He questions how we know whether the dead are, in fact, at peace. His previously-held beliefs have been shaken and turned upside down when he finds no solace in God. He rejects versions of heaven as an earthly paradise used to console the bereaved for having no basis in scripture. Lewis wonders where Helen is now and what she is experiencing.

He worries about the effects of time on his memories of Helen, fearing that the distinct reality of Helen is slipping away, slowly being replaced by his curated images of her. He depicts his preoccupation with his loss and the isolating effects of grief, the fleeting moments when everything appears all right, followed by a plunge into despair. In the beginning of the book, Lewis describes his initial shock in the immediate aftermath of H.’s death as grief descends over his existence, becoming, “the invisible blanket between the world and me” (3). Acknowledging the confusion of fact and fiction concerning their relationship, he asserts that “the most important part of the story pertaining to this book is simply a recognition of the great love that grew between them until it was an almost visible incandescence” (XVIII), even while both knew that due to Helen’s illness, her death was imminent. Lewis’s wife and Douglas’s mother, Helen Joy Gresham, the “H” of the book in the Introduction. L’Engle admires the honesty of Lewis’s text, especially his willingness to expose his anger at God.ĭouglas Gresham provides background information about C. Reading A Grief Observed showed L’Engle that while grieving is a very individual experience, there are universally-shared elements and feelings. In the Foreword, Madeleine L’Engle contrasts her own bereavement following the death of her husband after a long life and marriage with Lewis’s experience of losing his wife at age forty-five, after a short marriage. Each chapter describes a new phase of mourning, as Lewis explores his thoughts and feelingsin unvarnished, deeply personal terms that encompass shock, anger and despair, and finally reach acceptance.

Comprised of four chapters, the book chronicles Lewis’s progression through various stages of grief as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his wife. A Grief Observed “is a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life” (XV).

A grief observed book