In his memoir he recalls the death of his mother when he was a small boy.

But four years later Joy died of cancer.īorn in 1898, educated at a public school, an officer in the first world war, an intellectual, a man who (by his own account) feared the collective and feared the feminine, Lewis found himself plunged into an experience against which intellect could not defend him, a process that is as common as the air we breathe, a process that involves a feminine dissolution into “pathos and tears”. By his marriage he became stepfather to two boys. In 1956 he was lured out of his donnish bachelor state by Joy Davidman, an American poet. His memoir Surprised by Joy, written before his marriage, is an absorbing account of childhood and a luminous description of his conversion experience. Lewis, now most celebrated as a writer for children, was also one of the great Christian thinkers of the last century. There is a gulf between you and them, as if you had been stranded on an island for lepers indeed, Lewis wonders whether a grieving person should be put in isolation like a leper, to avoid the awkwardness of encounters with the unbereaved, who don’t know what to say and, though they feel goodwill, exhibit something like shame. You look with incredulity at those going about their ordinary lives. You fear to focus on your grief but cannot concentrate on anything else. Your mind is on a short tether, turning round and round.

Grief is like fear in the way it gnaws the gut.

Your former life still seems to exist, but you can’t get back to it there is a glimpse in dreams of those peacock lawns and fountains, but you’re fenced out, and each morning you wake up to the loss over again. Disbelief is followed by numbness, numbness by distraction, despair, exhaustion. The pattern of all losses mirrors the pattern of the gravest losses. Perhaps you have merely wasted time, and seethe with frustration because you can’t recall it. Perhaps you have just lost yourself on your way through life, lost your chances or your reputation or your integrity, or chosen to lose bad memories by pushing them into a personal and portable tomb. Even if you have not experienced a “front line” bereavement, such as the loss of partner, parent or child, you have certainly lost something you value: a marriage or a job, an internal organ or some aspect of mind or body that defines who you are. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” With his first line, CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed reacquaints his reader with the physiology of mourning he brings into each mouth the common taste of private and personal loss.

Cs lewis a grief