The background to this book may be well known to many New Zealand Baptists as Charles is the principal of Carey College. For those who don’t know, they outline it in the preface:

“In August 1992 our first child, Janelle, was born. Five months later she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given two to six months to live. Despite this prognosis she lived for another twelve years with extreme physical and intellectual disabilities, dying just short of her thirteenth birthday. On 7 April 1994, our second child, James, was born. Eighteen months later we were told he was severely intellectually disabled. Today at age sixteen he has the cognitive ability of a nine-year-old, depending on us to meet all his needs.”

This book does not try to give a theological answer to the problem of pain, but rather reflects the pain of parents struggling to cope with the above. This is an honest and open portrayal of the sorrow and struggle that it involves. Charles writes of how being a father isn’t what it was meant to be, that rather than watch his son play rugby he has to walk with him through the mall while people stare. Joanne writes of the grief and unbelief of receiving the specialist diagnosis, of looking out the window and seeing other people’s lives going on oblivious to the fact that hers had stopped.

The book is composed of short vignettes from both Charles and Joanne. It is not an easy book to read. My daughter came for Sunday lunch with our new eight month old grand-daughter. Seeing the book she picked it up and started scanning it, but put it down saying, “I just can’t read this, it is too painful.”

By Charles and Joanne Hewlett
Piquant, Carlisle, 2011 
ISBN 978-1-903689-77-6

 – David McLeod-Jones