Sideshow
Living with Loss and Moving Forward with Faith
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4.6 • 5개의 평가
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- US$21.99
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How do you live with the pain of watching someone you love suffer from addiction? How do you cope with the grief of losing them especially when your job is to make people laugh every day?
Comedian Rickey Smiley has dealt with these immensely difficult questions for years—first with his father, then with his son. Both battled drug addictions. Both died from overdoses. Both left Rickey weary and wounded.
Far from healed, Rickey has learned how to find moments of peace. He's practicing how to hold the good with the grief, the past gifts with the present heartache, the hope with the hurt. It's the "sideshow" he's living. It's anything but a smooth path, but he's on it, and he's moving forward. And he invites you to come with him.
Join a fellow hurting soul as he sits with his trauma, leans into therapy, and relies heavily on his faith and Scripture, which give him solace and strength. Rickey and his story will help you:
Feel seen and know you are not aloneProcess your pain and manage resentment and griefInvite God's strength into your weaknessFind a way forward and move toward peace
“This book is for those who know the weight of grief, who I can show the light of God. It is for those millions of families whose child or spouse or sibling is battling for their life against addiction, and want to know that others have walked this path too. It is for my own peace, because when I am in service of others, as God has directed me, I am fulfilled.” – Ricky Smiley.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian and radio host Smiley (Stand by Your Truth) paints a wrenching portrait of grief and faith in the wake of his 32-year-old son's death in 2023. After receiving the call that his son had overdosed, Smiley sleepwalked through the following days as he cared for his other kids, arranged the burial, and dealt with eerie echoes of his own father's death from drugs when the author was six. After Smiley returned to work, he would go "from crying my eyes out in my dressing room to... having the whole audience nearly pass out with uncontrollable laughter." He soon came to see the emotional highs as part of the mourning process—finding "glimmers of light" within grief, he writes, honors the deceased and proves that God can "orchestrate something good from pain." Smiley also meditates on the value of therapy in healing from tragedy; the horrors of watching one's child spiral into addiction; and questions of whether he could have done more to intervene. Smiley's depiction of grief is both raw and nuanced, giving due equally to the comforts and paradoxes of faith—"the same God I may question regarding the loss of my son," he writes, "is the same God who is helping me... survive that loss." It's a heartbreaker.
