C.S. Lewis’ short book on grief covers the slow curve from the abyss to recovery.
I read C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed because…well, when you’re a reader and you’re struggling with losing someone, you naturally read about…grief. Lewis lost a wife of not so many years. A wife he found late enough in life to know how precious their affection was, yet not so late in life to reduce the physical, sensual loss that tears one apart when you lose a lover.
To lose the one real romantic love of a life while still fully in its precious bonds? I’m not sure there is a worse grief. Though it’s pointless, of course, to compare griefs as if they were pumpkins in a field:
“That’s a fine big one.”
“Yes, but not so big as that!”
He wrote A Grief Observed as a short journal in the aftermath of that loss. It is raw. Almost shocking. Not because this is a grief in some way different than we all experience it. It’s just honest in a way that public thinkers rarely are. Its pages are sharp with self-loathing as Lewis struggles to rebuild his self. He careens between a desperate rage at man and God and wild words like sobs flow on what must be late and wretched nights. And when that grief retreats, he flays himself for his pitiful efforts at normalcy, wonders if he betrays his love, and savages that normalcy with the acid clarity of emptiness.
“The times when you’re not thinking about the person may be worse because the world seems flat…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 than I remember? The agony must die away but what will follow. Does grief subside into boredom tinged by nausea?
That is perhaps more to be feared.”
Grief makes everything you value seem small.
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
It’s like that moment at the doctor’s when a minor pain is transformed into an existential threat and all your other problems and joys suddenly seem irrelevant or trivial. Grief does that. Grief is profound and transformative because it is revealing (perhaps deceptively so) of that smallness.
So, it’s no surprise that Lewis, in agony, directs much of his contempt at himself. How, he wonders, could his faith be so shaken. Was he so stupid or blind? He was no five-year-old to whom death or suffering might come as an intellectual surprise.
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
All deep emotions give us this sense. We cannot live in a state of ecstasy or despair. But within those emotions our daily lives seem stripped of meaning. This is an illusion, I think, but a meaningful one. It is both true and false. Our everyday lives are not devoid of value and meaning, but they have less than they should. When the light of feeling is suddenly amplified, we see all the empty spaces in ourselves.
But if Lewis directs most of his bile against himself, he is bitterly contemptuous of those (both Christian and non) who think that grief is somehow ameliorated by religion. As if some doctrine could salve our wounds.
“It is hard to have patience with people who say that death doesn’t matter. Whatever is matters. Whatever happens has consequences. One might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. “
Nor is he buying the “she’s gone to a better place” as consolation. Not only because it is literally no consolation for HIS loss, but because he knows that real Christianity provides no such comfort. Lewis the Christian scholar does not think some material reunion awaits or that one’s pain and testing must necessarily cease with death.
“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?”
This is not intellectual despair borne of grief, this is just Lewis the scholar knowing what he has always known.
There are times in A Grief Observed when I wondered if being a Christian doesn’t complicate grief in this intellectual sense. As a materialist, I have no intellectual reckoning with grief. No surprise. The world has crushed me? Shit happens. For Lewis, the profound grief isn’t just that. It is an intellectual challenge.
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice.”
And
“If my house has collapsed at one blow it is because it was a house of cards. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labeled illness, pain, death and loneliness.”
But though this may seem (as it is written) to be the peculiar fate of a serious Christian, I doubt it is much different for anyone who believes or values anything. To whatever extent you think great Christian thinkers have solved the problem of evil and suffering, they have certainly not ignored it. But in the face of overwhelming personal loss, it is hard to take any answer as anything but sophistry. What ideas can stand against the physical assault that is true grief?
Lewis puts it this way:
“It doesn’t matter if you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let them lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”
Whose ideas, I’d like to know, can withstand the dentist’s drill? Being a materialist certainly offers no protection. Every idea feels shallow in the face of true grief.
Part of the struggle with loss is always a struggle over memory. Memory which we bless and curse, memory which is both consolation and torment, yet is so often full of false promise. Lewis fears that he will create an increasingly false version of his wife in his mind. A version that will be what he wants, say what he wants. A version that will never surprise him or disagree with him. A version, in other words, that is utterly false.
“What pitiable cant to say she will live forever in my memory. Live? That is exactly what she won’t do.”
And
“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…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.”
It’s a profound point and not just about the memory of those we have lost. For we do this all the time and not just in death. We make mental models of others that fundamentally misrepresent them — particularly in letting ourselves creep in. We do this with friends and family, and we fail to realize how importantly different it is to have THEM and not our idea of them. This isn’t due to some profound difference between idea and actual. It is because our idea of others is profoundly flawed. The mental model we carry in our minds even of those we know best is no more than a cheap counterfeit of the real thing, a bad cover-band at a county fair.
Our loss reminds us of why the reality of the people we value and love is so much more than our memory or idea of them. We will never truly value the people around us until their absence is a felt pain and even then, we like to fool ourselves.
Grief is, too, a great hammer pounding us into epistemic humility. Lewis knew both sides of this coin: the certainty that creeps into the thoughts and writing of a celebrated public thinker, and, of course, the pain and despair of the man alone with his loss wondering if anything he thought was valuable truly is.
“I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”
This is all of us, and religion will neither cure nor cause this epistemic state.
Lewis captures the way grief can feel like a cloud between you and the world. The moments when a memory obliterates the fragile sense that you’ll do okay. The way work runs on and everything else goes into abeyance. How the lonely become untidy.
As Lewis says, “Sorrow is not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history.” A Grief Observed is such a history and it captures that feeling not just that I have been there, but, far more profoundly, the feeling that I have been there before and am there now and will be there again. Grief is not a moment but a marathon.
If you are a Christian and struggling with grief, it is easy to recommend Lewis’ book. If you are not a Christian or religious in any way, I find it equally easy. He’s a fine essayist. A clear mind, and, of course, a fine writer who left behind a children’s fantasy classic that many of us treasure.
I spent my college years reading the great medieval Christian philosophers, admiring the way they blended the discipline and intellectual brilliance of Plato and Aristotle into the more emotional tapestry of their religion. And though I remain more admiring of Plato and Aristotle without Christianity and obdurate in my modern materialism, it’s never been hard for me to read serious Christian thought. If Augustine can learn from Plato, Aquinas from Aristotle, and Hume from Aquinas, we can surely learn from all of them — even when we profoundly disagree. After all, our best philosophical ideas capture only a kind of efference copy of our deepest values and truths.
A Grief Observed is a short book covering a slow curve from the abyss to the beginning of recovery. You can hear, amid many false starts, the slow beginnings of calm, the re-assertion of beliefs, the tumblers slowly clicking back into place as the wheels in his mind cease to spin. Along the way you will surely recognize much that feels familiar if you, too, are grappling with loss. It ends, as I think it must, long before what healing that can be done is finished. But there are, towards the end of his notes, moments of hope and a growing sense of life reanimated with meaning. A gradual coming back to something perhaps not as good as what was but the best that can be done. A new (and perhaps better) house of cards is being built.
I leave you with these words that I thought were very beautiful indeed.
“When I mourned H. least, I remembered her best…Why has no one told me these things?”