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.
A Narrative of Grace
Such unflinching honesty runs throughout this beautiful love story, and it made me wonder how in the world he keeps going. Eventually it hit me. It isn't only Becky who is changing. As Christ was changed by his cross relative to our sin, the caregiver himself is being changed by his cross relative to her disease. In the process he, like Christ, is being carried along in his sufferings by the loving, caring grace of God, even during days when the sun is eclipsed by the moon. That narrative of grace is the secret story of Walking Through Twilight. It called to mind Marilynne Robinson's idea of finding a story that has a suggestive power far beyond its subject.
This, then, is no woe-is-me memoir. Groothuis writes "to offer courage, hope, and meaning." Scenes throughout the book run between the tender and the tragic, giving witness to the couple's experiences of grace and meaning on their distressed path. There is the amusement and comfort the couple receives from Sunny, their almost-human Goldendoodle dog. There is the weight and effect of Becky's illness on Douglas in his classrooms, where we see him struggling to answer the question of how his sufferings can be nobly borne before his students. There is a groundbreaking and probing chapter of lessons he has learned from lamenting online. The penultimate chapter—an interlude given the title "Resting"—is so intimate a sanctuary moment that
I wondered if the veil should not have been left drawn across it.
Wisdom & Solace
The story is rich in wisdom from Christian writers such as W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. Groothuis also draws clarity and inspiration, often during the darkest moments, from unlikely sources: the essayists Michel de Montaigne and Christopher Hitchens, the music of Pink Floyd and Metallica, and the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Groothuis's greatest solace, however, is found in Scripture, especially in the Bible's literature of lament and wisdom. He dives deeply into these waters, refusing to rely on cliché or to rest in simple explanations. The book of Ecclesiastes is a particular saving grace for him. He writes that the book gives him "the perspective and language of lament necessary for my own sad sojourn during the last fifteen or so years with my chronically and now mentally ill wife. It is a deep well of tough wisdom for the weary and wasted soul."
In contrast to lament, Groothuis and his wife find moments of relief in simple laughter. "Becky's humor," he writes, "while not so fine-grained as it was, remains more intact than most of her other mental functions." A laugh momentarily "removes us from Becky's memory loss, speech loss, happiness loss, and the near loss of faith." Their closeness over many years, he writes, gives him "a comedic freedom not afforded to others. Becky cannot dish it out as she used to. But she can take it and laugh." Even at gallows humor. Of course there is nothing funny, he explains, about Becky's condition itself. "To ridicule it would be sadistic. But humor can find odd angles of vision on even the worst situations and without rancor or ridicule." One such moment happened after dinner:
I anomalously left a piece of pie with cream on the dining room table and went to my desk to do some paperwork. (Me doing paperwork can be quite humorous in itself.) Becky soon walked to me with that piece of pie, but without a fork. I said, "Where's the fork?" She looked perplexed and said she didn't know where they were. I went with her into the kitchen, opened the utensil drawer, pointed, and said, "Well, there they all are." We both laughed again.
A Real Diamond
Contrary to popular belief, and Superman mythology, real diamonds are not formed from lumps of coal. Neither are literary diamonds. Both require a combination of extremely high temperatures and intense pressures found in the far depths of the earth's mantle. Yet over time, some get forced to the surface. Walking Through Twilight is such a literary diamond. Grace-giving love is its underlying theme. Because of that love, this memoir will help readers who are beset by real troubles to face them with courage, wisdom, and hope—and find sanctuary.
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.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
on How Bodily Resurrection Informs Social Justice by W. Ross Blackburn
33.1—January/February 2020
Do You Know Your Child’s Doctor?
The Politicization of Pediatrics in America by Alexander F. C. Webster
22.6—July/August 2009
on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life by Leon J. Podles
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
