BOOKISHGAL

This one’s a toughie. It’s one of my favourite books, even now when I’m no longer religious, and it’s one of the hardest to read at any time. It’s both an Earthquake book, for me, and incidentally one of my Books Without ISBN.

Many people will be familiar with C.S. Lewis, he who wrote both the Narnia books and many theology/philosophy books. But even people familiar with the theology books aren’t always aware of A Grief Observed, which he wrote while grieving the death of his wife, Joy.

Today we would call what Lewis did in writing this book “journalling.” Lewis had been a confirmed bachelor for years, and then finally married Joy late in life. They had almost four years of happy marriage before she died of cancer. And he was left to grieve and go on without her for another three years until he himself died.

The book isn’t just about his grief for Joy, though. Just as much, it is his attempt to understand why God seems to have vanished. As the blurb on the back of the book says, “In it he freely expresses his doubts, his rage, and his awareness of human frailty. In it he finds again the way back to life.”

You can barely read through this small book without tears. He begins by making discoveries about the qualities of 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.

He even learns how grief affects him physically:

And 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 too rough?

And he is faced with the biggest question of all:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

It’s not so much, thinks Lewis, that he is going to stop believing in God. “The real danger,” he says, “is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”

He finds that his grief is no more acute, say, in places he and Joy used to go than it is in other places. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” In Chapter I he describes the grief in absolute detail, immersed in it, unable to escape it or lift his head out of it even as he recognizes he’s doing this.

But at last, in Chapter II, he looks back and thinks, “From the way I’ve been talking anyone would think that H.’s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. … I must think more about H. and less about myself.” (I believe he used “H” to stand for “Her.”) And from that point on he begins to work outward. And yet even trying to think about Joy, he discovers that there’s a danger the real Joy will eventually be obscured:

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant — in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?

One can hardly bear to read these painful cries. Especially if — as I did — you loved the author so much.

Although Lewis being Lewis, there are still some amusing moments. “What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?”

Gradually he works through questions about why a loved one dies, and what their separation means. He finally (through, he believes, the mercy of God) stops worrying about whether he will end up with a false memory of Joy. “And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere.” He recognizes that “passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. …It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow…that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness.”

And at that point he realizes that “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.”

By the time he arrives at Chapter IV — his fourth notebook, which he is determined to make the last — he now discovers that, “Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum.”

He comes to conclusions that may not be satisfactory to many of us, but which the reader will still rejoice in, as he or she watches Lewis climb out of the hole of terrible grief. He begins to be satisfied that in the end, God will answer his questions, or show him that he had been asking the wrong ones all along: “that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.”

And his thoughts about Joy?

It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly than before. Does H. now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it. So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives — to both, but perhaps especially to the woman — a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

To see, in some measure, like God.

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