There was a before and an after. Before, I believed in the orderly progression of mourning—the tidy "stages" I’d read about in psychology articles. After, when my wife died of cancer at 42, I found myself lost in a wilderness where no map applied. The platitudes people offered—"She’s in a better place," "Time heals all wounds"—felt like salt rubbed into raw flesh. Then, in the wreckage of our bedroom, I found her copy of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, its margins filled with her pencil marks. Reading it felt like overhearing a sacred conversation between her soul and Lewis’s—one that finally gave voice to my wordless agony.
This isn’t a tidy treatise on grief. It’s Lewis’s raw, unfiltered journal written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman—a scream into the void that somehow becomes a lifeline. Here’s how his brutal honesty met me in my darkest hours:
1. The Terror of a Silent God
Lewis articulates what few dare to admit: Grief can make God seem like a cosmic sadist. His famous analogy—"Not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him"—gave me permission to rage against divine silence without fearing I’d lost my faith.
I found myself praying Lewis’s own agonized words: "Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?" The relief wasn’t in getting answers, but in discovering that even a renowned Christian apologist had wrestled with the same doubts.
2. The Double Pain of Memory
Lewis describes how early grief twists memory into a torturer—how recalling happier times hurts because they’re irrevocably past, yet forgetting feels like betrayal. His passage about fearing to remember his wife’s laugh because "it’s only the past tense now" shattered me.
But then, his later realization—that as raw pain eases, memories become "like a welcomed breeze"—gave me fragile hope. I began keeping a "Gift of Memory" journal:
- Today, I remembered how she hummed off-key in the kitchen
- Today, I wore her favorite scarf and didn’t cry (at first)
- Today, our son told a story about her and we laughed
Slowly, the memories began to comfort more than wound.
3. The Unmaking of the Self
No one prepared me for how bereavement would dismantle my identity. Lewis’s metaphor of grief as "a house remodel where all the walls get knocked out" perfectly captured the disorientation. Who was I without her? The man who used to love gardening now hated the flowers she’d planted. The writer who once crafted sentences for a living could barely compose a grocery list.
Lewis’s admission—that he had to "relearn the world" after loss—validated my struggle. His words became my guide as I:
- Allowed myself to change (quitting the book club we loved)
- Discovered new facets of myself (volunteering at the hospice she died in)
- Accepted that healing wouldn’t mean returning to who I was
4. The Frightening Freedom of "Nevertheless"
The book’s turning point comes when Lewis moves from "Why?" to "Nevertheless." His agonized but stubborn declaration—"I am not arguing with God; I am trying to obey Him. But the real question is whether I will trust even when He seems to withdraw all His comforts"—became my own mantra during sleepless nights.
This wasn’t cheap resolution, but hard-won surrender. I began finding my own "nevertheless" moments:
- My heart is broken, nevertheless I will make our son breakfast
- I doubt everything, nevertheless I will light her memorial candle
- The world feels meaningless, nevertheless I will plant bulbs for spring
5. Love in the Present Tense
Lewis’s most controversial insight—that perhaps the dead are more present to us than we realize—comforted me in ways theological arguments couldn’t. His description of sensing his wife’s presence "not as a memory or a ghost, but as a living reality" aligned with my own uncanny experiences:
- Finding her favorite tea in a forgotten cabinet on a terrible day
- Dreaming conversations that continued unresolved dialogues
- Feeling sudden warmth during his description of "a door in the wall between worlds"
Whether psychological or mystical, these moments became lifelines.
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