Thread by @milfordedge

With so many people around the world mourning the loss of loved ones at this time, I wanted to share some phrases from "A Grief Observed" by C.S. Lewis, given to me by a good friend when my mother died in 1988 at the age of 48.
#coronavirus

Although Lewis wrote "A Grief Observed" about the loss of his partner and he talks a lot about his faith, which might not be relevant to everyone, this account of his grief helped me, like a friend who is going through the same as you. It made me feel less alone.

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid."

"At other times it feels like being mildly drunk or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says."

"There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. ... Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."

"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of
indulging it - that disgusts me."

"And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job - where the machine seems to run on much as usual - I loathe the slightest effort. ... It's easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting."

"We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination."

"For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?
...

...
How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time."

"The death of a beloved one is an amputation."

"Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies.
...

...
If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it.' But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; ...

... and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed.
...

...
All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again."

"Their absence is like the sky, spread over everything."

"I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process."

"Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead."

"What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?"

"It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on."

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. 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 truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. 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."

"Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness."

"Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer."

"You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box.
...

...
But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?"

"This is one of the miracles of love: it gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted."

"Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?"

"We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least."

"Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape."

A Grief Observed - C.S. Lewis