Review
Solace in the Shadows
Walking Through Twilight: A Wife's Illness—A Philosopher's Lament
by Douglas Groothuis
InterVarsity Press, 2017
(178 pages, $17.00, paperback)
reviewed by Charles Strohmer
"The meaning of history," wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel, "is to be a sanctuary in time." With that subtle insight, the noted twentieth-century rabbi drew attention to the paradoxical standing of human presence in the world. By our individual acts we can either increase the misery, suffering, and pain of others or contribute to their relief, healing, and well-being. Whenever we do the latter, Heschel writes in God in Search of Man, we are creating sanctuaries for people in distress.
When you see someone who is a living epistle of that kind of compassion and care, you really must stop and wonder. And when you see the care taking place day after day in a loving marriage, in the bitterest of its possible conditions, you are beholding a blessed sanctuary indeed.
In Walking Through Twilight, Douglas Groothuis invites us to experience what daily life is like in one such sanctuary of compassion and care. This eloquently written memoir begins with the tragic reversal of fortune that has come to him and his wife, Becky, and from its opening lines we learn how difficult it was to write. For Groothuis had to speak not only for himself but also for Becky, a once-talented author, editor, and member of the Mensa Society who now lives virtually without language capabilities. She suffers from primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a rare disease that disables the speech and language centers of the brain.
In scenes poignantly described by Groothuis—in their home, at a restaurant, in an art gallery—we meet an embattled couple whose better half is almost completely unable to speak or to understand what she hears. "She must fight a bloody war," he writes, "to secure the simplest word."
The Darkening Footpath
Groothuis, who teaches Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at Denver Seminary, does not offer a timeline of his wife's mental deterioration. Instead, he recounts many and varied experiences along what he calls the "darkening footpath." And he does not mince words. His willingness to be dead-honest about his confusion, anguish, denial, anger, and lament is both painfully moving and biblical in its realism.
In his Introduction to the memoir, Nicholas Wolterstorff aptly captures this tenor when he writes that Groothuis "does not flinch from the painful reality [that] this ravaging disease has wreaked in his life and that of his wife." Each chapter bears this out, as do chapter titles such as "Rage in a Psych Ward," "The Temptation to Hate God," and "Learning to Lie to My Wife (as Little as Possible)."
"Under the tyranny of her disease," Groothuis writes,
I learned of depths of sorrow and distress I had never known before. . . . Little did I know how much psychological agony a human soul could bear. . . . I learned how it feels to weep often and to cry unexpectedly, even in public. When my eyeglasses are smudged, and I take them off to look at them, I often find the marks of tears. I now behold much of the world through tears and am alert to the tears of others.
Charles Strohmer most recent book is Odd Man Out: My Story of Misplaced Faith in the American Dream and the Age of Aquarius. He blogs at www.waging wisdom.com.
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