Book Notes: A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
A small book written in the immediate aftermath of unbearable loss. The most honest pages I know on the subject.
C.S. Lewis lost his wife of four years to cancer. He wrote, in the months after, into a series of notebooks. He did not intend the notebooks to become a book. He was not writing for an audience. He was writing because the alternative was unbearable.
Eventually, he allowed the notebooks to be published. Under a pseudonym at first; later under his own name. The book is short. The pages are uncomfortable. The honesty is the gift.
What the book is
It is not a treatise on grief. It is not advice. It is a man, who happened to be a great writer, walking through a small apartment with a great deal of pain, writing down what the pain felt like as it arrived.
The first chapter contains a sentence that has stayed with me for years:
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
He goes on to describe the physical sensations — the trembling, the breathlessness, the weird emptiness of the stomach, the way the world seemed at once distant and too sharp. Most books on grief do not describe these things, because most books on grief are written by people who are not, at the moment of writing, grieving.
Lewis was. The book has the texture of fresh wound.
What it teaches
It teaches that grief is not a problem with a solution. There is no five-stage process, no exercise, no breathing technique that makes grief leave. Grief leaves on its own schedule, often years later, often after you have stopped expecting it to.
The work, while you are in it, is not to fix it. The work is to keep showing up — to the day, to the people you still have, to the small acts of being alive. The grief does its work whether you cooperate or not. You are simply asked to keep walking through it, without demanding that it move faster.
On the second-year truth
Most of the book is about the first months. But there is one passage about what comes later — the second year, the third — that I have re-read in difficult times of my own:
You do not get over it. You get used to it. And in some ways, you do not even get used to it; you just become a different person who has it as part of them.
This is, I think, the truest thing anyone has ever written about long grief. You do not return to who you were before. You become someone new — someone whose life has this loss in it. That person can still be happy. Can still laugh. Can still love. They are simply, also, someone with this loss.
Who this book is for
Anyone in a fresh grief, if they can bear to read it. Anyone who knows someone in a fresh grief, so they can stop trying to give advice that will not help. Anyone who is ready to read about the worst thing that has ever happened to a person, and to know that the person continued.
It is one of the most useful books on this shelf.
A line to keep
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
This sentence holds, in its fewest possible words, the bargain we sign by loving anyone. The bargain is worth signing. It is also worth knowing what we are signing.
The book is one hundred pages. You can read it in an evening. It will sit with you for years.