04/29/2024
This moving collection documents a believer’s faith, wisdom, prayers, and challenges as she faced the final days of a life that ended, in this sphere, in 2015, at age 47. But as Child of Light demonstrates, through both Koska’s rousing words and the book’s very existence, that wasn’t the end: “I know that I will enjoy an amazing eternal life after this earthly one,” Koska writes. Koska’s sister, Atlanta Marie Carrera, has ensured that Koska’s writings—expressions of faith, exhortations to love life, calls to forgive others even when it’s hard—endure, preserved here alongside Koska’s lovely paintings of lilies, docks, and New England shorelines.
Koska writes with disarming frankness about the challenge of remaining upbeat through chemotherapy and a hard diagnosis, and she will draw reader’s tears as she notes that “Every bone in my body hurts from the inside out” and contemplates changing “my son’s life forever by telling him that I most likely won’t make it to Christmas.” Her final entry is both wrenching and buoyant, as she contemplates the end and sets down the truths that she most wants those she’s leaving behind to understand, from working to know God to making time for good music each day to reaching out to others. “When you help someone else,” she writes, “you heal your own wound.”
That final dispatch crystalizes thoughts she explores in the many touching entries that precede it. (These essays originated as blog posts.) The focus is on her relationship with God and with life itself, with each entry offering a prayer and often verses from scripture. She urges readers to recognize their worth, consider what they are the “source of” for others, and to understand “God will provide for us what we need, when we need it, and on His terms.” Especially touching are accounts of her own growth, like reaching out to a volleyball rival to protect the joy of their shared pastime. This collection is an act of faith and of love.
Takeaway: Moving reflections from a Christian embracing God as she faced the end of life.
Comparable Titles: Edward Grinnan’s A Journey of Faith, Cathie Young’s Gold in the Road.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
