Grief Observed

Grief Observed by CS Lewis. This book is about the grief that a man observed in himself after his wife's death.

This book is available online. Check this link.

Quotes from this book: 

"The reason for the difference is only too plain. 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? The same with people."

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they [in heaven] suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. 

If H [Author's wife]. ‘is not’, then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. 

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That’s what I meant when I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues’. But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. This strikes a chord and seems quite similar to what Indian literature extols in a good wife - to be a good friend, mother, mistress to her husband.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine’. But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. 

I wonder. How would another man or wife, who loved their spouse very much, grieve? How different would it be from this author's grief? What is so special about this grief? I came across this book while reading another book on Male Grief where the author mentioned that males grieve in a way that is very different from the way feminine people grieve. Males don't talk it out and cry over a friend's shoulder. Is CH Lewis an example of all those male folks who love their wives a lot? Is this the way most male folks, who loved their wives, feel after their wives' death?

I know of an elderly gentleman. From what I have heard of him and his wife I think he could grieve like CH Lewis were his [my contact's] wife to die. I can imagine one difference though. My contact is not a person who can express as Lewis does. He would be more like a toddler who lost his mom - with a lot of grief but unable to express or articulate.

On the whole I am not able to relate to the kind of grief that the author felt nor empathize with it.