Stations of the Heart

November 26, 2012
On April 13, 2005, Lischer, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, received a call from his son, Adam, that no parent ever wants to receive. Adam, a gifted and loving young lawyer whose wife, Jenny, was expecting her child three months later, tells his father that the cancer they all thought was gone has now returned and that it now lives in many of his body's organs. Initially, Lischer is speechless, but his stunned silence soon turns to rage as he wails that his son's death is a robbery. In this tender, searching resigned memoir and tribute to Adam, Lischer relives the final three-month journey that he, his wife, and Jenny traveled with Adam, recalling with grace and humor memories of Adam in his elementary school days, his college days, and his quest to change the world around as a modern-day Atticus Finch in his law career. After Adam's death, Lischer observes that "grief is a series of cavesâdark, multiple, and unfathomed. You do not explore them. You fall into them....5 Your world is not as large as it used to be, for a ceiling has been imposed on happiness and the floor occasionally trembles beneath your feet." Walking this journey over again seven years later, Lischer declares that it took him from "the bitter gall of losing Adam to something like settled sorrow," and where he can now say, "He was my son. I give thanks for him." Agent: John F. Thornton, Spielar Agency.

December 1, 2012
A father's deeply felt memoir of witnessing his son's final months and grieving at the young man's death. In April 2005, Lischer (The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence, 2005, etc.), a Lutheran minister and faculty member at Duke Divinity School, received a phone call from his 33-year-old son Adam telling him that his melanoma had returned. What the author did not know was that in little more than three months, Adam would be dead. Stories of battling cancer are commonplace, as are stories of bereavement; what gives this story a twist is the religious angle. When Lischer's son learned of his diagnosis, he became more heavily involved in the Catholic Church. He and his pregnant Catholic wife adopted a series of daily rituals that involved lighting candles, attending Mass, praying and reading the Bible. As his son's faith was increasing, Lischer's was drying up: "I saw my son...motionless, serene as a sanded statue, and lost in a realm I could not enter." The author compares his experiences with his dying son to walking the Stations of the Cross, but here the reminders of pain are more mundane--visits to labs, meetings with oncologists, etc. By June, Lischer was searching for a cemetery, and in July, he was camping out in his son's hospital room listening for his last breath. After Adam's death, the author came to see grief as a series of dark caves of longing and despair that one repeatedly falls into, not unlike the anguish of a parent watching over a terminally ill child. The book ends on a somewhat brighter note with the baptism of Adam's daughter. A fond view of a father-son relationship and a loving tribute from a minister to a son who chose a different spiritual path in his life and to his death.

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December 1, 2012
Lischer's only son, Adam, died of rapidly metastasizing melanoma in 2005. He was 33. Ten days later, Adam's only child, a daughter, was born. While hardly suppressing his own feelings, Lischer resolutely focuses on Adam in this memoir provoked by the not-the-way-it's-supposed-to-be thing that happened to him. He retreats to Adam's precarious neonatal days and childhood coping with a mysterious neurological disorder that largely abated in his midteens. Thereafter, Adam blossomed, initially onstage, then following his mother into law practice. Marrying in his twenties, he'd just won a high-profile murder case for the defendant when a melanoma was discovered and surgically excised. Sixteen months later, the cancer was back; 94 days later, he was dead. He said he'd had a charmed life, and part of what is impressive about his questioning father's chastely worded, clear-eyed account is that we come to appreciate that. An immensely positive and congenial person, Adam used his time well, completing conversion to Catholicism and using daily prayer rituals with his wife to bless his child in the womb. Quite extraordinary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)