Book of the Week: My #1 is Still My #1

My #1 is Still My #1 by Bernice Bright Dickey, Xulon Press, 2010 (Available from Amazon)

On January 31, 2002, Bernice Dickey watched the local evening news as she waited for her husband and two daughters to come home for dinner. Hearing a report of a car-train collision, she prayed for the victims, a man, a young girl and a toddler. Only too soon did she discover that the family she was praying for was her own.

Dickey takes the reader with her on her widow's journey through a year-long series of conversations with God. Although the details are her own, the steps of the journey are familiar to all of us who have lost a spouse and/or a child--shock, numbness, disbelief, fear. We see her move toward acceptance, then backslide, and move on again, bolstered by her strong faith and the support of friends. Sole caretaker of her toddler, who survived the crash, she struggles with exhaustion as she combines work with mothering, deals with unresolved issues between her and her husband, and surmounts difficulties with the church where he was a minister. She grieves that she never got to say goodbye to her loved ones. Birthdays, holidays and anniversaries are painful. She even has the misfortune to witness a similar accident to the one that killed the husband and child some months afterward. Yet we see her soldiering on and finding a meaninful life and we are inspired by her courage.