A Review of C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed”

"A Grief Observed" is about one man's grief, but it's also a deep dive into the sudden shift in perspective caused by traumatic loss.

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I learned about C.S. Lewis’s, A Grief Observed, the way I often do when it comes to books about grief, someone mentioned it in an online forum as a book that comforted them after a devastating loss.

I’m a big fan of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles — the series of seven books that begin with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe which, as it turns out, is actually an allegory about the bible (a fact I didn’t know or care about when I read the books as a secular Jewish child).

Even so, I was hesitant to read his book about grief because I’m not religious and was worried it wouldn’t resonate with me (or worse, that I’d somehow feel preached to or offended because I didn’t share Lewis’s belief in god). I put my doubts aside and chose to read the book because I love Lewis’s writing and I was curious about his approach to writing about his own grief. I’m really glad I did.

A Grief Observed was originally published in 1961 after the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman, who Lewis refers to as H. throughout the book (her full name was Helen Joy Davidman). Ms. Davidman was an American poet who was considered a child prodigy, graduating from high school at age 14 and earning her Masters at Columbia University at the age of twenty. Lewis met Davidman late in life (he was nearly sixty and she was forty, divorced and with two sons of her own).

The story of how they met and fell in love is absolutely fascinating and worth reading, but for the purpose of this review I’m only going to say that the two were deeply in love. They were equally matched in intellect and talent, but doomed from the start of their relationship to enjoy a fairly short romance and marriage. Joy was suffering from metastatic bone cancer, though she did not know this when she moved to England to be with Lewis in 1955.

A Grief Observed is a series of Lewis’s journal entries written after Davidman’s death. It was first published under a pseudonym. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas H. Gresham, wrote the book’s introduction. In it, he describes A Grief Observed as “a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.”

Because this is essentially a compilation of journal entries, the narrative is extremely personal. It’s also somewhat nonlinear — there is no clear beginning and no sense of resolution at the end (a perfect metaphor for grief). The reader gets a tremendously clear sense of Lewis’s deep confusion caused by the loss of his H.

Lewis likens his grief to a feeling of “being concussed” — a feeling I was immediately able to relate to.

“There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me,” writes Lewis by way of introduction, “I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.”

Lewis’s initial journal entries about grief and his own confusion regarding his feelings about god and religion really instantly resonated with me. The loss of H. prompted him to question everything about his life, including his own faith.

As someone who isn’t religious (though I lean more towards agnosticism than atheism), I was surprised by this because I’d always assumed that people with a strong religious foundation were able to draw on a well of support that is simply not available to me.

Without god, I cannot say, “At least she is with god,” when I think of my daughter. Without a church, there is no congregation (beyond friends and family) to hold me up and support me through the heartbreak of losing my daughter. I’ve often envied people of faith because they have certainty in being reunited with the person they’ve lost.

But Lewis, who turned to Christianity later in life and was, by all accounts, a very dedicated and faithful Christian, was tormented by what reads as a sense of betrayal in the early pages of this memoir. He writes:

“Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent — non-existent. But then why does he seem so present, when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him?”

Lewis questions his own understanding of god — at first — but not the fact that god exists. This resonated with me not because I’m religious (I’m not), but because I constantly questioned my understanding of the world after my daughter died. I’m still not quite sure how to make sense of my own reality.

A Grief Observed is about one man’s grief, observed, but it’s also a deep dive into the sudden shift in perspective caused by traumatic loss — the questioning, the confusion, and the distorted sense of time, a sense that one is waiting for something that will never come again.

Lewis writes: “If the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference when we speak of them, between was and is and will be?” and, “…grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or, like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”

Grief feels like waiting. Yes, exactly this.

When I started reading A Grief Observed, I highlighted something (or several somethings) on nearly every page, but as I progressed through this brief memoir (it’s just 76 pages, not including the introduction), it didn’t resonate quite as much. That’s because as Lewis moved through early grief, he began to think — and write — more and more about god.

I am genuinely happy for Lewis that he was able to connect with his faith again. He found some light in the midst of his profound darkness which I found truly hopeful and even familiar. I recognized his shifting perspective as something I’ve experienced with my own grief as time passes.

It’s not that Lewis got over his wife’s death or moved on (never that), but that he found a path to acceptance which enabled him to feel close to her memory without drawing on sorrow as the main point of connection. Lewis names this himself.

He writes, “And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best.” and “It was as if the lifting of sorrow removed a barrier.”

A Grief Observed contains Lewis’s profound insight and remarkable empathy. If I’d read this book in the early months of grief, I would have immediately recognized a fellow traveler on this long road of sorrow (though Lewis describes grief not as a journey, but as a “descent.”)

In reading this book now, more than two years after my daughter died, I am able to regard it with some perspective. As with Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking, I seems that I have found a compatriot in grief, someone who gets it, someone who is able to give this pain a name.

I think Lewis’s most profound musings on grief arrive towards the end of the memoir as he realizes that deep sadness separates him from H. He writes, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them.”

This recalls my own experience with grief as does his sentiment to seek solace in joy because that’s when H. feels closest to him. “I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness,” writes Lewis. “I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.”
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This article was originally published on Medium on 11/1/201.