Sideshow: Living with Loss and Moving Forward with Faith

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. (Sept.)