A Grief Observed

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”

— Psalm 22:1, KJV

The Notebooks

In the weeks after Joy’s death, Lewis did what he had always done with experience: he wrote it down. He had found some old exercise books in the house, and in them, almost every day, he set down what he was feeling and thinking. He did not write for publication. He seems to have written partly to keep himself from going under, and partly because writing was the only way he knew to look at something clearly. He filled four notebooks. Then he stopped, because he had run out of notebooks, and because he found that he had come to the end of something.

The first sentence of the first notebook has become one of the most quoted sentences he ever wrote. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” What follows is not a treatise on suffering. Lewis had written that book twenty years before, in The Problem of Pain, and he had written it as a philosopher. These notebooks were written by a husband, and they are raw.

What the Notebooks Say

In them Lewis records his grief as it happened, day after day. He describes the physical sensations of it: the restlessness, the laziness, the inability to concentrate. He describes the embarrassment of meeting people who did not know what to say, and his own fear of becoming a bore. He describes the way his memories of Joy began, within weeks, to fade and blur, and his terror that he would lose the real woman and be left with an image of his own making.

And he describes, with an honesty that shocked many of his readers, what grief did to his faith. He did not stop believing in God. What frightened him was not that God might not exist, but that God might be other than he had thought: not loving, but cruel. He felt, in the first weeks, that when he turned to God in his need he found a door shut in his face, and silence behind it. He wrote some things about God in those pages that he would not have allowed a pupil to write in an essay. He wrote them because they were what he felt, and because he had decided not to lie.

Then, slowly, the notebooks change. Lewis begins to see that his own frantic demands had been part of the problem: that a man who is shouting cannot hear. He begins to recognise that his picture of God, like his picture of Joy, had been in part his own construction, and that the real God would have to keep breaking it, as the real Joy had broken his picture of her when she was alive. He does not find answers. He finds that the questions themselves begin to look different. And by the end he has come, not to understanding, but to a kind of peace, and a sense that Joy, wherever she was, was at peace with God too.

Published Under Another Name

In time he came to think that the notebooks might help others who were grieving. But the writing was too private to sign, and he did not want it read as the latest offering of a famous Christian author. So he arranged for it to appear under a pseudonym. It appeared in September 1961, published by Faber and Faber, under the name N. W. Clerk, and with the title A Grief Observed. It sold modestly. Very few people knew who had written it.

After Lewis’s death the book was reissued under his own name, and it has since been read by millions of grieving people. Many have said that it was the only book they could bear to read after a death. It has helped them, they say, not because it explains suffering, but because it does not pretend. It shows a Christian of great faith and great intelligence being knocked flat by grief and getting up again, slowly, without having had his questions answered. Readers who have lost someone have found that they are not alone.

The Book and the Man

It is sometimes said that A Grief Observed shows that Lewis lost his faith at the end of his life, or that it undoes the arguments of his earlier books. That is not how he saw it, and it is not what the book itself shows. In the notebooks he goes down into the dark and comes up again. In the months and years that followed he went on praying, going to church, making his Communion and writing about the Christian faith, and his letters of that time are full of a gentle, chastened confidence in God. What the book shows is that faith is not the same as being free from doubt and anguish. It is what remains, and what holds, when doubt and anguish have done their worst.

The Boys

Joy left behind two sons, and Lewis became their guardian. David was sixteen when his mother died, and Douglas fourteen. Both were at boarding school. Lewis, a bachelor of sixty-one who had spent his life among books and adults, now found himself the father of two teenage boys who had just lost their mother.

He did his best, and he did it with great kindness. He paid for their education, gave them a home at the Kilns in the holidays, and treated them with respect. Bill Gresham came to England that summer to see his sons, and Lewis received him courteously. Bill died in 1962.

David, the elder, was a difficult and unhappy young man. In his teens he decided to embrace the Judaism of his mother’s family, and to live as an observant Jew. Lewis, who might have been expected to resist, supported him. He took advice from Jewish scholars in Oxford, helped to arrange for him to learn Hebrew and to keep the Jewish food laws, and made sure he could practise his faith as he wished. Douglas, the younger, was closer to Lewis and to Warnie. He loved the Kilns and its woods, and after Lewis’s death he remained close to Warnie for the rest of Warnie’s life. Many years later he came to a settled Christian faith of his own, and became a writer and a guardian of his stepfather’s literary legacy.

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

The verse at the head of this chapter is the cry of Psalm 22, which Jesus took on his lips on the cross. It is the prayer of a man who feels abandoned by God, and it is in the Bible. Lewis did not need to be told that a Christian may pray such a prayer. He prayed it, in effect, in his notebooks in the summer of 1960. But Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment. It moves, in its second half, to praise, to the assembly of God’s people, and to the declaration that God has not hidden his face from the afflicted but has heard. Lewis’s notebooks move in the same direction. He was not given an explanation. He was given, in time, the knowledge that he had been heard.