Madeleine Davies - Lights for the Path: A Guide Through Grief, Pain and Loss

If it cant be happy, make it beautiful. Madeleine Davies offers us this exquisite gift, born from her own grief, her compassionate heart, and her listening soul. With elegant simplicity she attends to the fear, fury and fragility of loss, bringing forth wisdom, gentleness and insight in equal measure. Above all she gives us humility and patience, as she lets people tell their own stories and leaves unresolved what no comfort can easily heal. Anyone who faces the agony of loss could wish for no finer companion.

The Revd Dr Samuel Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London

This book is quite brilliant. Drawing deeply on the lived experience of the author and her many conversation partners, it offers a beautifully written, keenly observed, and pastorally sensitive resource for making sense of death and bereavement. It is full of practical and psychological wisdom, at once acknowledging the uncertainty and provisionality of life but grounded in a sure faith in the God who does not let us go.

The Revd Canon Dr Joanna Collicutt, Karl Jaspers Lecturer in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Ripon College Cuddeson

The stories and personal reflections in this book are indeed Lights for the path of anyone who walks through grief, especially the young, and for those who accompany them. Madeleine Davies writing is open, accessible, honest and helpful, asking just those questions that so many bereaved people hesitate to put into words. We are going to need good books on grief, like this one, more than ever in the coming days.

The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite, Chaplain, Girton College, Cambridge University

This engaging and easy to read book feels like a hand to hold through the darkest moments of your life. Lights for the Path is part memoir and part theological reflection on the theme of death. Skilfully woven together and littered with literary references, Davies offers a gracious acknowledgement and comfort for the whole range of emotions a young person experiencing a death will encounter. Sharing her own story of losing her mum as a teenager, and the stories of others, this book is a window into the deeper questions of life: what happens when we die? Why would God allow this? Davies gives no trite answers; this honest account exposes the simplistic answers for what they are, and creates a safe space to air your true thoughts, your true feelings and your true questions for God. At a time when you might feel most alone, Lights for the Path brings you into a fellowship of brothers and sisters. Although no one would choose to belong to this group, it is a reminder that others have walked a similar path, and that what you are feeling - whatever you are feeling - is perfectly normal and ok. This book is ideal for any teenagers who have lost a loved one, helping them to navigate the grief they are feeling and make sense of faith in the midst of their suffering.

Dr Phoebe Hill, Head of Theology at Youthscape

First published in Great Britain in 2020

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
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www.spck.org.uk

Copyright Madeleine Davies 2020

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard
Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The quotation marked KJV is from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, and is reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

The quotation marked RSV is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780281083565

eBook ISBN 9780281083572

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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First printed in Great Britain by Jellyfish Print Solutions

eBook by Nord Compo

Produced on paper from sustainable forests

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To
my parents, Andy and Alison,
and their grandson, born this springtime

I want my mom back. I want her to knock at my bedroom door and come walking in... I want her all in one piece, together, with Dad and I again.

I think I was nine when I first realized that people could die. I was reading a book called Anne of Green Gables, the story of a red-haired girl, Anne Shirley, who is adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a brother and sister living in a small town in Canada. Its a book about growing up intense friendships, fights in the classroom, an extreme hair-dyeing incident but, like a lot of books written around the early 20th century it includes an early encounter with death. When Anne is 16, Matthew dies, suddenly. When I reached this chapter, I got out of bed and raced across the landing into my parents room. I wanted reassurance that this wasnt going to happen to either of them.