I love to read, so I’ve been
searching out all the books on grieving I can find. I’ve read mostly memoirs,
personal accounts of the author’s passage through grief. Interestingly, the
books I’ve found so far are about the loss of a spouse or a parent. For some
reason the best-known books in this genre don’t seem to include books by those
who have lost a child. Is that loss too painful to write about?
My favorite book, by far, and
clearly a favorite of many because it is often mentioned, is C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. The book is very short
but quite powerful—raw, immediate, passionate, questioning. There were many passages
when my eyes were too full of tears to see the page. I felt like he expressed
my feelings over and over again.
Lewis is remarkably honest
about the details of his grief and about how his wife’s death caused him to
question both his faith and the nature of God (you can read pertinent passages here).
His questioning of God rang
true for me. I was shocked that the other writers I’ve read didn’t talk about
this. Grief was an existential crisis for me that entailed the questioning of everything. Lewis doesn’t question the
existence of God, but asks whether God is a Cosmic Sadist, or a Vet intent on
Vivisection, tearing our guts apart while we’re still alive for some reason of
His own. I wanted to know what the purpose of life was—what’s the point if
we’re just going to die?
Lewis describes how he
desperately wants to know where his beloved wife is, and hates platitudes like
“she’s at peace” or “she’s with God.” His experience was that once he passed
through the early days of desperation and was less passionately seeking her
presence, he began to experience her presence in a unique way. Not in the ways
he would have thought, but with an unemotional, almost intellectual knowing.
This book gave me the sense
that I wasn’t alone, that others had been here before me.
