Review: It Doesn't End Here, by Dawn Marie Roeder

©2011, Randall A. Beeler, All Rights Reserved

In the annals of books about grief stand C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, Sheldon van Aucken's A Severe Mercy, and John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud. All these titles treat instances of the terminal illness of an adult or near-adult loved one, and it's attendant grieving process.

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Dawn Marie Roeder's It Doesn't End Here joins this lofty company especially because it underlines the Catholic theology of dying-to-self in the harrowing aftermath of the sudden death of a tiny only child--and no mere accidental death, but one caused by a drug-induced psychosis.

Dawn Marie Roeder was a single mother of beautiful 2-year-old Nathaniel when, in a good-natured attempt to control her diagnosed ADD/ADHD, she was prescribed a drug, among whose hardly-noted (by the pharmaceutical company and her doctor) potential side-effects was drug-induced psychosis. With no previous history of psychosis, Dawn continued to take the drug under the prescription of two physicians only to wake up in a hospital with no memory of the car crash that stole the life of Nathaniel.

Mrs. Roeder pulls no punches in this memoir, ranging freely over the formative events of her faith development in a jumbled fashion--yet this jumbling is no accident of organization but an intentional means of helping us walk Dawn Marie's road to Calvary with Mary the Mother of Christ. As she reassembles the fragments of her shattered life--the latent guilt, the soul-ripping loss of a child, the suspicion that the universe is cruel at its heart, a prolonged court battle with the pharmaceutical company, and a deepening intimacy with her Beloved, Christ the Savior--we, too, bring into the focus of God's mercy our own experiences of grief, mental disarray, and David-vs.-Goliath fights:

As my faith had taught me about … the Mother of God, her strength came not in arguing with the will of God, but [in] surrendering to it. In this reflection, I realized with all my life that I, too, must embrace the reality that my child was not coming back this side of heaven…

Along the way, Dawn Marie re-introduces us to friends in the Faith whom we may also rely on amidst our trials--Mary, Saint Maria Goretti, and, most formatively for her, Padre Pio.

The blend of her very human reactions to the crests and troughs of her amazing journey, along with the humanity of these Saints, works like Saint Therese's "lift to heaven," helping us to see that, even at our most down-and-out moments, "it truly doesn't end here." One is reminded of C. S. Lewis' admonition to Sheldon van Aucken, "Christians never say 'goodbye' but 'see you soon'!"

I will not spoil the outcome, but I do urge you to read Dawn Marie's faith-emboldening embrace of the grieving process and the liberating power of forgiveness.

I look forward to Mrs. Roeder not ending her writing here but continuing to allow her very human and down-to-earth love of Our Savior empower her to pen more inspiring works.