Losing Jonathan

Soul-wrenching and life-changing. Robert and Linda Waxler, with their incredible faith and love for their son, find a way to articulate what it means to be a parent. Through their loss and subsequent struggle to survive it, Robert Waxler beautifully and powerfully gives us a much greater awareness and consciousness of our own love and committment to our children. This book also drills home the absolutely terrifying reality that everyone's children are vulnerable to the dangers of drugs. I knew Jonathan personally and went to school with him throughout high school. He was an intelligent, witty and extremely nice guy. He was one of those people that everyone liked and assumed would be a success in life. The face of a potential addict is every child - not just those who had a hard childhood or who were unloved. Jonathan was loved and the Waxler's ability to give us the gift of his and their story is possible because of the power of that love. Read it and become a better person and parent.

This is a fine book, well-written and heartfelt. The death of a young adult child, according to Darwin (who experienced this) is the hardest of all life's hard things. Worried parents of troubled children will have to ante up some gumption to read it. Non-Jews will envy the Waxlers' faith in their tradition, which seems to come from the inside, unmediated by a pastor's instructions or by the stiff martini resorted to by lonesome predestinarians. English majors and professors will be reminded of the deeply moral underpinnings of their vocations. People without children, once visiting this terrible story, will understand their friends with children better than they may understand themselves. Parents will see their children as never before, vulnerable in a hard world, today in an unnecessarily hardnosed American version of it. For parents who have lost a child, this book and the strength of this family may offer consolation-but the Waxlers advise never to give advice to people in this terrible position.

This is a beautiful, heart-felt story about family tragedy and love. It is a story that should remind everyone that the stereotypes we have about drug addiction and parental grief are wrong and too simple. It shows the complexity of human experience and gets us to face our own mortality.It is a story that could happen to anyone--and it does!!

This book gives the reader a sense of the wonders of Jonathan - the aliveness and excitement of his life and the positive effect he had on everyone he touched. Through the eyes of his mother and father you see beyond his terrible struggle to the light that glowed around him.

Losing Jonathan is a beautiful, heartbreaking, story of loss, love, and hope. Linda and Bob Waxler have powerfully told the story of their journey to hell and back while giving those of us who have lost a child hope for tomorrow. We highly recommend this book to any parent struggling with grief, regardless of how you lost your child or how old that child was. It also contains wonderful advice for those who are struggling with how to support anyone who has lost a child.