A Grief Observed is the journal C. S. Lewis kept after losing his wife, Joy, to cancer. In it he pours out his feelings, as his faith is battered by the storms of grief. I felt a bit awkward reading it, kind of like I was standing around, gawking at a car accident. On one hand, you want to see what's happening, but on the other you don't want to intrude on another's misfortune and sorrow. Of course, reading a published book is hardly an intrusion on anyone. The book was an interesting way to consider my own beliefs without having to personally suffer the loss of my wife.
--J. ( )

A deceivingly small book, it is packed full of honest and forthright insight into the thoughts and feelings we feel as we grieve.

While I have not faced the death of a spouse (this book was written after his wife passed of cancer), illness, disability and the stress of caregiving has changed me forever. C.S. Lewis gives light to dark thoughts and painful feelings so comfort and healing can begin.

The edition I read had a forward written by Madeline L'Engle which offered another thoughtful approach to this difficult subject. ( )

One of the best pieces of writing I've read on death, dissolution, and the reality or metaphor of religious belief. ( )

Beautiful and touching.

C.S. Lewis published A Grief Observed under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk, (the N. W. is Anglo-Saxon shorthand for nat whilk, “I know not whom”). In fact, the book was never published under Lewis’ name while he lived. First published in 1961, it has been called an unsettling book and the use of a pseudonym seems to indicate that Lewis knew that it would be found so.

Some argue that it is not about Lewis’ anguish over his wife’s, Joy’s, death but instead a fictional account of grief. Mary Borhek summarizes the position of those who hold this view: “The only reasons I can see for believing the book to be a fictionalized account are a desire to distance oneself from the extreme discomfort of confronting naked agony and an unwillingness to grant a revered spiritual leader and teacher permission to be a real, fallible, intensely real human being.”

Still others object to Lewis’ candid expressions of anger at God, suggesting the book demonstrates Lewis’ loss of faith: John Beversluis in his C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion states that “There is no case for Christianity in this book. Gone are the persuasive arguments and the witty analogies. Gone, too, are the confidence and urbanity evident in The Problem of Pain…The fundamental crisis of the book is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of such paralyzing magnitude that Lewis tries to distance himself from it in every possible way.”

Noelene Kidd in A Grief Observed: Art, Apology, or Autobiography? argues the book “is not simply a record of Lewis’s grief at the loss of his beloved wife…but a dissection of grief itself. The work is chiefly an apology concealed by art.” Still others find the book, while a deeply moving account of loss, overly introspective and emotional, verging on the maudlin. Yet Lewis avoids bathos in the book at least in part because of a clipped, prose style characterized by short, simple sentences and brief, almost snapshot-like paragraphs. These stylistic devices prevent his wallowing in excessive self-pity; in effect, he becomes a surgeon analyzing a patient’s medical chart. Ironically, of course, he is at the same time both surgeon and patient.”

Don King has written:

“A close consideration of the prose style of A Grief Observed suggests the book may be read as vers libre or free verse, poetry relying not upon a regular metrical pattern but instead upon pace or cadence. Furthermore, whereas conventional poetry places a premium upon the foot and the line, free verse finds its rhythm in the stanza. Accordingly, the short paragraphs of A Grief Observed function as stanzas linking it with other ostensibly prose works such as Psalms and the Song of Songs. If we read Lewis’ book this way, we may find that while his focus upon traditional poetic conventions in his consciously conceived poetry actually restrains his poetic impulse—that is, his concern with form overshadows his poetic sensibilities—the release he experiences unconsciously in free verse liberates his poetic impulse so that A Grief Observed becomes his greatest poem.”

As I read A Grief Observed I had all this in the back of my mind. Occasionally I would find myself pulling parts of it out and rewriting them in my mind to reflect more of what I saw in a poetic structure. Here are a few of what I did. I found they made the book more memorable for me, rather than saving a few quotations, which is my normal reading practice.

Her Absence

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy,
Our favorite pub, our favorite wood.
But I decided to do it at once,
Like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash.
Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.
Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.
It’s not local at all.
I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another.
Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal.
It is like that.
The act of living is different all through.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

After All Hope Was Gone

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together,
After all hope was gone.
How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly,
We talked together that last night!
And yet, not quite together.
There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’
You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain.
What you feel may be bad.
It might conceivably be as bad as what the other felt,
Though I should distrust anyone who claimed that it was.
But it would still be quite different.
When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear,
The recoil of the organism from its destruction;
The smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap.
It can’t be transferred.
The mind can sympathize;
The body, less.
In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least.
All their love passages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary,
Correlative,
Even opposite, feelings about one another.
We both knew this.
I had my miseries, not hers;
She had hers, not mine.
The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine.
We were setting out on different roads.
This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation
(’You, Madam, to the right
– you, Sir, to the left’)
Is just the beginning of the separation
Which is death itself.


Praise Is The Mode Of Love

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.
Praise in due order;
Of Him as the giver,
Of her as the gift.
Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise,
However far we are from it?
I must do more of this.
I have lost the fruition I once had of H.
And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness,
From the fruition which,
If His mercies are infinite,
I may some time have of God.
But by praising I can still,
In some degree, enjoy her,
And already, in some degree,
Enjoy Him.
Better than nothing ( )