Dawn Cogger’s memoir, Womb to Tomb to Womb, provides fodder for life’s journey, a journey with unimaginable positive changes. Her story demonstrates how our life journey and its teachings are unique for each of us. Her life starts with sporadic Christian teachings, and contrary messages that belief in God is not acceptable, her behaviour often unacceptable. Her love of nature brings her solace and inspiration. She shares her hunger for prayer and a relationship with God. The bold, yet gentle book of life memories starts as a child, travails through her moments of desperation, to a seasoned woman, nurse, spiritual director and writer. It will touch your heart, inviting transformation.Her memoir includes her struggle with the deaths of two young patients. She considered marriage to be a life-long commitment, and found it wasn’t. She went to therapy more than once. Dawn seeks and receives spiritual direction. She also walks the contemplative discernment process through the education of providing spiritual direction. As you witness her life, you’ll see her major losses turn into her gifts. Ageing and the virus COVID-19, at times seen as insurmountable challenges, bring about a grateful, inclusive, energized being. She shows the joys and woes of our lives have energy to foster: healing of a broken heart, a fulfilling relationship with God, and a life open to being true to our authentic selves.
Dawn Cogger, the mother of three adult children, grandmother, retired nurse and spiritual director, emigrated from Canada as a young girl to the United States. She worked in Paediatrics and Long-Term Care as well as other areas. Providing spiritual direction for individuals and retreats has been a labour of love for most of her adult life. Dawn never dreamed she would write, let alone be published. Her experiences of life realities inspired her to journal, fostering growth beyond her fears. Daily walks and painting with watercolours and acrylics keep her learning in joy. Her love of nature, including Canada’s Lake Superior, and searching for God, continue in parallel. Dawn has been published in Presence, an International Journal of Spiritual Direction. She has been published in the anthology, Corners: Voices on Change. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband.
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Reading From Womb to Tomb to Womb by Dawn Cogger is a holy journey. It travels through the recalling and questioning of childhood memories to painful adult struggles in work and marriage to the joy of ever-changing spiritual fulfillment. The journey is at times playful and prayerful, painful and peaceful. Dawn includes raw emotionally descriptive events that are easily relatable. A trip to the Holy Land forms part of her yearning for and the rebirth that comes from seeing and experiencing God in the diversity of people, unexpected places, and in her love of nature. The book may encourage the reader to delve into the exercises that were part of her spiritual direction training and practice. So, have a listening ear and receptive heart as you read Dawn’s gift to you, her story of strength and courage.
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At a devastating, emotional low point in Dawn Cogger’s life, brought on by the loss of patients under her nursing care, by her failing marriage, and by her failure at achieving the perfection she demanded of herself, she rejected suicide and resolved to give herself and her existence to God. For the first time in her life, she felt the presence of Jesus and knew that God would help her find the strength and courage to manage the challenges she was facing.
Dawn did not share her faith experience with her husband and other extended family members, fearing their rejection, but she began a quest to nourish her spiritual hunger, an odyssey that continues today.
This lovely, intimate memoir traces Dawn’s pursuit of a deeper comprehension of God’s presence in her life. The organization of the narrative is basically chronological, but there is also a bit of stream of consciousness when one revelation will lead to other references from the past or future. The result is that the reader feels they are sharing a very natural, deeply personal conversation with a very good friend.
Dawn does not shy away from detailing the trials that have occurred in her life. On the other hand, her inspiration is her lifelong yearning to comprehend God’s radiance and to welcome God’s comfort into her being. Dawn’s memoir describes a transformative journey that may well offer encouragement to us all.
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