A Grief Observed
C.S.Lewis, the author of the popular Narnia series, published a small book under a pseudonym after his wife died titles “A Grief Observed”. It is a journal exploring his thoughts and emotions, and is a brutally honest look at his Christian faith. It is probably not a book for everyone and is probably not the book to read while your feelings are still raw, but it is helpful to read it when you are able to reflect back.
The various stages of grief have been well-defined, but I don’t think that everyone will pass through all of them. I well remember a cousin saying to me “You must allow yourself to be angry”. Many people to experience anger, but it is the one emotion that I did not feel. Apart from the sadness, my over-riding feeling was (and still is) thankfulness. I felt strongly that I had been privileged to be Tom’s wife. However, C.S.Lewis’ account showed me that there were several similarities between his experiences and mine.
He says “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief.” In my notebook, where I wrote down all my thoughts as if I were writing a letter to Tom, I said “I simply cannot motivate myself to get on with things. I am so lazy and play scrabble all day long.” (Using an app on my tablet, I have now played 11 487 games!!) Surely this is a sign of unhappiness and depression?
Lewis also says that he is aware of being an embarrassment to everyone he meets. “I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not.” I found myself not knowing how to react to the questions asked in a funereal tone as if I must be feeling bad. You don’t want to say cheerfully “Fine, thanks”, so you end up saying gloomily, “Not too bad”. Which reminds me of a Bill Bailey sketch “Not too bad!”; be sure to “Google” it!
A friend of mine, widowed some years before me, once said, “It’s more like moving sideways, rather than moving on”. Six months after Tom died, I wrote in my notebook “I have been busy and generally getting on with life in your absence. I find that I can manage quite well when I am doing ‘my things’ with ‘my friends’. It is quite another matter when it comes to joint activities or ‘your friends’.” C.S.Lewis, on the other hand, says “At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy …… Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.” I have been grateful for the fact that Tom encouraged me to have interests of my own and these are the ones I have pursued – literature, theatre, stained glass, art, Jane Austen Society, Pilates.
Keeping busy is important. One has to have a reason to get up in the morning and to get on with something. C.S.Lewis describes grief like “waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down.” I am so grateful that I was able to go back to school to do some part-time teaching in the year after Tom died. I had officially retired, but there were too many periods for my successor and I went in to teach only 6 lessons a week with the final year pupils. That was the best thing ever. I could still meet up with my colleagues, the work wasn’t difficult and my pupils were grateful that they didn’t have to have a change of teacher halfway through their course.
I remember saying to a cousin’s widow that I feel that I sometimes have to give myself permission to be happy. Her response was “of course, you can be happy. Tom wouldn’t want you to be sad.” C.S.Lewis writes “in some sense I ‘feel better’, and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness.” His experience was that his memory/impression of his wife was clearer at those moments when he felt the least sorrow. But just when he thinks he is getting over it, “all the hells of young grief have opened again”. “one keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.Everything repeats. Am I going in circles. or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”
I like to think that it is like climbing an ever widening spiral staircase. One can look back and see how far one has come. The moments of intense grief become less frequent and one finds happiness again in new ways.
