24 pages • 48 minutes read
C. S. LewisA Grief Observed
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Lewis discovers that when he is distracted from thinking about Helen, “though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss” which is more painful than actively remembering her (35).
He decides to switch to a rational approach to managing his grief in an effort to escape from his overwhelming feelings. Lewis admits he always knew intellectually that suffering was inevitable, and “had warned myself [..] not to reckon on worldly happiness,” but discovers that pain and loss are much different in concrete, lived experience than in the abstract (36). Helen’s death forced him to confront the reality of suffering in the world, collapsing his “house of cards” (38).
Comparing his grief to his wife’s physical pain, Lewis criticizes his self-preoccupation: “what sort of lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers?” (41). Lewis wants Helen back “as an ingredient in the restoration of my past,”but realizes that may not be best for her: “having once got through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again?” (41). He wonders whether Helen is still suffering in the afterlife because before her death, Lewis did not imagine that people went straight to heaven, and while wonderful, she was not a “perfected saint” and thus, had “stains to be scoured” (41).
Lewis is surprised one morning to realize his“heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks” and finds that “at the very moment, so far, when I mourned H. least, I remembered her best” (44). Lewis experiences some guilt at moving on but perceives this as a desire to stay connected to Helen, ultimately realizing that “passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them” (54). His reprieve from grief is short and Lewis experiences again “the hells of young grief” (56) and wonders for how long this will occur.
Chapter 4 Summary
Lewis begins the chapter by declaring that this will be the final notebook he fills with writings of grief, as it is the last empty one he can find in the house. He acknowledges that writing has been a coping mechanism and that “in so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve, it has done some good” (59).
For Lewis, “grief is [now] like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape” (60). Recognizing the recursive nature of grief, he understands that “there are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat” (60). Although Lewis is still discovering new aspects of his loss as his grief continues to unfold, he has no desire to return to his“pre-H happiness” (60), as that would constitute another loss: “H would die to me a second time, a worse bereavement than the first” (61).
Lewis has made significant progress on two fronts: “turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum” (61). Lewis vows to express more gratitude to God for the gift that is Helen. He experiences a mental meeting with Helen that “was quite incredible, unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own” (73), which surprises him for its lack of emotion, causing him to wonder if emotions were just primitive human attachments.
Lewis is aware that the questions he asks of God are unanswerable for humans: “When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But rather a special sort of ‘No answer.’…Like ‘Peace child you don’t understand’”(69). Lewis accepts the great mystery of God and what comes after life even though it is unimaginable: “Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparent contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet” (71).By the end of the book, Lewis feels “that I have come to misunderstand a little less completely” the mystery of God.
Lewis ends A Grief Observed with Helen’s last words, “she said not to me, but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled but not at me” (76).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Lewis has moved out of dark despair and is gaining perspective on his grieving process as he comes to acceptance. Examining his previous writing, he explains his anger, “all that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred” that gave him “the pleasure of hitting back” at his grief (40).
Lewis shifts back to dealing with his grief more thoughtfully than emotionally, and is beginning to reconcile his grief with his faith: “in that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him” (66). Lewis’s discovery that he finds that he“can now believe again” precedes the lightening of his grief (44). His grief, Lewis realizes, was preventing him from reconciling Helen’s death with his life and beliefs: “It was as if the lifting of the sorrow […] removed a barrier” (45). It was his grief, Lewis now understands, that stood in the way of spiritual consolation: “you must have a capacity to receive or even omnipotence can’t give” (46). The “Cosmic Sadist” has been replaced by images of God as a surgeon, who only inflicts the necessary pain of operations for ultimate good, and God as a teacher: “Good you have mastered that exercise…And now you are ready to go on to the next” (49). After Lewis and Helen had attained perfect love, it was time to progress: “the teacher moves you on” (49).
As grief subsides, Lewis’s memories become clearer “and suddenly at that very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best” (44) As Lewis is able to let go of his worries about remembering his wife, he is better able to integrate her memory into his life: “the remarkable thing is that since I have stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere” (51).
Lewis shifts from chronicling the concrete details of his grief to a more abstract exploration of his understanding of love and loss, and the role of death in the journey toward God, “bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love” (50). In the end, Lewis fully embraces the mystery of God, coming to the realization that “the best is perhaps what we understand the least” (75) and is content to leave it at that.
Following Helen’s last words at the end of the book, Lewis adds a quote from the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy, when Beatrice returns to Heaven, in a parallel gesture to H’s: “Poi si torno all’ terna Fontana,” which translates as “Then she turned back to the eternal fountain” (76).
Related Titles
By C. S. Lewis
