“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”

“A Grief Observed” is the published version of some private journaling by the famous author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis, who wrote to help him find his way through his grief. It is heralded as a “modern classic” and it was recommended to me by a bereavement counsellor as a love story that illustrates the pain and struggles of processing a bereavement.

After only four years of marriage to Joy Davidman, Lewis’s wife sadly died of cancer and he found himself alone, inconsolable in his grief and struggling to sustain his faith. As a man of words, he wrote down his feelings of anguish and reflections on his bereavement as they happened, which are now contained in this small book. The book was first published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk, so Lewis could avoid being identified as the author. Although it was republished after Lewis’ death in his own name, the book still refers to his wife as “H”.

The Amazon reviews recommend this book for anyone who has faith and has lost someone; anyone who has lost someone and ponders faith; and anyone who is not sure how to navigate the storms of grief. The book, divided into four parts, documents the scattered thoughts of the author’s evolving state of mind and it questions whether it is possible to return to normality after grief. The surprisingly brief book inspired the movie “Shadowlands”, which is based on the relationship between Lewis and his American poet wife.

What I wanted: I wanted a love story that would help me to release tears and embrace my own feelings of loss and grief and show me the emotions of shock, guilt and pain felt by others. Instead, I found the book to be more a series of grief notes with a strong emphasis on faith that, for someone like me without such a strong belief, felt a bit of a distraction and made the book hard going at times. Nevertheless, I appreciate how the book could be helpful to others who might question their own religious beliefs after the death of a loved one.

What I liked: I liked the raw human emotion which is written in all its chaos and confusion and which clearly illustrates the fact that there are no set stages for grief and which instead describes the muddled illogical process that lacks a timetable. It was also comforting to realise that even a great literary genius struggles to articulate the experience of grief.

This book is not suitable for people looking for a self-help fix to grief but some of the passages give a beautiful description that help with the understanding of the bereavement process. One of my favourites was:

“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I have already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago.”

There are many favourable reviews of this book and I can appreciate how useful this window into the human condition of grief might be to a Christian who is questioning the injustice of the death of a loved one.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

- C. S. Lewis