12/09/2025
A Grief Observed, by CS Lewis. Highly recommended. (The movie? Shadowlands, starring Debra Winger and Sir Anthony Hopkins)
He met her on an ordinary afternoon in Oxford—ordinary to him, at least. He was a man of routines: lectures, pipes, manuscripts, the occasional walk through Addison’s woods. He preferred ideas to people, arguments to emotions, and the quiet, predictable order of his study to anything resembling chaos.
She was chaos.
She entered the room with the energy of someone who had already survived too much. A former atheist. A poet. A firebrand. A mother. Her voice came before her, then her eyes, then her laughter—bright, sharp, unsettling. She didn’t ask permission to speak. She didn’t wait to be invited into the conversation. She dove straight into it.
And the old bachelor felt something shift.
At first he treated her like any other correspondent. Then like a friend. Then like an intellectual equal—rare enough in his world. But their conversations grew into something else, something he had long ago locked away under the neat intellectual label of “unnecessary.”
He told himself he was too old.
She told him to stop being foolish.
He said the arrangement between them—visits, letters, shared ideas—was enough.
She said he was lying.
Still, even as she fell ill, even as the doctors spoke of shadows where shadows should not be, he clung to distance the way a drowning man clings to a plank of wood. He had built his whole life on the safety of distance. Affection, yes. Camaraderie, of course. But love was a frontier he had always refused to cross.
Then came the day when the nurse said the words no man wants to hear.
In the quiet of a hospital room, fear stripped away all his careful philosophies. He realized he did not want a world where she existed only in memory. So he did the most reckless thing he had ever done.
He married her.
Not for convenience. Not out of pity. But because for the first time in decades, he wanted something with a heart, not a mind.
They had a brief, blazing happiness—walks, jokes, letters, fierce debates, quiet evenings. It was as if the universe had decided to give him one small glimpse of the love he had spent a lifetime analyzing but never touching.
Then the illness returned.
He held her hand when she whispered her last words. He felt something inside him collapse—something he had carefully built and carefully protected for years. The pain was so vast it threatened to undo him.
But instead of breaking him, it revealed him.
The man who had written confidently about faith found himself wrestling with doubt. The man who had spoken eloquently about suffering found grief swallowing him alive. He wrote not as a philosopher, not as a scholar, not as the great intellectual the world admired—but as a man who had finally learned what love was, only to lose it.
The book he wrote afterwards was raw, unarmored, honest to the point of agony. A man clawing through sorrow, searching for God in the ashes.
And only at the very end do we understand them.
The brilliant Oxford professor was C. S. Lewis.
The woman who shattered his calm and awakened his heart was Joy Davidman.
And her death became the fire that shaped one of the most powerful meditations on grief ever written.
A Grief Observed.
