A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane.

for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.

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.

I almost prefer the moments of agony.

But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me.

They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.

if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.

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.

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.

What would H. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back?

An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.

I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination.

But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.

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.

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. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all this.

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. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back.

On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’

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.

The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook!

What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves.

‘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.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.

I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again.

the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad.

Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us.

This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.

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.

And grief still feels like fear.

One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship.

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.

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?

We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it.

concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.

The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.

If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overw...

It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled ‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it...

He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better.

Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind.

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.

If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.

was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’

‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.