Reviews

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

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forestidylls's review against another edition

4.0

I have had this as "to-read" for years and finally listened to it on audio book while, ironically, walking to, through, and from a graveyard (no, that was not planned-I was just looking for a book to listen to while I went to get inspiration for a story!). I wasn't sure what to expect, since it was about mourning someone close to you, but I found it surprisingly applicable to life at large. I appreciate the raw wonderings of C.S. Lewis as he grieved, and the thought patterns. I felt like many of the philosophical discussions were useful both inside and outside of mourning, and am truly glad I read it.

peonierose's review against another edition

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5.0

Tender and very real. An antidote to saccharine sweet preacherly spiritual books on grief. A short but terrifically on point memoir of the grittiness of grief. The honesty and integrity with which C.S. Lewis approaches the great terrifying void of loss gives others a companion to traverse the bleak midwinter of grief.

cono44's review against another edition

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Eerie almost. Grief is so individual but also so universal.

'And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I yawn, i fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.'

'It's not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs - nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time - but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berried reddening and don't know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember.

This is one of the things I'm afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when i no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?'

This is maybe a non-review given it's made up mainly of lengthy quotes from the text. But I don't think I could write anything myself that could sum up grief as C.S. Lewis does here.

I'm most afraid of the idea that this grief is a performance that will one day end. That I will go back to being just Carmen, not Carmen-minus-Dad. I'm also scared of the reality that Carmen-minus-Dad = Carmen-now-and-forever. As though he had never existed to me. I'm not afraid of my mind forgetting him, because how could I? Everyone has a dad (if not a Dad), so how could I really forget his existence? I am, though, afraid of something deeper in me forgetting him, of not feeling this grief, of feeling ordinary. It feels disgusting to me, almost. Maybe that's why it feels like I don't want to get better, to get over it, or to heal. Because I don't want him to not matter anymore. I don't want to think of him and feel just okay. But the pain is so much. Too much?

C.S. Lewis wrote interestingly about what it means for the dead to be dead. And how we have all of these names for them - corpse, memory, ghost. A way of maybe trying to make them still be here, still be something. I guess that makes me think of the language of death - when my mum called me on that day in January she said 'Dad has died' not that he was dead. When I tell people, I don't say that 'my dad is dead', I say 'my dad died'. I actually feel incredibly resistant to the former, though the latter is something that becomes increasingly awkward as you get further away from the event ('What, just now?', 'No, in January'). It's not something that he just is, it's something that he has done. I think this is similar to what C.S. Lewis talks about here. Maybe I think of him still as an agent. I think of him as at least a something.