Good Grief: One Husband's Journey from Incapacitating Fear to Overwhelming Joy

At age twelve, author Thomas Michael Johnson faced the death of a great-grandparent he was close to as a child. That trauma left him with an irrational fear of losing loved ones. By the time he married and became a father, the fear of death living within him was incapacitating and debilitating, often causing difficulties in his personal and professional life.

Seeking freedom from this terror, Johnson began to understand the difference between joy and happiness; he was delivered from the fear some six weeks before his wife's untimely demise. After nearly nineteen years of marriage, he woke to find his beloved wife had passed away while he slept. He suddenly became a single parent of three sons (ages seventeen, thirteen, and twelve), struggling through the typical single-parent issues with an added layer of grief. Johnson's middle son's autism added to the challenges.

In Good Grief, Johnson shares an account of the trepidation he lived through as a young man, his freedom from the fear of death before his wife died, and the two years following her death. This memoir focuses on the lessons he learned from God directly, from scripture, and from the tight-knit group of family and friends God had given him. Raw and authentic, Johnson chronicles a story of his experience as a grieving widower, a single father, and a broken child of God who had no choice but to ask for help from those surrounding him, while trying to restore joy in his home.