This is precisely the quality which suggests that A Grief Observed may become "among the great devotional books of our age. Get A Copy. Paperback , 76 pages. Published April 21st by Harper One first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about A Grief Observed , please sign up.
Sueli Silva-barton God sees our imperfections, possibly the ones we hide from ourselves or are not aware of, and loves us the same way. He sees us because He loves us, a …more God sees our imperfections, possibly the ones we hide from ourselves or are not aware of, and loves us the same way. He sees us because He loves us, and He loves us exactly because He sees us as we actually are.
We are His creation. Love and the knowledge of that creation are intertwined. See 2 questions about A Grief Observed…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of A Grief Observed. To begin with, let me offer you my condolences.
So, I am sorry for your loss. For the grief you are experiencing. He was an exceptional human being. He was smart — a college graduate working on his PhD. He was fun. He laughed like nothing else. He was athletic. He played college rugby and climbed mountains and ran 50k trail runs.
He was a great friend, an incredible brother, and a transcendent uncle. He was life personified. He died at the age of Lewis was an Oxford don, a Christian apologist, and the creator of the minimalist epic, The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis knew that Gresham had terminal cancer when they wed. For a time, remission gave them some measure of hope.
The cancer returned, however, and she died, leaving Lewis bereft. This, his first great experience of love, and of the loss of love, spurred him to do what he did in such an inimitable fashion. He wrote. A Grief Observed is a collection of his meditations. Originally, his reflections were so raw, so honest, that they were published under a pseudonym.
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. The feeling of being concussed. Everything was sad and hard and vivid you will never forget the image of young people seeing a young person in a coffin, never but it didn't really touch me. There was a layer between myself and the world. I felt like I was observing everything from a distant planet. It might be a survival mechanism, this inward retreat, the way that veins constrict when your body is too cold.
Nothing can help you. You expect too much, even though you know in your heart that nothing would really feel right. Some over-emote. Others under-emote. Some pity you. Others are ready to move on five minutes after the funeral. I had one friend who managed to do nothing. He was a good college buddy, a groomsman in my wedding, yet I never heard a thing. Not a phone call, text, email, or raven. Based on his Facebook posts, he must have been too busy home brewing.
For a short span, I felt an irrational anger towards home brewing. That has mostly passed. People do try, though. And that is a blessed thing. This very human need to try. Who watched our kids. Employers gave us time off. Coworkers covered our projects.
But by not telling them, it feels like withholding a terrible secret. Or just a simple black band around your arm that whispers: I am among you, but not a part of you. So they say. You have to go on, except now it is a lonelier place, this life. At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those place than anywhere else. You cannot escape it. Anywhere you go. Leave it to Lewis to find the simplest, most perfect way to describe it.
An absence like the sky, spread over everything. He gives you an extended discussion about belief, but one that exists within an interesting paradigm.
Rather, his dialectic attempts to identify the kind of God that rules above. I saw what Lewis was doing as he wrote them: he was trying to keep sane by intellectualizing the process.
It probably helped him to retreat back into what he knew. On the day Paul died, I prayed for him to be saved, and then I prayed to die, and both prayers went unanswered. I see how it has literally saved some of the people around me. It has provided the comfort, the hope, the solace that one needs to keep going. It is an inspiring and jaw dropping thing to see such generosity.
Humans are really at their best during the worst. You think you know what matters. Live your life so that when you die, your wake lasts for hours, and everyone has a story to tell. Live your life in such a way that when things go wrong, you are surrounded by a wall of love. Paul loved Kurt Vonnegut.
A Grief Observed is not going to show you the pathway out of despair. There are no pithy aphorisms. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea? Hard questions without good answers.
A horrible club. I take solace in Paul. When you know and love someone you know what they would say in a situation, what they would think. You can know and love someone enough that they are there even when they are not.
But the sham and drudgery of daily existence makes it hard. Morning commutes. Internet comment boards. Work deadlines. The barista who gave you coffee instead of a double-shot of whatever. All the little things that loom so large until you get that wakeup call that says that never really mattered at all.
Of course, I am the king of sweating the small stuff. On my first day back from work, I went into the courtroom and within a minute, the judge was screaming at my client, screaming at me, and finally screaming at my client again for reasons that still elude me. This didn't touch me at all. It gives voice to what you are feeling. It shows you that you are not alone.
It gets you through an hour or two, and that hour or two is important when time has stopped. I wish you the courage to endure what is to come. I wish you strength for the road ahead. And if there is a god, I pray that god goes with you. View all 22 comments. I bought this book about ten years ago for a reason.
It sat on my bookshelf all that time. Recently a Goodreads friend of mine Shirley picked it for me to read for our group's challenge. So I couldn't hide from it anymore. My mother died in January and my father died in June To say that I was overcome with grief is a colossal understatement. Losing one parent is hard enough but two? Bereavement counseling was my lifeline. In counseling they suggested I write in a journal to express m I bought this book about ten years ago for a reason.
In counseling they suggested I write in a journal to express my grief. It was a very hard process. I was never angry with God I'm Catholic for taking them away from me. As a matter of fact my faith and love in God increased tremendously. Without God's love I don't know how I would have survived. So, that's the reason why A Grief Observed by C. Lewis sat on my bookshelf for all these years. I just didn't want to bring my grief to the forefront again. I knew reading the book would bring back a lot of emotions and sadness which, by the way, never really goes away.
It's just a different kind sadness. A Grief Observed was a painful read. I could feel C. Lewis 's heartache, raw emotions. I felt a kindred spirit in reading his words and knowing that I wasn't alone in my grief. Death is hard. The grieving period is hard. It takes time to regroup but in the end you do survive. Thanks Shirley for picking this book for me. View all 31 comments.
A Grief Observed, C. Lewis A Grief Observed is a collection of C. Lewis's reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in The book was first published in under the pseudonym N. Clerk, as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. A Grief Observed explores the processes undergone by the human brain and mind over the course of grieving. The book questions the nature of grief and whether or not returning to normality afterward is even possible within the realm of human existence on earth.
Based on a personal journal that he kept, Lewis refers to his wife as "H" throughout the series of reflections, and he reveals that she had died from cancer only three years after their marriage. After my wife passed away from cancer and I was in the depths of grief, well meaning friends kept bringing me what I call "victory books. I hurt bad and I didn't want to get over it!
I loved her for 20 years and to just "get over it" was to count her as unimportant in my life. Somehow, and I don' After my wife passed away from cancer and I was in the depths of grief, well meaning friends kept bringing me what I call "victory books. Somehow, and I don't remember how, I came across C. Lewis' book A Grief Observed.
As I read the first page the tears began to flow and I began my healing as I read the author's experience after losing his wife to cancer. I realized that I wasn't losing my mind because my thoughts were just like his. I have given this book to many people that are in the midst of grieving over the loss of someone, especially spouses.
It is one of the most important books I have ever read because it met me at my point of need. View all 6 comments. Each person's grief is unique. When C. Lewis' wife died in , he journaled and took notes, trying to observe his bereavement. This is a short but meaningful read; it is less than pages, but it took me several days to finish because I frequently had to put the book down and contemplate certain passages. Lewis often wrote and spoke about his Christianity, and this book has meditations on God and faith and purpose.
I am not a religious person, so another reader may find these sections more Each person's grief is unique. I am not a religious person, so another reader may find these sections more meaningful. I was more interested in his writings that focused on his grief and how he coped.
As Goodreads friend Matt mentioned in his thoughtful review, if you have sought out this book, it might be because you have recently lost someone and you are seeking solace, as I was. My mother died a few months ago after a long battle with cancer, and it was devastating. Since then I've found it helpful to read other grief memoirs — it is comforting to remember one isn't alone on this journey. Maybe this book will help you, too.
Meaningful Quotes "Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively.
But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. But as a nation, America has been afforded little space to stop and feel the grief that comes with the tragedy of this moment in history. One of the best literary examinations of grief that I know of is C.
Lewis is a precise and scrupulously honest chronicler of his own thoughts, and the result is a portrait of a mind in the throes of very personal grief, which is why it is perhaps strange that what he describes feels so similar to the grief of living through an era of mass death worldwide. Lewis and Davidman had a brief marriage. They met when he was in his 60s and she in her 40s, and they married, at first, for immigration purposes: Davidman, an American-born poet, wanted to stay with her son in the UK, and a marriage would help her do so.
And since Davidman was divorced, and the Church of England did not recognize divorces at the time, she and Lewis did not expect to ever have a wedding the church would consider legitimate. They lived in separate houses. Then Davidman was diagnosed with advanced and incurable metastatic cancer. She was told she had limited time left. And faced with this news, she and Lewis decided they were so in love that they needed a church wedding after all.
She would die in , after three years of true marriage to Lewis. As a novelist, Lewis can be strikingly bad at writing adult women the biggest exception, Orual of Till We Have Faces , is thought to have been based on Davidman. But in the privacy of his journal, he is heart-wrenchingly specific about the depths of his admiration and affection for his wife. Fear breathes throughout this book about grief. Later, he will clarify this sense. As a theologian he would come to credit God with some subtlety, but as a man he must have felt he had been thrown back into the classroom at his prep school, with its routinely hellish regime of arbitrary beatings.
He soon saw that mourning kicks away the props we rely on. It confiscates our cognitive assets and undermines our rationality. It frequently undermines any religious faith we may have, and did so in this case. Lewis had worked over the ground in theory. Unless his faith in the afterlife is childish and literal, the pain of loss is often intensified for a believer, because he feels angry with his god and feels shame and guilt about that anger; this being so, you wonder how the idea began, that religion is a consolation.
It is not that Lewis ceases to believe in God. How can one not rebel against such perceived cruelty? Conventional consolations are offered to him, and seem to miss the point. But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back.
Gradually the shape of loss emerges, but it is complex and ever-changing. The dead person recedes, losing selfhood, losing integrity, becoming an artefact of memory. The process creates panic and guilt; are we remembering properly? Are we remembering enough? A year passes, but each day the loss strikes us as an absolute novelty. In a culture that is all about this life, consuming goods and living life to its fullest, death is the … Read More.
May 28, Zach Kincaid 0 Comments Lewis seems to talk a lot about pain and loss. May 17, Zach Kincaid 0 Comments The eternal cause of pain is not clear; it wears a mask. Lewis says that this command must … Read More. These eye-catching covers are also a welcomed invitation for new readers … Read More. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: Read More.
Aug 01, Zach Kincaid 0 Comments Lewis talks quite a bit about suffering and loss. Everyone suffers, but … Read More.
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