“A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis
How can a benevolent God cause you so much suffering and death? This was the question asked by a devout Christian C. S. Lewis when his beloved wife passed away, leaving him with so much grief.
Lewis married his wife Helen Joy Davidman (referred in the book as simply “H”) when he was already 60 and have long become a celebrated writer as well as the famous don of Oxford. Helen was an extraordinary woman, with intelligence and accomplishments that can match his level, which instantly sparked a connection between them since they first met. In fact, the story of how they met was incredible. Their marriage lasted only a decade long, however, after she sadly passed away due to bone cancer. And it ruined Lewis and prompted him to question why did God took her away after only a very brief period of happiness following a lifetime of being a bachellor?
But instead of abandoning his faith, he decided to write a book about this doubt and torment. This book. And the journey was profound.
We can see early on in the book that he is hurting, confused and feel the sense of lost: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid”, Lewis then continues, “I dread the moments when the house is empty.”
He also hate the way he was grieving, when he said “on the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it – that disgust me.”
He then went to a depression stage: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.”
And starting to question about God’s absence during his darkest period: “But 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. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
And he was angry: “I’m not in danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”
He then became bitter: “To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’”
And traumatized: “At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite 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.”
But he then realized that “Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.” And the fact that “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
But he still missing her some more, when he said “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 when he said “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 love-making, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”
At some point in the book, he even began to question about his wife’s happiness in the afterlife: “‘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?”
But then, he started to see the light at the end of the tunnel: “Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.”
And he applied it to his own situation: “Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’”
And began to slowly heal: “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. 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.”
And able to philosophize his experience: “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.”
And able to revisit his grief: “And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off—something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.”
He also started to see God from a different light: “Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason—the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.”
Despite still having some doubts for the future: “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.”
And still can’t help for feeling the grief: “Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.”
Only this time is different. As Lewis remarks, “the greater the love, the greater the grief.”
In this, he has accepted the lost of his wife as a price to pay for loving her, a price very much worth paying. Because it is better to have loved and lost (however brief it was) than never experience them at all.
With this regards, Lewis realized that the key is not to avoid the inevitable suffering, but to embrace it as a part of the love you get to experience beforehand. A greater and better life that you can have if you have the courage to love (and bare the loss later on). And this, Lewis eventually realized, is what God intended for him all along.
THE CHAOS THEORY 