76 pages
English language
Published March 26, 2001 by HarperSanFrancisco.
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: "Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He 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." This is a beautiful and unflinchingly homest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.
A less theological writing compared to his other works. Writing his emotions, you can see him being pulled back and forth. Might not be for everyone, but I certainly gleamed something from it. It was interesting the distinction he made between the images we make of people in our own mind as opposed to their actual makeup.
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear..." begins a penetrating exploration of the anguish C.S. Lewis felt after the death of his wife from bone cancer. By all accounts, writer and theologian C.S. Lewis' brief (four years) marriage to Joy Davidson was an intense and profoundly felt relationship for both of them. Lewis' extraordinary examination of his feelings around her loss is both deeply personal and highly intellectual, yet to anyone who has lost someone they love, his feelings and thoughts will seem familiar.
This book was way too Christian for me, and I suppose being married for only four years could heighten the grief when one of the partners dies, but I still found Lewis' attempt to understand a senseless loss unique and almost luminous.
