A Grief Observed (CS Lewis)

You will die.  So will your kids.  If you're lucky, you'll go first.  I'm probably in the minority here, but I often reflect on this.  I pass someone many years my senior in town, hobbling as best they can down the street, and think to myself, "that will be me before long."  I wander through a graveyard, reading the stones with their words of anguish and hope, and reflect on the fact that I, like all the dead, will be soon forgotten.  How many generations mourn the passing of distant ancestors?  Do we ever weep as we recall our great-great-great-grandparents?  Of course we don't, because we don't know who they were.  And, many years from now, our descendants won't know who we are, either.  Even with the proliferation of digital pictures- how many thousands of shots of each of us exist?- we will be soon forgotten.

Where do we go when we die?  Do our souls exist, or cease entirely?  These are questions often ignored.  We live our lives, focused on the moment, and when a death of someone near to us occurs, we mourn for a time, but seldom reflect on death's reality and consequence, returning soon to our "normal" lives, perhaps affected by the passing, but soon choosing to forget and march on.  We have to, to survive- dwelling at length on some of these questions awakes only feelings of intense uneasiness in us.  We fear the answer, so we forget and move on.  At death, we either cease to be, or we don't- and either option has terrifying implications.

CS Lewis wrote A Grief Observed immediately after his wife of just 4 years passed away- it appears to be a collection of journal entries within a few weeks of her passing.  Lewis, a lifelong bachelor, had married in his mid-fifties a woman much younger (early forties), but who suffered with cancer.  They enjoyed a happy, though brief, marriage, and her passing brought out (as you'd expect) a rash of emotions in Lewis, which he captured here.  This is a tremendously small volume, and not tremendously structured- but, could you expect it to be?  It is a journal, after all, and that, topped with the wave of emotions one can experience in such circumstances, it's not surprising that it's "all over the place."

I really liked this, though I couldn't always track with what Lewis was saying (I have this problem with some of his other works, too).  You see a man in anguish, without all the fluff- real stuff here.  You see a man try to make sense of death, and whether or not there is a God in the midst of it all.  While, as I said, it's not tremendously structured, and doesn't even appear to have an overall conclusion, it's a good study into the process of mourning, and forces the reader to think about some tough questions regarding this life, and the next.

Rating: A