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A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death
By Diane M. Komp
Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1992. 125 pp. $12.99.

How do children experience death? And how does a child's experience of death teach those of us who are remaining about life? Diane Komp, a pediatric oncologist at Yale University, uses these guiding questions in this book of evocative narratives about children dying of cancer.

For example, consider seven year old Anna who died of leukemia: "Before she died, she mustered the final energy to sit up in her hospital bed and say: 'The angels-they're so beautiful! Mommy, can you see them? Do you hear their singing? I've never heard such beautiful

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singing!' Then she laid back on her pillow and died." Or consider Nate and Jordan's story, identical twins who died of the same disease when they were three years old. When Nate died first, Jordan had a lot of questions about death, heaven, and his brother, whom he was sure was playing with Jesus. Jordan's favorite image of heaven was a grassy meadow where he could run with Jesus and his brother, Nate. One day Jordan asked how he would get to heaven to join Nate: "Dad, does Jesus drive a school bus?"

These imaginative, revelatory narratives are held together by Komp's personal narrative. In the beginning of the book, she admits to being a " post-Christian" doctor, somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic, a result of medical education that became for her "a journey to disbelief." This happened as she tried to keep her feelings about her patients as numb as possible. However, something happened after she met Anna. She found her ears retuned, able to hear and appreciate the stories she was about to receive from her new teachers, children with terminal illnesses. While these stories did not correspond to what she learned in medical school and the language of science, they did correspond with the words of Jesus and the narrative language of theology. The result is an intricate linkage among the children's narratives, her narrative, and the ancient narrative, God's story. And that is where the transformation happens for all of them: in the telling and the hearing of their stories. All of these stories lend perspective on death and life. Komp reveals that the children's narratives opened a window of faith in God that had been shut tightly. Her heart was opened and ears retuned to the truth of God's suffering love, as revealed in the lives of these children.

While much has been written about the power of narrative in a theoretical sense, Komp's collection of stories bears witness to the actual power of these unfolding narratives by gaining a better understanding of the preciousness of life in the face of death. In being open to learning from the stories she receives, Komp is ready to re-discover the presence of God's love, even in death's shadow.

The book's audience is more the medical establishment than the church, though there are lessons for both, as well as for parents with children who are dying. Dr. Paul Brand writes in the foreword that the medical community should be awakened to see these dying children as " patients" rather than as "clients," or as biological entities. In the language of science, many physicians have been convinced that it is pathological for grieving to extend more than a year after someone's death. The common rule: distance oneself from one's patients.

For the theological audience, this is another book about the presence of suffering and death that naturally tears a hole in the fabric of religious communities, as people are uncomfortable with disease. Such discomfort is caught in the example of the hospital chaplain who beats a hasty retreat in the face of a child's death, more comfortable with the psychological than with the spiritual issues. The whole issue of

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responsibility could have been developed more in this book. Is anyone responsible for a child's dying and death? God? Society? The family? Or are these unanswerable questions? And what role does the congregation play in these children's imaginative stories?

What Komp is sure of by the end of the book is that God is neither absent from nor ambivalent to the children's experiences. God is present and suffers in life's fiery furnaces, not just by treating a disease, but by being with the dying children and their families. Komp acknowledges this truth because she has heard the powerfully moving narratives of children who have died all around her, and in their suffering she witnessed God's love.

Brett Webb-Mitchell
Devereux Hospital & Children's Center
Melbourne, FL