Friends,
Some in our extended family expereinced another rush of grief this last week. It is more than one family should endure. One son died in a plane crash. Another son died fighting a fire. Now, a third son has found life too difficult and the urge to exit trumped his obvious love for his family.
Then I got a brief e-mail from a friend who simple said that her son had died. Her grief reminded me of a litte book published in 1961 by CS Lewis. Here are some excerpts.
A Grief Observed: CS Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times if 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. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.
Yet I want others to be around me. I dread moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
Then to paraphrase:
Sometimes there is a voice inside of me that says that all of this is really going to be okay. Love is not the whole of my life. I have resources. People get over these things. I will be okay. Then I am ashamed to listen to this voice. Once in a while, while I am thinking this way there is an onslaught of a ret-hot memory and all of this ‘common sense’ thinking vanishes, burned in the hot furnace of my loss.
“An odd by product of my loss is that I am aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they will ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it all together. R. has been avoiding me for a week.”
Wondering if God was playing some cruel joke with cancers seemingly in remission, wondering if Jesus was lured into a trap at the cross, then remembering…But he (some cruel child) would never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.
“Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? (38)
Bridge players tell me that there must be money on the game, or else people won’t take it seriously. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences, but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man – or at least a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover himself. (43)
“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.”
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times if 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. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.
Yet I want others to be around me. I dread moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
Then to paraphrase:
Sometimes there is a voice inside of me that says that all of this is really going to be okay. Love is not the whole of my life. I have resources. People get over these things. I will be okay. Then I am ashamed to listen to this voice. Once in a while, while I am thinking this way there is an onslaught of a ret-hot memory and all of this ‘common sense’ thinking vanishes, burned in the hot furnace of my loss.
“An odd by product of my loss is that I am aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they will ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it all together. R. has been avoiding me for a week.”
Wondering if God was playing some cruel joke with cancers seemingly in remission, wondering if Jesus was lured into a trap at the cross, then remembering…But he (some cruel child) would never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.
“Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? (38)
Bridge players tell me that there must be money on the game, or else people won’t take it seriously. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences, but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man – or at least a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover himself. (43)
“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.”
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