C.S Lewis is one of my favorite Christian authors. He wrote such notable works as: The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Space Trilogy, Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed to name a few.
He died of kidney failure and heart problems on November 22, 1963 at a fairly young age of 64. This was the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated! Thus the November 22 deaths of Lewis and another famous author Aldous Huxley were hidden somewhere in the inner pages of newspapers.
Lewis was a bachelor most of his life but finally married an American writer Joy (Davidman) Gresham in 1956. He considered her his intellectual equal and good friend. He was 58 and she was 41. She had 2 sons, David and Douglas by a previous marriage to novelist William Gresham. Lewis grew to love Joy deeply, and when she died just 4 years later of bone cancer, he was devastated.
In an attempt to reconcile his emotions after her death he journaled on any scraps of paper he happened to find around the house. These notes eventually became A Grief Observed.
I found this book to be helpful in dealing with the aftermath of relationships I have lost over the years.
My copy of A Grief Observed , is a well-worn paperback published by Bantam Books by arrangements with the Seabury Press, inc, 7th Printing 1980. The material was originally copyrighted in 1961 by "N.W. Clerk", a pseudonym for CS Lewis, and an "Afterword" added to the book was copyrighted by Chat Walsh in 1976.
The beginning of the book starts with Lewis trying to get a handle on his grief:
"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."
"At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."
Elsewhere, Lewis is afraid that he has forgotten Joy's face:
"I have no photograph of her that's any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions--waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking--that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice--that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child."
On the final page of the book Lewis writes:
"Once very near the end I said, 'If you can--if it is allowed--come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for hell, I'd break it into bits.' She knew she was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed through her."
" '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' She smiled, but not at me."
