24 pages • 48 minutes read
A Grief Observed
A 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 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
C.S. Lewis is unprepared for the initial emotional onslaught of grief he experiences after Helen dies. He is stunned by the experience, feeling as if he is “mildly drunk or concussed” (3). The enormity of his loss permeates his existence, becoming “a sort of invisible blanket between the world and [Lewis]” (3). People treat him differently, he observes, noting the discomfort of friends and acquaintances he encounters. Although he is able to focus on his work, Lewis finds it difficult to muster the energy for ordinary tasks.
Lewis is trapped in the throes of all consuming grief: “I not only live each day in endless grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief” (10). He experiences a roller coaster of complex emotions, is seemingly almost fine and reasonable one minute, then comes crashing down the next, feeling guilty for feeling better. Although concerned that keeping a journal may, in fact, exacerbate his grief, Lewis decides that writing helps him “get a little outside it,” while noting that Helen would dispute that assertion (10).
Lewis discovers that he is no long able to believe in an afterlife for Helen, as he did following the death of a friend; he desperately wants to, but can no longer be sure it exists. Lewis observes that while God seems close and accessible during happy times, when seeking God in the depths of grief he finds, “[a] door slammed in [his] face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside” (6). He never questions the existence of God, but senses “the real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him” (6).
Lewis recalls Helen’s illness and “how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone” (12). He now realizes that her illness was the beginning of their separation, putting them on separate paths, which he realizes is the fate of all who love.
Chapter 2 Summary
After reviewing what he has written so far, Lewis is shocked that his grief is so self-absorbed: “from the way I’ve been talking anyone would think that H’s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself” (17). Although he vows to think about her more, and himself less, in reality, he is already constantly thinking about her.
Lewis worries that the actual Helen is slipping away and being gradually replaced by his own carefully-curated memories and images of her, and in that process becoming his own creation, rather than her own authentic person. He also fears that he will lose all that he gained as a person from the experience of love and marriage to Helen. Lewis finds he cannot pray for her the way he has for others who have died, “because I have never really cared, desperately, whether they existed or not” (23).
Lewis ponders what happens to the person who died, wondering if the deceased also suffers from leaving a loved one. He dismisses the platitudes used to console the bereaved: “How do they know she is ‘at rest’?” (27) and scoffs at “all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore;’ pictured in entirely earthly terms” as having no basis in scripture (25). Lewis questions why people think God will treat Helen differently after death: “she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here” (27).
If God hurt Helen in life, then why not assume he will continue to hurt her after death? Lewis fears God is really a “Cosmic Sadist” inflicting suffering on humans (30). Recalling all the “false hopes” he and Helen were given throughout her illness, “by false diagnoses, by x-ray photographs, by strange remissions,” Lewis views them now as God’s “torture” (30). Reading his journal the next day, Lewis calls this “a yell rather than a thought” (30) Looking for a way out of the pain, Lewis realizes that what he longs to have end his grief—the return of Helen—is impossible. He is in despair: “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable” (28). Lewis sees no way out of his grief: “now there is nothing but time…empty successiveness” (33).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Chapters 1 and 2 reveal Lewis’s progression through different stages of grief. In Chapter 1, Lewis passes through the initial shock of grief and the accompanying recognition that Helen’s death has changed everything: “The act of living is different all through” (11). His loss is different than any previous loss he has endured because he loved Helen in a way that he has not loved anyone before. Further, his grief separates him from the rest of life: “the invisible blanket between the world and me” (3). For Lewis, writing is a form self-medicating: “I must have some drug,” and sole coping mechanism (10).
Lewis discovers that nothing in his experience or beliefs about death applies to his grief over Helen. The magnitude of his loss brings him to question his assumptions about faith and his perceptions of the nature of God, which becomes one of the prominent themes of the book. Lewis, a devout Christian, naturally seeks solace in his faith, but finds none, asking, “Where is God?” (5). An empty house, locked and silent, represents Lewis’s futile search for God’s comforting presence. He examines alternate versions of God, turning his previous beliefs upside down by exploring the notion of a “bad God,” one who reverses traditional notions of heaven and hell, and thereby introduces the image of God as a “Cosmic Sadist” who tortures humans (30-31).
Lewis experiences a dark night of the soul as he plunges into the depths of despair. In the darkest, angriest period of his grief, Lewis becomes nearly nihilistic: “death only reveals the vacuity that was always there” (28). He is trapped in his emotional pain and feels as though he has made no progress in his grief which “still feels like fear,” as it did at the very beginning (33). Lewis perceives no way out of his suffering and dismisses taking an intellectual approach to assuage his grief: “do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?” (33). Chapter 2 ends bleakly, with Lewis describing Helen’s and his mother’s deaths from cancer, using the metaphor of ships on a dark, stormy night heading for shore to meet a crashing end: “their landfalls, not their arrivals” (34).
Unlock all 24 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By C. S. Lewis
