Grief In Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament For A Son

Introduction
Grief is defined as the neuropsychobiological response to any kind of significant loss, with elements both typical and unique to each individual or situation. The response is mostly associated with degrees of suffering, at times intense or even unbearable, and of widely variable duration. Grief is an individual or a larger group of individuals’ event where they are thrown out of equilibrium through changes brought on by loss.

Mourning is the shared expression of a grief experience, where trying to attain a new equilibrium following any manner of loss or deficit, which include decreased function or role, loss of assumed health, and diminished dreams of the future. Grief and mourning together constitute the grief process, representing movement from life through death and back into life again. A grief process for the patient with cancer and all those related in the system of

It is first and foremost the grief of one person over the death of his son. Here the author accepts that he has grief because he has loved his son and that son is no more. As much he loved his son, so much is his grief. When we go through this book keeping in mind Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, we find that the development of the thoughts of the author is also almost the same.
In the first stage he expresses his denial of the fact that my child is not dead and at the same time he doesn’t want to say that he is sorrowful. But later he comes to awareness that his sorrow is to be expressed. Whether it is men or women it is to be expressed. According to behavioural psychology the feelings are to be expressed. In another side it shows that how much he loved his son. He quotes from the book of Bible, that is from the book of Job.
“As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up. He returns no more to his house nor does his place know him any more” (Job 7,