Holy Saturday - by Gary Hauk (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This extraordinary memoir offers a roadmap through the challenging landscape of profound loss.

When Gary Hauk's teenage son, Thomas, suffered a cardiac arrest in the middle of one terrible night, it launched Hauk into an unexpected journey through grief, faith, and the search for meaning. As both an academic and a person of faith, Hauk offers a vulnerable, beautifully written perspective on this heart-wrenching experience.

Through intimate emails, journal entries, and profound theological reflections, he documents the seven-week period from his son's hospitalization to his eventual passing, and the transformative journey that followed. Readers experience an unprecedented exploration of loss, while Hauk's raw honesty about his struggles with faith and meaning offers comfort to those facing similar challenges.

The memoir's powerful metaphor of Holy Saturday -- the time between death and resurrection -- provides a framework for understanding the liminal space of grief.

This remarkable memoir offers more than just a story of loss -- it provides signposts and waysides for anyone navigating the complex terrain of grief and faith. Through Hauk's masterful blend of personal narrative and spiritual insight, readers will find solace and strength for their own journey.

--Gary Hauk

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR HOLY SATURDAY

"Gary Hauk's meditation on the loss of his son is a gorgeously written lesson in grief. Written from a particular Christian perspective, it nonetheless contains universal wisdom. We learn from this teacher how to understand and accept the grief we all must bear when we lose our loved ones. We also learn about the achingly specific experience of anticipatory grief, as a son lies unconscious in a hospital room. We learn the geography of the unique and unfathomable wilderness of losing a child before one's own death, and the endless questions that haunt a parent in the aftermath. Most importantly, we learn from this teacher about the hard work it takes to do what the Jewish tradition asks us to do: make a memory a blessing. A must read for anyone who has experienced loss--that is, all of us."

-- Laurie Patton, president, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

"Once begun it became compelling, with an inner spiritual momentum that possessed me. It is a fierce and lovely meditation, laced with a profound tristesse."

-- Ambassador James T. Laney, president emeritus, Emory University

"Holy Saturday offers no easy answer to the fact of death. It doesn't cheat. But it resolves to go forward with strength, patience, faith, and clarity of mind. And to me--a person of no religious faith--it strengthens my mind as I look at death."

-- William M. Chace, president emeritus, Emory University

"What Gary Hauk's wonderfully gifted pen has produced is simply a masterpiece. It's a stunning work that will help many readers who have suffered the death of their loved ones, especially their children. What a remarkable gift of love and hope offered to the world."

-- John Witte, Jr., McDonald Professor of Law and Religion and author of Faith, Freedom, and Family

"A piercingly painful and hauntingly beautiful memoir, Holy Saturday gives utterance to the day of unspeakable grief and silence in the face of a terrible journey of dying. With soul-searching questions and unrevealed mysteries, it is a love story of a son and father, a family, and a community."

-- Rev. Susan Henry-Crowe, retired general secretary, United Methodist Board of Church and Society