child just a month before Peter’s death. It is difficult to live simultaneously with the joy of new life and sadness of life lost. To complicate matters, the child was named Peter.
Less than three months after Peter’s death, Don and his wife, Lynnea, celebrated her wedding anniversary with Peter’s widow, Linda. “We clinked glasses and toasted Linda’s 10th Anniversary of becoming part of our family.” Linda was now first of all a member of the family rather than Peter’s wife. “No more wedding anniversaries,” she said. Roles and family rituals had already been redefined.
There are a number of common truths about uncommon grief that we are invited to discover in these letters from a grieving father to his dead son.
Grieving people feel transparent, as if the whole world can see a soul in sadness. As Don Mayer opens his billfold to pay for the wine, the flight attendant says “Forget it!” waving him off with a secretive smile. “How could she know?” he asked Peter. The painful paradox for grievers is that they want their grief heard without the messiness of being seen as grievers.
It is tempting to varnish the story of a life or a death to fit our preconceived hopes or dreams. “The consensus in the family is that you swerved to miss one of the abundant deer in that neighborhood—but who knows?” The family was free to grieve fully when they determined to tell the truth about the role of alcohol in Peter’s tragic death.
We often use negative images to describe the process of grieving. We will say someone “broke down” or “fell apart” when their grief was expressed in sobs and tears or in erratic and uncharacteristic behavior. Don Mayer has it just right. “Falling apart now and then (actually pretty often) is part of what will eventually put us back together.” It is often our fear of not being put back together again that keeps us from the “falling” that makes healing in grief possible.
The end of intense grieving is a second loss. Don Mayer was aware of that change when he stopped writing to Peter for some time. People need to hold on to their grief because it may be the only thing they have left of someone they loved and lost. People are sometimes reluctant to share their grief with others out of fear that they would take the grief away or invalidate the sadness.
Our culture discourages men from grieving. They must be strong and tearless. Tears are a sign of weakness and only women are permitted to be weak. While Don Mayer did not set out to write a countercultural account of a man grieving, his frequent references to sobbing uncontrollably or being held by his wife as he cried and cried present an alternative to male stoicism in the face of devastating loss. These letters also reveal a human struggle to maintain the thin veneer between the intense internal pain grievers feel and the façade the world expects from them. Don was able to write these letters because he was held by people who did not expect him to hide his sadness.
Grievers often find it difficult to embrace moments of joy in their lives in the midst of sadness. The years following Peter’s death were filled with incredible abundance and joy. Perhaps because it does not seem right to have such rich life experiences while Peter is dead, Don did not write to his son for five years. Eventually Don writes that “your loss no longer shadows the glad times in the way that it did.” “I want to share with you the deep joy of this time, these times, this year marked not so much by your death but by celebrations of fifty years of marriage.” When sadness no longer cancels the joys of living, grievers know that the darkest part of the journey is over.
These letters chronicle a journey that parallels the biblical psalms of lament. Walter Brueggemann, whose epilogue concludes this collection of letters, had convinced Don Mayer that it was “very much ok to pour out my anger to God.” In these letters, the anger is more directed toward Peter than God but for similar reasons: abandonment and absence. Eventually, in the biblical psalms, angry complaints about God’s absence are replaced by quiet confidence in God’s enduring presence. Peter is gone, the hole his death left in his father’s life is still there, but the memory of this beloved son is constant and sweet. These letters chronicle that journey from sadness to sweetness. They are also compelling testimony to the necessity of taking that journey. Healing from grief is found where our wounds hurt most. We discover those wounds through persistent remembering and storytelling. Sometimes it becomes necessary to “write my way out of grief,” as Don did.
I have known Don and Lynnea since shortly after Peter’s death. The authenticity of their lives is reflected on these pages. So is the affection for them from people they have loved. The people that sustained them with love and hugs and accepting presence were people who had earlier received love from Don and Lynnea. I did not know Peter, but knowing Don I understand about the “multiplier effect” that he attributes to Peter. The same might be said for Don and Lynnea. While these letters have been written largely from a father’s perspective, their willingness to face the sadness together made it possible for each of them to live through their own unique grief. Their confidence in the promise of God’s understanding made it possible to take that grief journey, not knowing what they would discover on the way. I end with these words from Don that bear witness to the kind of faith that makes grieving possible. “Our own trust in God’s understanding and acceptance of our feelings gave your mom and I the permission to express without hesitation all the pain, shock, anger, all the ‘if only’s, the emptiness, brokenness and sadness which we felt in the aftermath of your death, all the tears, the whimpering, the earth-shaking sobs: you got it all in these letters, Peter, week after week, month after month. And so did God. We trust that God understood and accepted all that.”
1. Dietrich Bonheoffer, Letters & Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 176.
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
3. Edward K. Rynearson, Retelling Violent Death (Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 2001).
4. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. “Alex’s Death.” A sermon preached at Riverside Church in New York City, January 21, 1983. In The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, Vol. 2, The Riverside Years (Years 1983–1987) (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008) 3–5.
Part 1
Through the Dark Valley
Before Our World Was Shattered:
Two E-Mails from Pete
November 21, 1997
Dad—
Yesterday I got a call from my friend in Birmingham. He has a pretty good job opening that he would like me to come and check out. (This would be a pay increase of about $45,000 per year—an unbelievable thought to me). He would like Linda and I to come on 12/5. I am going to talk with him on this Saturday a.m. for more precise info.
Can you and Mom come down to stay with Chelsey that weekend?
By the way, are you coming down over Thanksgiving? Would you be staying here then?
I think I told you that I stopped in to see grand-father. You are very correct—he does seem to be declining rapidly. I am not sure that he knew my name. Pretty sad . . .
Pete
November 22, 1997 (in response to an e-mail from me)
Hi Dad—
Boy, a lot of thinking
