What type of book is A Grief Observed?

“A Grief Observed is not an ordinary book. In a sense it is not a book at all; it is, rather, the passionate result of a brave man turning to face his agony and examine it in order that he might further understand what is required of us in living this life.. … In its stark honesty and unadorned simplicity the book has a power which is rare: it is the power of unabashed truth. … What many of us discover in this outpouring of anguish is that we know exactly what he is talking about. Those of us who have walked this same path, or are walking it as we read this book, find that we are not, after all, as alone as we thought. … If we find no comfort in the world around us, and no solace when we cry to God, if it does nothing else for us, at least this book will help us to face our grief, and ‘misunderstand a little less.’”
—Douglas H. Gresham, “Introduction”

“I am grateful to Lewis for the honesty of his journal of grief, because it makes quite clear that the human being is allowed to grieve, that it is normal, it is right to grieve, and the Christian is not denied this natural response to loss.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, “Foreword”

20 quotes from A Grief Observed

The nature and effects of grief—what it’s like

“No one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth?”

“An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. … Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”

“But I know this [restoring things] is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. … It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death.”

“It [grief] gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything.”

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes [i.e., reflecting on his grief] merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do [i.e., ignoring his grief wouldn’t help]?”

Grief as a cyclical process

“There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. … People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

“An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. … For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always? … The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.”

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history. … There is something new to be chronicled every day.”

Reflections on “doing better”

“I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest.”

“The words [getting over it] are ambiguous. … [After a leg amputation, a patient may] get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

“There’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. … What is behind it? … We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself. … We don’t want to pretend that it [our circumstances] is whole and complete. … Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all—if we understand ourselves—seeking the aches for their own sake.”

Inadequate consolations

“It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.”

“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. … Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook!”

“What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. … Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? … As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind!”

“The same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?”

“Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.”

“There is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it. Who still thinks there is some device which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”

For more on this theme see A Grief Ignored | Madeleine L’Engle on A Grief Observed.

Grief as a trial of faith

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? … Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”

For more on this theme see When Grief Meets a House of Cards Called “Faith” (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed).

On God’s role in our suffering

“If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine.”

“The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport-might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, we’re for it. What do people mean when they say, ‘1 am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?”