A Grief Observed
Notebooks kept after his wife died, published as they stood. Mourning recorded while it happens rather than recalled.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.
Across four numbered sections, Lewis sets down the day-by-day collapse and partial recovery of a mind under bereavement: the physical restlessness, the lapses of attention, the sudden returns of pain that had seemed to lift. He watches his own belief buckle and reform, and turns the same suspicion on his grief itself, asking whether the sorrow he feels is for his dead wife or for himself. It first appeared in 1961 under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.
For a clinician it maps the volatility of the acute phase without smoothing it into stages. Most striking is what Lewis notices about the internal image of the dead: how quickly a remembered person hardens into a construction of the mourner's own making, and how the effort to hold her accurately competes with the wish to be consoled. Earlier states return unbidden; nothing settles in sequence, and each apparent resolution is provisional.
About the author
Clive Staples Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (1898 to 1963) was a British writer and scholar who taught English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. He is widely read for his works of Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, and for the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. After the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, he wrote A Grief Observed, a first-person account of his mourning, published in 1961. He also produced literary criticism, poetry, and science fiction.
Details
- 1961
- Faber and Faber
- Faber and Faber
- 9780571265794