"The Most Important Book I Ever Wrote Was My Marriage": Peter Kreeft on Grief and a Finished Life

Riding home from the nursing home where his wife Maria had just died, Peter Kreeft wept, and then, he says, "God reminded me that this was a triumph." The tears turned into what he called "wild laughter."[^1] How could joy and grief meet in such a shocking way?

Kreeft, a philosopher who has written over a hundred books, insists tears and laughter were the only right responses, in a July 2026 conversation with Matt Fradd about love, loss, and suffering.[^1] He is 89 years old. Maria died after a prolonged illness during which Kreeft served as her caregiver. What he offers is not a theory of grief but a reported experience of it, specific, at times brutally honest, and finally, persuasive.

The self that loves

Kreeft's governing claim is that love, not biology or attribute, constitutes who a person is: lose the person you love enough, and a real part of yourself goes with them[^1]. Catholic Christian anthropology, per Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, likewise holds that the person is not reducible to individual psychology or biological function alone; personhood involves relation and orientation toward genuine goods.[^2] Kreeft's intuition runs in the same direction: if you love another person more than you love yourself, then that person's death takes a real part of you with it. Fradd, married 20 years, describes feeling that his wife is "becoming me," that he needs her the way he needs himself. Kreeft confirms it. The loss, on this account, resembles losing a limb more than losing a friend, and in some ways worse than that.[^1] C. S. Lewis, writing in his own grief journal after his wife Joy's death, describes something similar: the person who persists after such a loss is genuinely diminished, not merely sad.[^3] Kreeft has read Lewis's account, though he says the tears prevent him from finishing it now.

A marriage that argued

Kreeft is careful not to romanticize. Asked about the hardest parts of 63 years together, he names four children in six years with no help, exhaustion, and real differences in temperament: he describes himself as an only child from a quiet Dutch family; Maria was a New Yorker with a loud extended family, strong opinions, and no patience for pretension.[^1] He calls their marriage a mismatch of a round peg and a square hole. They argued, sometimes bitterly, though he says they never lost the underlying respect. Kreeft invokes Chesterton's observation that men and women are, in effect, two different species by nature, incompatible by temperament, so that every marriage that holds is something of a miracle rather than a mere matter of compatibility.[^1] One of Kreeft's examples of Maria's contribution is characteristic: she edited the one book he wrote with her help by "unwriting" it, crossing out repetitions, flagging preachiness. When the publisher told him his style had improved, he had not yet told her why. "I've told her that, of course," he says.

The last rational act

Maria's final lucid decision before entering hospice care followed a specific sequence. Kreeft had promised her years earlier that he would never put her in a nursing home. When he could no longer manage her care alone, she raised it with her nurse instead, saying Peter was so stressed out he could not take it anymore.[^1] Telling the nurse rather than renegotiating with Kreeft directly released him from his word without requiring him to break it himself. "That act of charity," Kreeft says, "in the mouth of a New Yorker who wasn't terribly subtle or sweet or compassionate, that was special."[^1] A woman dying of Parkinson's, partly paralyzed and bedridden, who saw her husband's exhaustion and arranged for his relief at the cost of the one commitment she had asked of him: that is heroic virtue in an ordinary register.

Suffering without evasion

Kreeft does not soften the account of the final year. He was exhausted. He screamed into his pillow. He complained to God. None of this is treated as a failure of faith; it is honesty. Asked whether he despaired, Kreeft says, "Of course." Then he adds: "Everything's not all right. But God makes wrong things right."[^1] The claim is not that suffering is secretly fine, or that grief resolves into peace if you pray enough. Lewis made the same point in his own grief journal: suffering is not just a weight to carry but something the sufferer must not evade, since evasion compounds the weight rather than lightening it.[^3] Kreeft did the opposite: stayed present to an extremely difficult reality for over a year, not because he found it manageable, but because love demanded it. Ascetical theology calls this the purgative dimension of a faithful life's later stages: sufferings we do not choose but must receive purify only when received with the will's cooperation, however imperfect. Kreeft's kicked furniture and screamed complaints are not evidence against this. They are evidence the will was engaged in something real.

The body of the beloved

The most striking moment in the conversation is not the wild laughter in the car but what Kreeft says about his last view of Maria, about an hour after she died. "Here is a wasted emaciated wrinkled suffering body," he says. "It's as beautiful as a crucifix."[^1] The Catholic doctrine of the resurrection of the body rests on the premise that the body is not incidental to the person; what the person has done in and through the body is part of who they are. This unity of body and soul runs through the Thomistic anthropology that grounds the CCMMP framework: the person is a body-soul composite whose integrity persists through and beyond physical deterioration.[^2] Maria's body, at the end, showed what she had gone through and chosen. Kreeft saw it and fell in love again.

The phone at the wake

Kreeft tells one more story, and he does not try to explain it. During the wake, as a priest prayed over Maria's coffin, his cell phone rang. He was embarrassed, pulled it from his pocket, and had to open the flip phone before any button could register, which meant the screen was already showing when he first saw it: "mom."[^1] The number was one Maria had used years earlier, before she gave up trying to master a cell phone and the family retired it. He called it back; the number had been out of service for roughly a decade. "It couldn't possibly be anything else," he says. "It was from heaven." He does not argue for this. He reports it, and treats it as a gift rather than a proof.

What this looks like in a life

Kreeft's account is not a blueprint. A 63-year marriage built on Thomistic anthropology, Dutch stubbornness, New York directness, four children, and a year of caregiving is transferable as a form, not a method: love fully enough that the loss is real. Argue within the love, not against it. Do the caregiving when required, even when it is difficult. Tell the truth about what suffering costs. Then, when the book is done, recognize it as a success. "I've written over 100 books," Kreeft says. "The most important book I ever wrote was my marriage."[^1] For anyone in the middle of a marriage, caregiving, grief, or the ordinary difficulty of loving another person well over time, this is the harder comfort: evidence that it is possible, and worth everything it costs.

References

[^1]: Peter Kreeft and Matt Fradd, "Love, Loss and the Meaning of Suffering," Pints with Aquinas, Ep. 587, YouTube, July 13-14, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GhuwT-NuY. Verified against the full episode transcript.

[^2]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), ch. 4.

[^3]: C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Faber & Faber, 1961).