By 2012, Canada’s combat role in Afghanistan will be over. The end of a nation’s involvement in combat activities forces a communal process of contextualizing and ultimately mythologizing the ordeal. Thus the importance of For Your Tomorrow, B.C. college instructor Melanie Murray’s soulful examination of the death and life of her nephew, Captain Jeff Francis, who was killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb on July 4, 2007, at age 36. Murray’s powerful work contains the emotional resonance currently lacking in much of the writing about our involvement in the Afghan conflict.

For Your Tomorrow follows Captain Francis from his typical adolescence in Nova Scotia through his atypical experience as a doctoral candidate and student of Buddhism and martial arts. Murray portrays a man restlessly seeking a higher cause, and finding it at age 30 in the Canadian Armed Forces. Although the book focuses on Francis, it is also about the impact his life and death had on the lives of those around him. There are multiple levels of myth-building here, from the story of a late-blooming warrior to the chorus of grief that attends the death of a man who was a son, grandson, brother, nephew, husband, father, and brother-in-arms. In Murray’s hands, her nephew becomes an emblem for all our war dead.

Murray’s writing is elegiac and lyrical. She reaches for the language to convey something utterly personal and, in the process, soars into the deeply profound.

The function of grief literature is to give the reader solace that life goes on despite death and loss. This book is a worthy volume not just for those searching for catharsis, but also for a nation looking to bear witness to the full measure of our soldiers’ sacrifice.