Life Is Not Here to Torture Us: What I Learned from a Father Who Buried His Son and His Wife
Steven Ferrara’s story begins in a place that doesn’t look extraordinary on paper.
He was born in Newark’s Ironbound section, a poor Italian immigrant neighborhood wedged between a trucking firm and a factory, under the shadow of Newark airport. His grandparents lived in the basement, his aunt and uncle in the same house. Money was scarce; no one called themselves poor—life “was just as it was.”
What stands out is not deprivation, but love.
Every Sunday the whole extended family—twenty people or more—would pack into that little house. His grandmother, somehow, would feed everyone with “a pot of spaghetti and a couple of meatballs.” No one left hungry. The house was full of music and dance: a father who was a musician, a mother who had been a dancer, grandparents who were ballroom dancers. It was, in his words, “a wonderful time of life.”
From there, he did what many in such neighborhoods only dream of:
- At 18, licensed as a life‑insurance agent, knocking on doors in working‑class New Jersey.
- Riding the wave of the financial services boom through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
- Building a firm that became one of the larger outfits in the Northeast.
- Eventually serving as CEO of a major financial services company.
He married young, had a son at 26—Christopher—and then two daughters. They bought a beautiful home. From the outside, “my life was wonderful,” he said. “From where I came from to where we were, I could never have dreamt that my life could be that good.”
On the inside, though, he was always looking for something more.
His father was a “real spiritual seeker,” exposing him early to teachings from multiple traditions, including the Concept‑Therapy Institute—an unusual blend of Christian, Eastern, and metaphysical ideas developed by a chiropractor deeply interested in the “innate power within,” what you and I might recognize as a way of speaking about the God‑spark in us.
At 17, Steven learned Transcendental Meditation. He taught for Concept‑Therapy for 20‑plus years. He devoured authors like David Hawkins, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, and A Course in Miracles. He believed in principles. He believed in choice. He believed in the “innate.”
And then his son died.
“I Came Crashing Down”
In 2004, at 49, Steven lost his 23‑year‑old son Christopher in a car accident.
Christopher wasn’t just his child. He was his closest friend, his business partner, the person who would finish his sentences and whose sentences he would finish. They played golf together. They worked together. The bond, he says, felt “unconditional,” forged before birth and alive still after death.
Then, in an instant, he was gone.
All the study, meditation, and spiritual frameworks he had built over decades did not cushion the blow.
“I just came crashing down,” he told me. “I questioned everything.”
He was angry at the universe. Angry at God. Angry at anyone he could be angry at.
He remembers running through his neighborhood, literally yelling at the top of his lungs, because there was so much grief inside that the only way it could escape was as rage.
The concepts that had sounded so deep in books suddenly felt thin. The idea that “the universe doesn’t make mistakes” mocked his pain. The “innate” felt absent. The potter seemed to be crushing the clay with no regard for its shape.
He did one thing, though, that would quietly save him:
He started to journal.
From the day after Christopher’s passing, he wrote. Stream‑of‑consciousness. Raw emotion. No audience. No theology. Just what was true in the moment.
He kept journaling for twenty years.
He didn’t read them back. He wasn’t trying to create a narrative. He was just trying to survive.
And then, after selling his firm five years ago—right as COVID hit—he finally had time to look at the bookshelf full of journals.
He picked one up and began reading.
Life Is Not Here to Torture Us
As he read, something unexpected emerged.
He didn’t just see his pain; he saw turning points. Places where a different kind of thought would appear in the middle of the storm, pointing in a new direction.
One was the day he hit what he calls “rock bottom”—when he realized that the way he was dealing with Christopher’s death was going to destroy him.
“I felt that… I just can’t handle this in the way I’m handling it. There has to be a better way.”
That simple sentence holds more theology than many sermons. It acknowledges:
- The reality of agony.
- The failure of his current strategies.
- And the possibility that another way exists.
A “dim little light bulb,” as he puts it, went on.
If there had to be a better way, then maybe his most basic assumption needed to change.
Maybe life was not, in fact, here to torture him.
“I began to shift that mindset and realize: life is not here to torture us. No matter what the challenge of life is, including the loss of a child—which is one of the toughest. Life is here to teach us.”
If that’s true, even this—this almost unimaginable loss—must have a teaching buried somewhere inside it.
Not a reason that makes the event “okay.” Not a tidy explanation that erases pain. But a way of relating to it that doesn’t reduce him to a permanently broken man sitting in a corner for the rest of his life.
He realized something else: if he spent the rest of his days as “the grieving father,” clinging to the identity of victim, he would actually be disrespecting the enormity of what had happened.
“As traumatic as this was, it couldn’t have happened just for me to go in the corner and cry for the rest of my life. That would have disrespected it.”
So he made a choice—not once, but again and again over the years:
- To treat this tragedy as something he was called to understand, not as an excuse to stop living.
- To believe that the universe which had been unfolding for billions of years without his input probably hadn’t suddenly started making senseless mistakes when he arrived.
- To accept that while he couldn’t control what life brought, he could still choose how to respond to it.
That doesn’t mean the grief disappeared.
It does mean it stopped being the only story.
A Parenthesis in Eternity
Out of his journaling emerged another image that has stayed with me.
We often talk about “life and death” as opposites.
Steven reframed it:
“The opposite of death is birth. Birth and death are opposites. Life is eternal.”
In his view, what we call “life” on Earth—the 80–100 years most of us hope for, or the 23 years Christopher had—is like a parenthesis in an unbroken line of existence:
- Before birth, something of us already is in the mind and heart of God.
- After death, something of us continues in a dimension we don’t fully see.
- Birth and death mark the opening and closing of a brief embodied phase.
“Life,” in the deeper sense, is not the span between those parentheses. It is the line itself.
That may sound abstract until you apply it to Christopher.
If Christopher’s 23‑year “parenthesis” is over, but his life is not, then the question shifts from:
- “Why was he taken from me?”
to
- “Where is his journey now, and how can I, as his father, support it?”
That was another key turning point he found in his journals.
At some point, he began writing from Christopher’s side.
“What if I could see this experience I’m going through from my son’s side and see this as something that is his experience that I can support?”
It wasn’t denial. It was re‑orientation.
- Instead of only tallying what he had lost—future business, shared golf games, potential grandchildren—he began to ask what this meant in terms of his son’s destiny.
- If the universe “doesn’t make mistakes,” then Christopher’s 23 years here, and his continuing life beyond, are part of a coherent story Steven may not understand, but can still choose to honor.
He decided, consciously, to support his son’s ongoing journey:
“As a loving father I supported him in whatever he felt he wanted to do in his life that would be good for him. Why would I not support him after his death if this was part of his ongoing journey?”
That shift did something profound.
It pulled him out of the cramped space of “what might have been” into the wider space of “what can be.”
He realized that the relationship hadn’t ended. It had changed dimensions.
Love Doesn’t End When the Body Does
If love is just chemistry in the brain, then when the brain stops, love ends.
But if love is something deeper—if it is, as your Bible and my Bahá’í writings and his spiritual teachers all suggest, a property of the soul, a quality of God reflected in us—then love doesn’t die when the body dies.
Steven discovered this not as a doctrine, but as an experience.
As he read through years of journals, he noticed that his language about Christopher was changing.
He always signed his entries the same way:
“Love forever and eternity, your dad.”
At some point, he began to add a phrase:
“Your dad and spiritual partner.”
That tiny addition came to signify a big shift:
- He no longer thought of his son as purely “gone” and himself as purely “left behind.”
- He began to see them as partners, moving through life together, helping each other—Christopher without a body, Steven still embodied.
- Their relationship, he realized, was now entirely in the spiritual dimension, but it was still real, still growing.
He also began to see that this is, in fact, where all our deepest relationships are grounded—even when both people are still alive.
When your spouse or child stands in front of you, you naturally relate at the physical and mental levels:
- Sharing meals, conversations, hugs.
- Making plans, arguing, laughing.
Those are important. But the love you feel—what makes their presence so precious—is not reducible to those interactions.
You notice this sharply, as Steven did, when one of those people is no longer physically present:
- The love doesn’t end.
- The bond doesn’t evaporate.
- Something of them still lives in you, and something in you reaches toward them.
For Steven, that “something” was more than memory or sentiment. It became a channel.
He began to experience his son—not as a ghost or apparition, but as a very real spiritual companion, an ongoing source of insight and connection.
That doesn’t mean he floated above human emotion.
He was honest that waves of sadness still came. There were days when the ache was heavy. But one day, standing in his sunroom looking out at a beautiful day, feeling a deep heaviness, he had another moment of clarity:
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, this feeling is just so heavy. It just feels so sad.’ And it occurred to me that if I’m talking about this feeling, then I’m not this feeling.”
He saw that the emotions moving through him—sadness, anger, even moments of despair—were not the core of who he is.
- He did not have to identify as “a sad person.”
- He could say, instead, “Sadness is moving through me right now.”
- He could observe it, allow it, and trust it would eventually pass.
That’s not stoicism. It’s spiritual discernment.
It’s the difference between drowning in a wave and learning to float on it.
And it flows directly from his conviction that he is, at his deepest level, a soul in relationship with other souls—including a very much alive, though disembodied, son.
Where He Landed at 70: Life from the Inside Out
Today, at 70, Steven is living very differently than the young man who once went door‑to‑door selling life insurance.
A few years ago, he built a successor team at his firm, sold the business, and stepped away from the financial world. He did it just as COVID was emerging—a providential timing he’s grateful for.
That transition gave him:
- Time to read his journals,
- Space to write From Grief to Gratitude: A New Paradigm on Death,
- And freedom to focus on what he now sees as his primary task: continued inner growth.
He describes his daily aim simply:
“My focus on a daily basis is to live from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in.”
We live, he notes, in a world of chronic over‑stimulation:
- Constant news cycles,
- Endless device notifications,
- Perpetual outrage and fear.
That is outside in living—a relentless invitation to let events and algorithms dictate our inner state.
He has opted out as much as possible:
- He doesn’t watch the news.
- He uses devices sparingly.
- He is acutely aware of “how much we carry on our shoulders if we engage with all that.”
Instead, he is “committed to nurturing the inside”:
- Continuing his own spiritual study and meditation.
- Teaching, lecturing, and leading workshops on grief and transformation.
- Appearing on podcasts and webinars.
- Considering a second book.
And his message, distilled, is:
You do not have to suffer unnecessarily.
There is a pathway that will lead you to joy and gratitude in your life.
That pathway does not bypass grief. It walks through it, with eyes open to:
- Life not as torturer, but as teacher.
- Death not as the opposite of life, but as the other end of a brief parenthesis.
- Love not as a chemical, but as an eternal bond that can grow even when bodies are gone.
- Emotion not as identity, but as weather moving through a deeper sky.
- Choice not as illusion, but as our genuine “superpower”: the ability to respond in love rather than fear.
You are created in the image of God.
And God loves His creation.
Steven’s story is one more reminder that this image, and this love, endure even when the worst happens—perhaps especially then.
Sneak Peek: Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
On upcoming episodes, I’ll be joined by:
- Chinyere Egbe, economist and professor at Medgar Evers College, who explores the intersection of finance, education, and economic development—and how data‑driven thinking can expand access and opportunity in central Brooklyn and beyond.
- R. J. Snell, Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute and editor‑in‑chief of Public Discourse, who reflects on questions of truth, ethics, and the human person, and how we make sense of meaning in a fragmented age.
If Steven’s journey from grief to gratitude has stirred something in you, these conversations will add further layers to our shared quest: learning to live, here and now, as people created in the image of God.
