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 Help in Time of Grief April 2, 2008
Steven R. McEvoy (Canada)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is another amazing book by Lewis, and another that I have read multiple times. I have had to read it for at least three university courses over the last 18 years. This book is unlike anything else that Lewis ever wrote. It is raw, visceral and at times disturbing, unlike most of his other work that is very precise, specific, well argued and clearly laid out.
Recently I heard this story: `Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis's stepson recently released a book about Lewis called Jack's Life. It includes a DVD interview, where Gresham states that Lewis did not intend to publish A Grief Observed; it was a personal notebook. When it was published it was under the pseudonym NW Clark and by a publisher Lewis had never published with. Gresham also said that Lewis received numerous copies of the book as gifts from friends who thought it would help.' That speaks to the power in Lewis's writing; even his friends thought the book would be helpful for him as he journeyed through his grief.
Lewis states in his book The Four Loves: "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him, throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it." That view is drastically changed when he writes Grief. In A Grief Observed we have a very different approach. Lewis presents a very visceral response to the loss of his wife. An example of this is that Lewis states at the beginning of the book: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." This book shows us more of Lewis's own heart and life than almost anything else he wrote.
It is a great book for those dealing with loss - either for yourself or for someone you know and love. It is often used in grief counseling, and one of the courses I read it for was on the spirituality of death and dying. This book is a gem in the cannon of Lewis literature. It will not disappoint.
 Heart-breakingly honest on suffering; but what about the Fall? January 6, 2008
Betty Watson (London, UK)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I re-read this book recently and would recommend it to anyone working through grief. However, I would dare take issue with two things.
1) I was struck by a glaring omission in the way Lewis deals with the issue of human suffering. He starts off by wondering whether God is a 'cosmic vivisectionist' because he allows suffering and in the end finds some resolution and declares that He is not, since he uses suffering for our benefit, to refine us. Yet in this analysis he misses out the supremely consoling fact that God is not responsible for suffering. We, mankind, through Adam, are responsible for suffering and death, through our own sinfulness and disobedience to God (the Fall, Genesis 3). In God's perfect creation there was no suffering and all was 'good' [Genesis 1 & 2]. Thus, although God may allow suffering, and even use suffering, it is not, as it were, his plan... And suffering and sin is only tolerated by him in the interim between Jesus' death and the last judgement, out of mercy (2 Peter). Because the alternative would be to stop suffering right away by ending the world now.
2)Lewis seems to believe in the idea of purgatory, which is not really Biblical.
I was a bit surprised by the two facts outlined above - perhaps the issue of suffering is dealt with more fully in Lewis' book on the subject.
However, I still think it is a useful book, because of the sheer, brutal honesty of the self-analysis and the lucid writing.
Lewis coming to terms with God and loss of Joy ( his wife), November 2, 2007
Mike London (Oxford, UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A heart wrenching little book by Jack Lewis. Originally a journal to record his feelings and fears, this is a classic trial of faith. Lewis is well known for his apologetics works, his logic, his wit, and his deep sense of Christianity. Yet here, after losing the woman he had come to love so much, everything is thrown into dismay and despair. God gently takes him by the hand, and walks him through this. To hear Lewis, this great Christian brother, rage and acknowledge his doubt during this trial of faith shows us we are not alone in our own trials. To anyone who has lost a spouse, very highly recommended. To anyone going through a hard time in their lives, recommended. God will always be with you, even if you can't see him. Admit your doubts and work through them, with God as your guide. C. S. Lewis called his faith a `house of cards'. If yours is knocked down, let God walk you thru it, and have him build your faith on the firm rock of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He loves you - yield.
Originally issued May 16, 2000 on Amazon.com
Most Tender Courage of a Grief Examined July 17, 2007
Zinta Aistars (Portage, MI United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
"A Grief Observed" is just that, an observation by immersion, recorded in a journal by C.S. Lewis with the great courage it requires to open one's heart in complete vulnerability when in its most raw state. It begins with a listing of physical symptoms of grief - the sense of fear, or something much like fear, in the pit of the stomach, the yawning of an expanding void, the constant swallowing, as if trying to digest and wash away this immense emotion so difficult to process. From the physical, Lewis moves in closer and with more intimate observation on this thing called grief, struggling to cope and understand. Struggling to survive. Struggling to be transformed and healed.
To understand this particular struggle, one must understand the love Lewis has lost in the death of his wife. Theirs was a short but meaningful union, one begun as a friendship that only later, after the vows were taken, moved into a love known only by true partners. Rather than modern day reversals - in which lust is too often mistaken for love, and a friendship often does not enter the union at all, and so quickly crumbling without basis to build upon - this couple has the order right. Only true friends can blossom into love. Love grows from the intimacy of knowledge of another being, and this is what this couple has enjoyed, why the one left behind now knows such immense grief. Lewis's grief is deep and now resonates for the remainder of his own life as a constant companion where his wife once was.
Few can express in words so well what, in some variation, all of us feel. Lewis is a master with words. His bring healing - to himself, and to those of us who many years later are still graced with his words in our own struggles of loss.
"The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H's lover. Now it's like an empty house."
Lewis talks of favorite places, visiting them again, but now without her, and finds his ache does not increase or diminish with place; he aches everywhere. His wife was like a lens through which all places, and all life, was processed for him. He talks of his loneliness, and yet simultaneously, his inability and often lack of desire, to communicate with others about his grief. And still, he says, he longs for the company and comfort of others. If only, he writes, they would go on about their own business and their own conversations around him without directly including him. Just be near him.
A large part of Lewis's struggle, as a man with a deep Christian faith, is his need to understand death and God's role in it. Indeed, much of this slim journal is about a man nearly losing his faith, or walking away from it, and then not only returning to it, but returning to a faith strengthened by its testing.
"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be - or so it seems - welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you feel? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside...
"Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him..."
Who of us have not asked such questions in times of suffering? Lewis articulates all our doubts, surely. During any kind of pain or loss, and not just in terms of death, it is human nature to cry out to God and shake a fist at the heavens, daring, wondering, questioning, demanding, even threatening, crying out for answers and response, often feeling like we get none. Lewis describes what answers he does find, what responses he eventually feels, once he is ready for it, over the coming days of his observed and processed grief.
Yet one can never return to what was. Rant and carry on as one must, but there is no return. The dead remain dead, the living, still living. "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 amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one. Still, there are the two enormous gains... turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum..."
Change is gradual, Lewis writes, and subtle in its progression and healing. One day, you notice you are coping better. Not quite sure when the transition happened, but it has. He is connected with both love and God in a new and changed way, faith restored, and he makes it clear that he will from now on be a man "with an amputated limb" where his wife once was, forever crippled by her loss, yet he has (re)new(ed) reason to live. In terms of his faith, he has come to realize that one cannot be a Christian in order to be reunited with one's loved ones after death, for faith does not work that way. Faith is about union with God, first and foremost. Have an ulterior motive of reunion with family, and the connection with God instantly crumbles. Yet through his grief, Lewis acknowledges another life lesson learned, and thus a new intimacy with God. And it is in reaching this new place of peace that he realizes, remembers, the peace he witnessed in his loved wife's eyes in dying. It is, in the end, his greatest act of love, then, to let her go, and to go on.
So high a cost... February 24, 2006
Kurt Messick (London, SW1)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
C.S. Lewis is perhaps best known for children's stories that also delight adults; however, during his lifetime he was best known as an inspirational speaker, not quite in the same line as modern televangelists, but nonetheless a crowd-pleaser who had subtle but strong theology to share.C.S. Lewis was a confirmed bachelor (not that he was a 'confirmed bachelor', mind you, just that he had become set enough in his ways over time that he no longer held out the prospect of marriage or relationships). Then, into his comfortable existence, a special woman, Joy Davidson, arrived. They fell in love quickly, and had a brief marriage of only a few years, when Joy died of cancer. This left Lewis inconsolable. For his mother had also died of cancer, when he was very young. Cancer, cancer, cancer! Lewis goes through a dramatic period of grief, from which he never truly recovers (according to the essayist Chad Walsh, who writes a postscript to Lewis' book). He died a few years later, the same day as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, Lewis takes the wonderful and dramatic step of writing down his grief to share with others. The fits and starts, the anger, the reconciliation, the pain--all is laid bare for the reader to experience. So high a cost for insight is what true spirituality requires. An awful, awe-ful cost and experience. 'Did you know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past...' All that was good paled in comparison to the loss. How can anything be good again? This is such an honest human feeling, that even the past is no longer what is was in relation to the new reality of being alone again. In the end, Lewis reaches a bit of a reconciliation with his feelings, and with God. 'How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back. She said not to me, but to the chaplain, "I am at peace with God." ' Lewis had a comfortable, routine life that was jolted by love, and then devasted by loss. Through all of this, he took pains to recount what he was going through, that it might not be lost, that it might benefit others, that there might be some small part of his love for Joy that would last forever. I hope it shall.
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