Christianity Today, December 9, 2002

How to Survive Grief
An honest reflection on the death of an infant daughter.
Reviewed by Wendy Murray Zoba

I grow weary of Christian "How To" books, as if doing something were the way to authenticate the Christian life. I stand corrected, though, after reading Nancy Guthrie's poignantly written, non-mawkish Holding on to Hope. It is written with such pathos and honesty that one believes what the author says, for she has won her authority dearly.

Nancy, her husband, David, and their son, Matt, welcomed a newborn daughter to their family in November 1998. They named her Hope, with all the ebullience it implies. Hope died six months later of a rare metabolic disorder called Zellweger syndrome (see "Praying for Hope," CT , July 10, 2000).

The Guthries poured themselves into her fragile, precious life knowing she would die and, in a way, waiting for her to die. This book wrestles with what you do with that, as a human in this life. The author kindly and courageously makes it clear: There are no easy answers. Guthrie recounts how, shortly after Hope's death, she was purchasing mascara: "Will this mascara run down my face when I cry?" I asked. The girl behind the counter assured me it wouldn't and asked with a laugh in her voice, "Are you going to be crying?" "Yes," I answered. "I am."

This is indeed a How To book: How to be honest before people and before God. How to admit, as David Guthrie does, that "we expected our faith to make this hurt less, but it doesn't." How to face grief "head on," as she puts it, and "trudge through it, feel its full weight, and do my best to confront my feelings of loss and hopelessness with the truth of God's Word." So the How To isn't so much in the doing , but in the becoming : How to become truly human through suffering, and how to become like Jesus.

Into the narrative of her personal loss, Guthrie weaves the story of Job, the paragon of human suffering, which broadens the vision of Guthrie's book and lends insight to it. But the power of this short book is found in Guthrie's story itself, and in her spare but poetic way of telling it. "[People] want to fix me. But I lost someone I loved dearly, and I'm sad."

The book's authority heightens when Guthrie discloses halfway through that, despite surgery to prevent it, she is pregnant again. And again, this child carries Zellweger. They named him Gabriel. And he, like his sister, died at six months. The Guthries cling to the message the angel of the same name announces: Jesus. This affecting book promises those who grieve the same thing to cling to.

Wendy Murray Zoba is a senior writer for Christianity Today.

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May 27, 2002

In late 1998, doctors diagnosed Guthrie’s newborn daughter, Hope, with Zellweger syndrome, a rare congenital disorder, and gave Hope less than six months to live. Guthrie, a media relations specialist who has a 10-year-old son without the disease, tells of Hope’s brief life with raw emotion, but never resorts to coying sentimentality. After Hope’s death, Guthrie’s husband had a vasectomy to prevent future pregnancies. Thus they were shocked to learn, a year and ha half later, that Nancy was pregnant again. Although there was only a 25% chance that the baby would carry the disease, they soon discovered that this child, a son, would also be a Zellweger baby. Gabriel lived just one day shy of six months, dying in January of this year. In trying to extract meaning behind such suffering, Guthrie turns to the Book of Job, teasing out themes of restoration and redemption amidst Job’s many trials. She is honest about her own terrible sorrow; after outlining God’s possible purpose for the fleeting lives of these two children, Guthrie admits, "That is what I believe. It is not necessarily how I feel." She says that her decision to trust in God is a daily choice, not a onetime sacrifice, and that some days such submission is easier to embody than others. The book closes with a time-honored evangelical altar call. And here, it works. Readers who have immersed themselves in Guthrie’s honest story of redemptive suffering will examine their own faith in a new light.

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