The theme that emerges from these pages is “control.” Control, as in to make the tragic events of the sudden death of a spouse of forty years to “unhappen.” This, of course, is what we all face, waking up that first day as a widow or widower. It’s the shock, the denial, the grief, even the self-pity that we all experience in those first days of mourning.

In 1991, the car author Jerry Sittser was driving on a dark stretch of road with his wife, mother and four children was hit headon by a drunk driver. Sittser’s wife of twenty years, his mother and four-year-old daughter were killed. That night for Sittser became “The End and The Beginning,” as Sittser entitled the first chapter of A Grace Disguised, in which he recounted the accident.