Emily Parker spoke with Alain Emerson about the loss of his first wife, how to process grief, and why he wrote Luminous Dark.

Emily: What did grief mean and look like to you, after Lindsay passed?

Alain: It was the most overwhelming, haunting kind of thing I could ever have imagined. It was worse than I ever imagined grief could be. I wasn't able to control it. The intensity of Lindsay's sickness almost made her passing even worse in some ways, in that so many people were praying for us. In retrospect I think that those prayers didn't give us the answer that we wanted. They did allow Lindsay and me along with her family and closest friends to experience a love for her that was really deep, and a few weeks before Lindsay died we were practically doing everything for her.

As a husband, I was only 27 at the time, married a year and a bit to the girl I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I found myself doing everything for her, but it felt like a grace and an empowerment to do that. The love that I felt for her at that particular time was colossal. It felt like a deep reservoir inside me of love for Lindsay. I felt the power of the prayers people had been praying for me, in retrospect, empowered me to do that. So in some ways we touched something really holy. It felt holy and whole in the midst of such sickness. But that just meant that when she died it almost made the pain even deeper. As colossal as that love was, so was the pain, because the object of all that love that you still felt you had for someone, was gone.

The brutality and finality of death, the stark reality of it physically, it felt hard to get a breath. Basically, it was bearing down on me that much. It was like a dark hole that kept getting darker and darker in those early days. It's really quite difficult to try and find words to describe what it was like, because there weren't even words that came out of you. It was just groans and aches that came from the deepest part of you.

Emily: As you journeyed through the grief, there were lots of different things that you then began to experience, in order to move through that, but also how you changed your perception of God as well.

Alain: Everything felt like it was up for grabs again. To be honest, in those moments, all the promises that you'd heard, the scriptures you'd been brought up with being brought up in a Christian home, so much of the Christian jargon and the promises of faith, they all seemed to be up for grabs. Working from the ground up again was probably a disorientating experience as well. Plus the fact that my vocation was wrapped up in helping people journey in their faith. It felt like I couldn't really help them in any sort of authentic way till I had found some answers for myself.

In the early days of grief I think I just wanted somebody to get me, and part of the reason for Luminous Dark is that for other people who are travelling these days where it feels like all they can do is stay alive, I know I wanted to read something, or listen to something, or talk to someone, or listen to music that just could put some kind of poetry, or word, or feeling to my pain. I think the early insight for me was, as painful as it was, I realised that the Bible was actually full of this kind of language. There was an awful lot of lament and protest and disappointment in the Bible that I'd glossed over before. To be honest, I think large parts of the Church still gloss over it.

So as I started to work my way through my grief, I started to become quite passionate about helping other people realise that the scriptures give us a language for our souls, when we don't have a language for ourselves. And how God gives us permission to grieve and be completely real with what we're feeling and experiencing.

Emily: It must be a real journey to go on when you're walking through the loss, particularly of your other half, to have your family and your friends walk that journey with you, and to see the support that you get, but see them grieve also.

Alain: It's a fascinating thing, in a really dark kind of way, to watch everybody grieve differently and allow everybody to grieve in the way that they grieve best, if that's the way to put it.

It was interesting within a close knit church family to watch that as well, because one year previous to Lindsay dying, my aunt, who was the founder along with her husband of our church, she died quite suddenly at 48 years of age. So within 13 months, as a youngish, growing church, to have two quite prominent leaders in the church die, just knocked the heart, the stuffing out of us all really. Watching different people grieve in different ways was difficult. Just holding each other tight and listening to each other's heart cries was important.

Looking back, in some ways, those people were heroes for me, because they found a way of allowing us to continue to try to lead them out of our grief, and that's something I'm very grateful for as I look back.

Emily: In society today, I think we can sometimes trivialise loss and grief and that process. Why is going through grief and grieving properly important?

Alain: First and foremost, I think it was Richard Brewer who said, "Pain that is not transformed, will be transmitted." In other words, if you don't process your pain in a really healthy, whole and honest way, the reality is somewhere on down the line, someone is going to get your pain. It's like a beach ball being held under water: you can try and hold it under for as long as you can, but we all face things that bring trauma to our souls. From a faith perspective, Jesus didn't pull any punches with that either. He said in this world you will have troubles and tribulations. So when they come, rather than try, like that beach ball, to hold them down under the water, the reality is that at some point it's going to come and smack us quite forcefully in the face, or worse, somebody else.