12/12/2025
Another must-read to add to the list.
It startled me to learn what grief did to C. S. Lewis. Here was a man who built cathedrals of reason with his mind, suddenly reduced to rubble by the silence left after his wife’s death. For all his brilliance, Lewis found himself clawing through the dark like a child, bewildered that pain could so thoroughly unmake a grown man.
In A Grief Observed you don't meet Lewis the apologist or Lewis the professor, you meet a man whose intellect has betrayed him, whose prayers echo back unanswered, and who can do nothing but watch himself unravel in real time. From the first few pages, you eavesdrop on a mind stripped down to bone, a man who had stopped trying to make suffering polite.
What undid Lewis was not simply the loss of Joy, but the terrifying suspicion that God Himself had slipped through his fingers. He scribbled in notebooks, desperate and disoriented, trying to make sense of how someone with such a towering faith could feel so utterly abandoned by God. And it’s in that unraveling, those unguarded confessions, those whispered doubts that this little book becomes almost unbearable to read. Because it’s not neatly structured. It’s scattered, just like grief.
1. Grief strips away certainty
Lewis begins the book from a place of spiritual disorientation. For a man whose faith had once seemed rock-solid, death turns everything to dust. The God he once trusted now feels cruel and silent. This is not doubt as rebellion — this is doubt as anguish. And if you’ve ever experienced the kind of loss that makes even breathing feel like betrayal, you’ll recognize the sacredness of this unraveling. Lewis shows us that it’s okay, even necessary, for grief to shake our foundations.
2. Love doesn’t end with death
Throughout the book, Joy is never far. She haunts the edges of his writing — not like a ghost, but like someone too real to reduce to memory. Lewis fights against forgetting. Against letting time erode what they had. In his longing, we see that real love doesn’t die. It becomes part of you — a hollow in the chest, maybe, but also a hidden warmth that flickers when you least expect it.
3. Pain doesn’t make you faithless, it makes you human
One of the most powerful aspects of this book is how Lewis allows himself to question everything. He doesn’t hide behind piety. He admits to his anger, his numbness, his bitterness. And yet, through it all, he continues to write. Continues to reach. That’s faith, too — the kind that limps and gasps and still shows up. Lewis teaches us that faith isn’t about having the right words — it’s about daring to keep the conversation going, even when the silence screams louder.
4. Healing moves in spirals
The grief in this book doesn’t resolve neatly. There are no "five stages." Instead, it circles back on itself. One page might hold despair, the next hope, the next regret. And that is its greatest truth. Lewis validates the mess of grief, how one moment you laugh at a memory, and the next you’re sobbing in the cereal aisle. Healing, he reminds us, doesn’t follow rules. It moves in spirals.
5. Grief is love, continuing
Perhaps the deepest truth Lewis shares is this: the depth of grief is proof of the depth of love. In his mourning, Lewis isn’t just falling apart, he’s bearing witness to something sacred. He’s showing us what it means to have loved so deeply, that losing her feels like the world has tilted off its axis. He doesn’t try to erase the pain. Instead, he allows it to exist as a testimony to a love that was real, fierce, and forever changed him.
But what makes this book unforgettable is how it stays faithful to the ache. Lewis walks with the grief, stumbles with it, rages and wrestles, until, gradually, something like peace creeps in. Not the peace of forgetting, but the peace of surviving with the love still stitched inside you.
And somehow, through all the pain and questioning, he doesn't find clear answers but discovers a deeper kind of faith, one that's been through the fire and emerged scarred but stronger. It's a grief observed, yes, but more importantly, it's grief lived and transformed through.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/456VeYP
