Where Are You, God? My Wife Has Cancer

It started as a cough.

By the time the scan came back, Lynn - forty-one, two sons, sixteen years cancer-free - had a tumour the size of a fist in her lung. Stage 4. The prognosis was weeks.

This is the story of what followed.

Where Are You God? My Wife Has Cancer is Michael Janse van Rensburg's memoir of love and lament - a husband, father, and theologian's account of the months between the first cough and the questions he could no longer outrun. Written in present tense, while his wife was still alive.

How do you sit across the breakfast table from a wife who is dying, and pray? How do you tell a twelve-year-old? How do you keep believing when the prayers come back as silence?

The book moves slowly through small rooms. A hospital bedside. A passage with an oxygen concentrator running. The bedroom where two boys lie in the dark playing a tickle game called Are you happy? It refuses the easy verses. It does not promise miracles. It sits, instead, with Psalm 88 - the only psalm in scripture that ends in darkness - and with the two-word verse before Lazarus is raised: Jesus wept.

A memoir for readers walking through cancer or grief, for those wrestling with the old question of faith and suffering, for anyone who has cried out into a silent sky and wondered whether anyone was listening.

A Christian memoir in the tradition of literary lament. The long Holy Saturday between crucifixion and resurrection, where Sunday has not yet come.