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A Grief Observed

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'A Grief Observed' by C.S. Lewis is a poignant and honest exploration of the author's personal journey through grief following the death of his beloved wife. Through a series of raw and heartfelt reflections, Lewis delves into the depths of his emotions, doubts, and struggles with faith in the face of loss. The book offers a candid portrayal of how grief can challenge even the strongest beliefs and how one can navigate through the overwhelming pain of loss.

The writing style of 'A Grief Observed' is described as intimate, emotional, and deeply personal. It provides readers with a glimpse into Lewis' innermost thoughts and feelings as he grapples with the profound impact of his wife's passing. The book is noted for its unflinching honesty, poignant observations, and the way it captures the complexities of grief with both clarity and vulnerability.

Characters:

The main character is the author himself, who transforms his personal grief into a broader exploration of human emotions and relationships.

Writing/Prose:

The writing is raw and unvarnished, offering a truthful depiction of emotional struggles through a mixture of narrative styles.

Plot/Storyline:

The narrative is a personal exploration of grief following the author's wife's death, addressing the emotional turmoil and the struggle with faith.

Setting:

The setting is largely psychological, exploring the author's inner world as he grapples with his loss.

Pacing:

The pacing is steady but contemplative, focusing on the emotional weight of each thought rather than maintaining a conventional narrative flow.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to ta...

Notes:

C.S. Lewis wrote 'A Grief Observed' after the death of his wife Joy.
The book reflects his raw emotions and struggle with faith after her loss.
Lewis initially published the work under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk.
The book is a collection of Lewis's journal entries during his grieving process.
It explores complex feelings such as grief, rage, and questioning God.
He describes grief as feeling similar to fear, filled with restlessness and confusion.
Lewis discusses how memories of the deceased can distort reality.
He emphasizes that sorrow is a process, not a state of being.
The text sheds light on his initial disbelief in the consolation of faith during mourning.
By the end of the book, he finds some comfort and reexamines his faith.
Despite its personal nature, many readers find the book relatable and helpful.
The work is seen as both a profound reflection on suffering and an exploration of love.

Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings

Content warnings include themes of death, intense grief, and the questioning of faith.

From The Publisher:

A classic work on grief, A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments," A Grief Observed an unflinchingly truthful account of how loss can lead even a stalwart believer to lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and the inspirational tale of how he can possibly regain his bearings.

Ratings (16)

Incredible (5)
Loved It (7)
Liked It (3)
It Was OK (1)

Reader Stats (44):

Read It (19)
Want To Read (15)
Not Interested (10)

2 comment(s)

Incredible
6 months

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

5 stars because I think this is the most vulnerable thing I've ever read.

A Grief Observed isn't the theology or philosophy or fiction that Lewis is best known for; it is, indeed, a grief observed, almost a character study of a man struggling to cope in the wake of the death of his wife.

Lewis is, as always, a brilliant stylist, but his writing in this slim volume is raw and honest and emotional like I've never read him before. Reading it feels a bit voyeuristic—like I'm prying into something not intended for a stranger's eyes. And that is precisely what makes it so valuable.

I haven't yet lost anyone close to me, and as Madeleine L'Engle discusses in her introduction (and Lewis himself mentions), the grieving process is different for each person.

A Grief Observed is a small window into what that process was like for Lewis, and it's a powerful and intimate experience.

Some favorite passages:

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant—in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back—to be sucked back—into it?

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.

The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do.

And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we—or what we mistake for ‘we’—could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

It’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss.

I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What’s wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember.

The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal.

Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself.

We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not. But the same thing happens in our private prayers.

For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about.

For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives—to both, but perhaps especially to the woman—a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. To see, in some measure, like God.

How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me.

Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.

From Madeleine L'Engle's

Foreword:

But our memories, precious though they are, still are like sieves, and the memories inevitably leak through.

It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul’s growth.

From Douglas H. Gresham's

Introduction:

I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain—it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love.

I have always wanted the opportunity to explain one small thing that is in this book and which displays a misunderstanding. Jack refers to the fact that if he mentioned Mother, I would always seem to be embarrassed as if he had said something obscene. He did not understand, which was very unusual for him. I was fourteen when Mother died and the product of almost seven years of British Preparatory School indoctrination. The lesson I was most strongly taught throughout that time was that the most shameful thing that could happen to me would be to be reduced to tears in public. British boys don’t cry. But I knew that if Jack talked to me about Mother, I would weep uncontrollably and, worse still, so would he. This was the source of my embarrassment. It took me almost thirty years to learn how to cry without feeling ashamed.

 
Loved It
1 year

It tells of my story during the loss of family members and how I struggle to get to term with the loss

 
 
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