Finding a way to hold on to hope

MICHELE MARR

Hope was the long-awaited daughter of Nancy and David Guthrie, who

had saved that name for her for years. As Nancy would later write,

they “never could have dreamed how meaningful it would become.”

Guthrie’s book, “Holding on to Hope,” is the story of her

staggering pain and tenacious faith through the grief of losing Hope,

who lived 199 days.

I found the book while I was trying to come to grips with the

death of my father. It’s not necessary to have lost a child to find

salve in what Guthrie wrote. Hope aims to bolt from people’s lives

for many reasons. Guthrie knows.

She catalogs a few: A marriage ends, maybe your parents’, maybe

yours; financial disaster strikes; a child rejects your values; a

child rejects you; a diagnosis isn’t the one you want; someone you

love is gone.

All manner of things threaten to extinguish the hope we hold. One

of the fiercest, though, has to be losing a child.

So when I opened an e-mail the other day from Glenda Schoonmaker

asking for the name of a book she might give to a friend who just

lost his daughter, I suggested “Holding on to Hope.”

There’s no end to the volumes that have been written on grief, so

when grief knocks on the door and moves in, advice on how to host it,

then shoo it away, is as close as the nearest Barnes and Noble or

Amazon.com. Type “grief” into the search at Amazon.com, and you’ll

find 116,259 results.

When my father died and I found myself looking for a book that

would help me through my grief, the titles alone of a slew of them

were enough to make me rethink. “Nevermind,” I’d hear myself

muttering. “I’ll just live with it.”

You can pick up texts like “Healing Your Traumatized Heart: 100

Practical Ideas After Someone You Love Dies a Sudden, Violent Death.”

By its cover, it looks, well, like a practical book, like something

on gardening perhaps, or on understanding the sound of one hand

clapping.

In the midst of heart-rending grief, maybe I should have craved

the practical, the way a heart-attack victim wants a defibrillator.

But I couldn’t bring myself to go there.

“Grief: The Mourning After: Dealing with Adult Bereavement” has a

dark, and stark, lonely-looking cover. At $65, it qualifies for free

super-saver shipping. A look inside suggests it’s not a self-help

book, better marketed perhaps with a label warning: “Do not try this

at home.”

The oxblood colored cover of “Good Grief: A Constructive Approach

to the Problem of Loss,” looked stolid. But its promise of a

“constructive approach” to my suffering, however much I might have

needed one, offended me.

There’s humor, too. Not much, but there is humor, as in “Why Are

the Casseroles Always Tuna: A Loving Look at the Lighter Side of

Grief.” Somehow, the idea of reading that seemed too akin to eating

breakfast on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 while watching the World

Trade Center towers in Manhattan come down.

I felt like I was picking through a mountain of fool’s gold trying

to lay hands on a nugget of the real thing while my heart all the

while was turning to ashes.

Then I walked by the window of Our Ministry bookstore and Nancy

Guthrie’s “Holding on to Hope” looked out at me.

It’s a tiny book, 4 1/2 inches wide and 7 1/2 inches tall. Below

the book’s title are the words, “A pathway through suffering to the

heart of God.”

A pathway through suffering, I thought, was what I’d been hunting

for. And if it led to the heart of God, well, all that much better.

I believe stories hold great healing power; I often wonder if I

believe that because I write or I write because that’s what I

believe. On the soft bronze and black cover of “Holding on to Hope,”

a sepia photo of an open wood -- cut through by a tidy path --

beckons the reader to step in. It promises a story, not a manifesto

or user guide.

And it delivers. Guthrie tells her story of losing Hope (and later

her infant son Gabriel) without losing hope. It’s a story as

archetypical as the biblical story of Job, which she interweaves with

her own, yet so much more within our reach in this 21st century.

In reviewing the book, David Van Biema wrote in Time magazine,

“Few people have lived ... as deep a firsthand experience of pain and

loss as Nancy Guthrie. For that reason alone, her Christian reading

of the story of Job should lay special claim on readers themselves

undergoing suffering. Guthrie explains how she has maintained hope

and deepened faith where most would find only heartbreak.”

When I’d read the last page and set the book aside, I was no

longer holding on to hope; it was, instead, resting comfortably in my

lap.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].