by Shafer Parker

In 2016 Jason and Shauna Caldwell lost their twin sons in a tragic bobsledding accident at Calgary Olympic Park. Since then they have focussed their lives on helping other hurting people, including taking up the mantle of leading a city-wide grief recovery ministry called Tidings of Hope. I was recently privileged to speak to their monthly gathering on C. S. Lewis’ experience with grief. The text of my talk appears below, but because it was a talk designed to last about 45 minutes (and it did), you need to know that this is quite long (perhaps over-long) for a blog. Hopefully the slog will be worth it.

Introduction

Let me begin by saying that I am very conscious of being in the presence of people who have suffered greatly, and whose grief exceeds anything I’ve ever experienced. So please understand that I have no intention of trying to tell you what to do. I will instead try to serve as a conduit through which C. S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis, or Jack to his friends) can come and sit down beside you, and perhaps by sharing his pain, somewhat lessen yours.

Such is the clarity of Lewis’ writing that you can benefit from diving into A Grief Observed without knowing anything about the author’s life. Nevertheless, I think some biographical background will be useful.

Biographical notes on Lewis

The defining event in Lewis’ life is arguably the loss of his mother to cancer on August 23, 1908, when Lewis was not yet 10 years old. It impacted his childhood confidence in God to the point that within three years he had announced himself an atheist. He would later convert, first to theism, and eventually to Christianity, but on some level he never stopped grieving the loss of his mother.

In his mid-fifties, long after he had become a best-selling Christian author, Lewis would write The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth of his seven Chronicles of Narnia. The publisher’s blurb says the book is about, “How Aslan created Narnia and gave the gift of speech to its animals.” But if you’ve read it, you will remember the book is really about two children, Digory and Polly, and the spiritual lessons learned through their interactions with Aslan, who, as you know, is a representation of Christ. Perhaps you will also remember the one moment in the book where you cannot help but sob. It comes when Digory, who stands in for the child Lewis, receives an apple from Aslan that heals his dying mother. What Lewis could not have in real life, he gave to himself in a fantasy.

Lewis’ loss of his mother impacted his relationships with women his whole life. For instance, while attending Officer’s Training School during the First World War he made what many have considered an ill-advised pact with his training school roommate Paddy Moore. Lewis and Moore agreed that should anything happen to one of them, the other would care for their ageing parent. Moore was killed and buried in France, and a little over a year later, Lewis moved in with Mrs. Moore and her daughter. In spite of a busy career as an Oxford Don, and despite becoming England’s best-known lay Christian and the leading apologist of the 20th century, Lewis would live with this woman, just ten years younger than his mother, for the next 30 years. Only her death set him free from a promise he’d made three decades earlier. Lewis would have told himself he was only keeping a promise, but one does not need to be a trained psychologist to suspect something more was involved. Lewis missed his mother.

Suddenly, at age 53, Lewis was alone, unencumbered by the domestic responsibilities that had occupied much of his discretionary time for what so far had amounted to his entire adult life. A year later he met Helen Joy Davidman, whose death would later inspire the book we’re considering tonight. I’m anxious to get on to the book, but there are a few facts about Lewis’ relationship with Joy that to me seem very relevant to Lewis’ later grief.

Davidman was a brilliant American Jewess who, like Lewis, only came to a Christian faith after a young adulthood of militant atheism. When she and her two sons first visited England in 1952, she was separated from her philandering husband, but not yet divorced. Her plan was to get away from marriage difficulties long enough to finish her book, Smoke on the Mountain. But when she subsequently moved to England in the fall of 1953 she was a divorced, single mother, anxious to rekindle the friendship she and Lewis had enjoyed the year before. Lewis was equally interested in maintaining their friendship, but apparently did not even imagine anything deeper. He was well aware of the disparity in their ages (she was 15 years his junior), and he also knew himself to be physically older than his years might suggest.

Then Providence took a hand. In 1956 British immigration authorities decided Joy had outstayed her welcome, and that it was time to send her home. Lewis offered, strictly out of friendship, to enter into a civil marriage with Davidman, thereby allowing her and her sons to remain nearby. The marriage was duly performed at the Oxford Registry on April 23, but other than keeping Joy in England, the new arrangement made no change in either of their lives. Until, that is, Joy contracted bone cancer that made its presence undeniable when her leg simply gave way. She was given only weeks, at best months, to live.

That’s when Lewis recognized that God, who first surprised him with the joy of life in Christ, had now surprised him with a Joy he deeply loved and who now, although it appeared to be too late in coming, he genuinely desired to make his wife in full. On March 21, 1957, with Joy in her bed, and Lewis standing beside it, an Anglican priest married the two in a Christian service, then immediately placed his hands on Joy and prayed for her healing.

The prayer worked. Joy was healed and strengthened, though not without cost to Lewis, who shared her pains during the worst of her illness, and somehow mysteriously shared the calcium from his own bones to make possible the rebuilding of hers. If that sounds miraculous, that’s because it really was. But the reward was worth everything Lewis gave. She recovered almost fully, and from 1957 through 1959 the “newlyweds” experienced—deeply—every joy, apart from childbirth, that marriage can provide. Of his marriage Lewis would state in the fourth chapter of the book we’re discussing tonight . . .

What was [Joy] 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 mean 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.

Then, in the spring of 1960, Joy’s cancer returned, and on July 13 of that same year, she died.

Why this long introduction

Lewis was devastated by Joy’s death. But he knew what to do. As Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Gresham, puts it in his biography of Lewis, entitled Jack’s Life (Jack being Lewis’ nickname among friends), “He did what he always did when under extreme stress. He sat down at his desk, and looking into himself and carefully observing what was happening deep in his mind where we keep our inmost secrets, he picked up his pen and an old exercise book and began to write.” In fact, he found four empty exercise books in the house and would eventually decide that since chronicling one’s grief risks running into self-indulgence, he would stop when they were full. For grief journaling he would purchase no more. The result was the four-chapter book, really more booklet than book, that we are considering tonight.

From this point on we’re going to look directly into Lewis’ book. But let me take a moment to describe what I’ve been trying to do so far. I know that many of you grieve, and will continue to grieve the loss of relationships that were either more organic—by that I mean the loss of a family member, a son or daughter, a brother, a sister, or perhaps one or both of your parents—or else more long lasting. Here I’m thinking of death that breaks a marriage relationship carefully built over decades of growing appreciation marked by mutual self-giving and sacrifice.

I’m trying, to put it plainly, to prevent you from thinking, “What can Lewis possibly say to a person like me? He was only really married for a little over three years before Joy died. What can he possibly know about grief?” I’ve given you this lengthy biography, then, in the hope that you will see how Providence specially prepared Jack and Joy for the intensity of young love at a time when they were both experienced enough to understand and appreciate what a gift they had been given. Then, I hope you have seen how, when that joy (in both senses of the term) was so suddenly cut off, Jack was gifted enough to record for posterity an understanding of grief, and the impact of grief upon the griever, that arguably has never been equalled, and certainly has never been surpassed.

Chapter 1, Denial, but Not Only Denial

Lewis didn’t name his four chapters, but I think a title for this first one may provide a helpful way to understand the feeling that attaches to it. I imagine that you are already familiar with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief, but here I want to warn you that if you are thinking of reading A Grief Observed, do not assume that Lewis will just be giving you another version of her work.

Lewis certainly experienced all five: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Listen to Lewis give voice to his denial.

I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

Sounds like a form of denial to me. But in spite of how the Kübler-Ross stages may present themselves in A Grief Observed, there is always something deeper going on. Lewis is doing something that only human beings, enabled by grace, can achieve. He is deeply experiencing every possible form of grief, yet able to stand apart to observe and reflect on what is happening. He grieves, perhaps like few others, but he also observes, with a cool expertise that enables him to express exactly what is happening in his life. The result is, you feel him (to use the vernacular), and then he helps you understand what his feelings mean.

GIVE TODAY!

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” This is Lewis’ first sentence, and to me, at least, these words print themselves indelibly upon the mind. I’ve never lost anyone in my immediate family, but February a year ago, my wife Jeanne was sick enough with COVID that we had to send her to the hospital by ambulance, and it felt to me as though she might not come home. That day, and in the two or three days that followed, I think I understood for the first time in my life something about the fear that attends even the possibility of the permanent loss of the most important person in your life.

Lewis provides other similes.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. 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 the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

Does that description of his early suffering ring true for you? You want people nearby. You need people nearby. But what you don’t need is people trying to “cheer you up,” people somehow communicating that they think it's time for you to move on. Lewis is eloquent in expressing these thoughts.

One thing sets Lewis apart from other mortals; he never lets himself go. He never stops thinking in terms of self-discipline. Even in the early stages he hates it when his thoughts tempt him to walk down a garden path from which he may never return.

The bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself.

(Parenthetical injection: If you’re wondering why Lewis would refer to his beloved as H., here’s the explanation. After Roger Lancelyn-Green read Lewis’ copybook journals he urged his dear friend to publish them. And Lewis did so, but only on the grounds that it be done by a publisher not previously associated with him, and that he as the author be given a pseudonym. Accordingly, the first edition of A Grief Observed was attributed to N. W. Clerk, and the woman being grieved was referred to only as H., Helen Joy Davidman’s first initial. The author’s pen name, by the way, is from the Anglo-Saxon “Nat Wilk Clerk,” meaning “no one knows the writer.” Lewis’ humour could always bubble up in the most unexpected places)

Now back to Lewis.

Give that mood its head (he’s still talking about self-pity) and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

Grief and Faith

In his grief Lewis struggled with his faith, and asked, even as Jesus did while on the cross, “Why has thou forsaken me?” I’ll let you read the rest of that experience yourself, if you haven’t already done so, because time is short and I want to share something you may not find in many books of this sort. After revealing his struggle to believe, Lewis frankly discusses the relationship, or the supposed relationship, between sex, God, and death.

One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love; every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. (Emphasis added) Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe.

Before moving to chapter 2 I have to serve up one more of Lewis’ insights. He became concerned that it might be a mistake to spend too much time keeping promises made to the dead.

I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle, ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny; with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own.

As much as any man of the 20th century, Lewis was a prophet for our times, arguably the prophet for our times. That makes me wish there was a way to confront everyone alive with this insight.

It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.

Of course, there are people who say birth, life and death do not matter. God help us to gird up the loins of our minds so that we never forget that everything matters.

Growing up (I’m speaking here of myself) there was one forbidden phrase in our house, “I don’t care.” We were not allowed to say it about anything. My father, though functionally illiterate, had a firm grasp on a basic truth. This is God’s world, and because God matters, everything in it, and everything that happens in it, matters. We must care. Of course we have to balance our cares with responsibilities and capabilities, but we must never ever not care. If death doesn’t matter, then life doesn’t matter, and, it follows, as Lewis notes, that birth doesn’t matter, and that means preventing birth by any, or every means doesn’t matter either.

When we’ve reached that point, and we have, then we’ve reached the point where human life doesn’t matter any more than anything else that grows. A demonic parody of Matthew 6:30 might read, “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, since you are of no more value than grass, how dare you raise a peep about your own death if you won’t rise up to defend the life of the babe in the womb or the disabled who are being encouraged to seek medical assistance in dying?”

Chapter 2

I’ve taken too long to get to chapter 2, and there are still two more after that. I’m going to have to sum some things up quickly, while hopefully leaving you with the desire to read A Grief Observed on your own. You can do it, you know. The whole thing is only 34 pages long.

But let’s move on. In chapter 2 Lewis is beginning to think about a future in which mourning his wife’s death will no longer dominate his thinking. But he knows he’s not ready for that. Like chapter 1, Lewis is still struggling with his faith, only now the struggle is about his wife’s personal future.

Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? What do I really think? I have always been able to pray for the other dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H. I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity.

In walking the road of faith Lewis has been such a comfortable companion that I sometimes forget his faith was shaped in a different mould than mine. Then something like praying for the dead comes up and I feel estranged. As a lifelong Baptist I honestly don’t know what Lewis means by “praying for the dead.” But I can say this, I suspect that in prayers for the dead he remembers, perhaps better than I ever do, that those who’ve died in Christ are still part of the same mystical body of Christ to which I am privileged to belong. And that can’t be a bad thing. What’s bad is when you struggle to believe your own dear wife may not be part of that body. And for a little while that became a problem for Lewis.

Chapter 3

Lewis turns a corner in Chapter 3. Instead of thinking God has revealed Himself as a cosmic sadist by causing him to grieve or causing Joy to suffer, he begins to think of God as a surgeon who wields pain as a kind of scalpel to cut away all the dead tissue of ungodliness from his soul. Two things can be said about that. (1) Lewis is not a Calvinist but at no point is he not firm in believing God is utterly sovereign. He never for a moment yields to the idea that anything is mere accident, or that anything that happens isn’t filled with meaning. Even in his worst moments he accepts that Joy’s suffering and death were somehow God’s will. It just took him a while to understand. And (2) it’s in Chapter 3 that you begin to realise Lewis is living out the principles he had first laid down 20 years earlier in The Problem of Pain. He’s beginning to see that what he said then is being proven true in experience.

Let me illustrate this by a handful of short quotes from The Problem of Pain.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.”

In the same way it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. . . . When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that he has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one.

God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Rev. 4:11). We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest well pleased.” To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God.

Remember, these quotes are from The Problem of Pain. Now do you see why 20 years later Lewis could write: What do people mean when they say ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?’ Have they never even been to a dentist?

Chapter 4

On to Chapter 4 and a rousing finish! I want to close with an assurance, and two quotes. The assurance is that when you get to Chapter 4 you will discover that Lewis’ faith is not merely recovered, but actually stronger than before, stronger because he has reached a much deeper understanding of what God is doing, not just in his life for the moment, but for all eternity. He finally understands God is stripping away the falseness of his imaginary God, as well as the falseness of the lover he remembers and imagines, in order to bring him ever closer to the truth.

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of Him in our own minds?

Oh dear friends, don’t ever identify yourself with your grief. Grieve, but don’t become a griever. Like Lewis, let God bring you through grief to a greater appreciation of Himself, and all that He intends to do in you, for you, and through you!

Finally, even though I’m leaving out tons of the best stuff I just need to skip to the end. (How on earth does Lewis pack so much into 34 pages?) In previous chapters Lewis has already mentioned that before the end he heard Joy say she was at peace with God and ready for her upcoming departure. But only on the last page does he reveal these were her last words.

“How wicked it would be,” he writes, “if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me.

Here, I believe, Lewis implies that at the last Joy is smiling at a Presence only she can see. Why do I think that? Here are the final words of the book. “Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana (from Dante ‘Then she turned back to the eternal fountain’).”

God help us to remember that this is the true goal of every believer, not to return to a relationship with a loved one that has been strictly forbidden by Christ Himself (Matt. 22:30), but to return our spirit, as Solomon so wisely puts it, “to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7).

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