Donald Howard was minister of St. Peter’s Church of England, Sydney when his wife, Diana, at the age of forty contracted cancer. She was to live a further six years but, he writes, although through faith in Christ ‘we were ill-prepared for death, I was ill-prepared for grief’.

This ill-preparedness, he found, arose from a lack of understanding and two years later he wrote these pages for the help of others. They contain a blend of biblical, pastoral and personal elements and serve to fill a gap on the subject of bereavement.