A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis (a summary by Pat Evert) 

• Forward

What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends. I am grateful to Lewis for the honesty of his journal of grief, because it makes quite clear that the human being is allowed to grieve, that it is normal, it is right to grieve. But for most of us, who see a God of a much wider and greater love than that of the tribal God who only cares for his own little group, more is needed. And that more is a leap of faith, an assurance that that which has been created with love is not going to be abandoned. Love does not create and then annihilate. The important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love. I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is a part of healthy grief not often encouraged. 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. ~ Madeleine L’Engle

• Introduction

This is the passionate result of a brave man turning to face his agony and examine it, the pain and sorrow of the loss of those whom we love. My stepfather, C. S. Lewis attempted to come to grips with and defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life. Helen Joy Gresham (née Davidman), the “H.” referred to in this book, was perhaps the only woman whom Jack ever met who was his intellectual equal and also as well-read and widely educated as he was himself. They shared another common factor: they were both possessed of total recall. Jack never forgot anything he had read, and neither did she. The great love grew between them until it was an almost visible incandescence. They seemed to walk together within a glow of their own making. Even then in my early teen years I stood aside and watched the love grow between these two, and was able to be happy for them. It was a happiness tinged with both sadness and fear, for I knew, as did both Mother and Jack, that this, the best of times, was to be brief and was to end in sorrow. 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. For Jack this was the end of so much which life had for so long denied him and then briefly held out to him like a barren promise. I was fourteen when Mother died. 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. 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. Mother was brought up an atheist, and became a communist. Until encountering the British writer C.S. Lewis she became aware also that here was a mind of hitherto unparalleled clarity, and a penfriendship soon developed. Her marriage to my father was over, and following the divorce she fled to England with myself and my brother. It almost seems cruel that her death was delayed long enough for him to grow to love her so completely that she filled his world as the greatest gift that God had ever given him, and then she died and left him alone in a place that her presence in his life had created for him. He too fell headlong into the vortex of whirling thoughts and feelings and dizzily groped for support and guidance deep in the dark chasm of grief. ~ Douglas H. Gresham

• Chapter One

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. Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like.’ It’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent — non-existent. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers. To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. The act of living is different all through. 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. And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are. 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. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. Her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.

• Chapter Two

Her point of view seems to have dropped out of sight. She liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known. A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was snatched away. Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. 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. 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. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone. ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? I have a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. But there are other difficulties. ‘Where is she now?’ That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body—and the body I loved is certainly no longer she—she is in no place at all. Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. ‘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. They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ‘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. He crucified Him. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture. 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. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view ‘good,’ telling lies may be ‘good’ too. Even if they are true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us – or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles – what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? 

• Chapter Three

There is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. A man like me 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. However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now? All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. 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. 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. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. 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? You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. Was it my own frantic need that slammed the door in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear. As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ The teacher moves you on. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. A sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account. Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. Like a man who’s had his leg off. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her. 

• Chapter Four

Every horizon, every clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-H. happiness. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. 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? All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask. And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly than before. Does H. now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? 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. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees. The absence of emotion repelled me. But in this contact (whether real or apparent) it didn’t do anything of the sort. One didn’t need emotion. The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it. Can that intimacy be love itself—always in this life attended with emotion. It would, if I have had a glimpse, be—well, I’m almost scared at the adjectives I’d have to use. Brisk? cheerful? keen? alert? intense? wide-awake? Above all, solid. Utterly reliable. Firm.