Brief Thoughts on “A Grief Observed”

C. S. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed in 1961 after the death of his wife. It is in the form of a private journal written as he processes the emotions and thoughts that come right after her death (but there are no markers of what days these are written, so it is hard to tell how long this process takes). I once heard that the book is not as “raw” or unedited as it appears, but that he edited it a little to make it more approachable and helpful for readers. Regardless of how edited it is, it is true that it was first published under a pseudonym. Whether that was because it was thought that more people would read it and be helped by it if it did not have Lewis' name on it, or because he was shy about revealing all these feelings to the public, or both, is a question that does not matter now. 

 This book contains a lot of strong feelings. What struck me in particular about these feelings when I read the book most recently was how culturally conditioned are our ideas about death, the feelings we have about loved ones dying, and what we think happens to people right after death. In the introduction to the book it is pointed out that the book is "a" grief observed; not grief in general, but one husband's grief in particular. Yes, psychologists tell us that, for everyone, grief is a process that has defined stages, but how Lewis feels during the process and about the process is particularly his own. There are stages for everyone, but what we imagine during grieving and how we think we ought to feel and express ourselves is strongly culturally influenced. I especially noticed that C. S. Lewis had a hard time believing that his wife was experiencing any conceivable afterlife; for most of the book, he tells how he feels like believing that he will never see her again. He knew as well as any Christian does that the Bible says everyone ends up in either Heaven or Hell, but I guess that materialism (the idea that people have no soul that lasts beyond death, but when someone dies, that is all, and they just pass out of existence) was so widespread an idea in the mid-twentieth century that his imagination and feelings have to struggle with it. How different that is, it struck me, from our contemporary images and assumptions about the afterlife in which dead people go to a pleasant place and see those who have preceded them! This made me wonder whether what I really think about Heaven and the afterlife owes much to the Bible or whether it really draws more from my cultural imagination and atmosphere. C. S. Lewis was firmly trained that if we want to believe something, that is a strong reason for being skeptical about it. Is our skepticism so well trained?

 If I had studied more about how twenty-first century Americans feel (and are expected to feel) when we process grief, I think we might detect even more cultural differences between Lewis' grief and what might be "typical." There is much more that can be said about this short (75 page) book, but let wiser and more experienced people than I say them.