How ‘A Grief Observed’ by C. S. Lewis Came to My Rescue in Darkness

I was restless. I knew it was coming for me. Real fast and heavy. Like I’d never ever experienced before. Grief.

After a long period of numbness, and even acceptance that Ryan was leaving us definitely, for his true home with the good Lord, came my first hard hit with reality.

One night as I was sitting on the sofa in the living room with my best friend and her husband, I was gripped with intense fear. Fear like I’ve never felt before. I was thinking what the future would look like from here. 

From going from a state of acceptance and trusting in God’s will to feeling intense fear of even God letting us down badly, I was in a completely shattered state. The mere thought that what if even God is immune to our sufferings gripped me with fear like I’d never experienced before. 

From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Matthew 27:45-46

Ironically, the same God who gave me Ryan also took him away. Even more ironically, my answer was also right there in front of me: In Him.

I could run away as far away from Him but would I be able to sustain…survive…thrive? 

I doubt it. 

So, I went back to the same God who turned a deaf ear to my ardent prayers for Ryan’s recovery. Even though there seemed to be multiple options, I knew there was nothing that could match God’s shelter and plan.

Yes, it would mean carrying the heaviest cross for a long time, but he would also give me the strength to carry and endure it.  

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.’

Matthew 16:24

Finding ‘A Grief Observed‘

Here I was all alone, my most precious and beloved part brutally snatched away from me.

I tried to grab onto every physical evidence of him. I’d wear his home T-shirt and track pants, stack my wedding ring on top of his and feel them against my skin, and a lot more crazy things…just to feel his presence. 

Before I thought I was going insane with my obsession for Ryan, I was seeking stories of people who had lost their spouse suddenly.

How did they cope? Did they come out of it? How long did it take them?

I don’t remember the exact moment when I discovered “A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis. Maybe it was a book recommended by someone online who had been in my shoes previously. Or maybe I discovered it elsewhere, that I’m unable to recollect precisely. 

All I remember was this overpowering urge to purchase my Kindle copy of the book immediately. I didn’t want to wait any further for the physical copy to arrive at my doorstep. Not a day, not even a few hours. I wanted access to the book immediately, and boy, did it over-deliver on all expectations.

The Arc of Grief and Faith

Lewis rejected his faith—i.e., Christianity—after his mother, Florence, died at age 45, when he was only nine years old. He returned to his faith at 32, but struggled with it again right after his wife, Joy’s death. Eventually, he made peace with both God’s will and Joy’s death.

“A Grief Observed” is his raw, poignant outpouring of cries and tears over the loss of his beloved wife. It expresses his utter shock and dismay at God’s plan, among other emotions.

The book hit me right away with its opening lines.

No one ever told me that grief is 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, it feels 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.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I was in the acceptance stage when I started reading this book. Lewis, by contrast, was still in the shock and denial stages. Yet I nodded my head all along because I had been through the same pattern: intense fear, mental fogginess, disillusionment with God, disinterest in worldly or material things—which I now found shallow, vain, uninteresting, and utterly useless and more.

When I reached the latter half of the book, where Lewis moves into acceptance and a more spiritual phase, I had slipped back into my own shock, denial, anger, and raw grieving stage. Strangely this helped me regain focus and clarity on the present.

Grief doesn’t follow a set pattern, cycle, or timeline.

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on 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?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

What is Faith Without Fire?

What do people mean when they say ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?’ Have they never been to a dentist?

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Faith is not standing outside places of worship and clicking pictures for social media. Faith cannot bloom to its fullest power in good times.

Faith needs the toughest of trials by fire to be tested and sharpened. There’s no faith and seeking closeness with God if you will not trust Him in the good, bad, and difficult times. 

As tough as things might seem at the outset, faith probes into the deepest, darkest corners and discovers God always has your back.

God knows best. Ryan is in his true home with the Lord.

Isn’t that what we all look forward to and strive for in our lifetime on earth? 

I remember being in the hospital during those last few weeks. I wasn’t thinking of myself at all. My focus was entirely on Ryan. If he was leaving this world, I prayed constantly for God to forgive any of his sins and to keep him safe under His loving heavenly wings.

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished for anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Our Illusion

Something I often hear is that Ryan’s gone too soon. Or his life ended too short.

As if death were in our hands.

As if birth were in our hands. 

As if life were in our hands.

I remember telling Ryan’s friend in the hospital cafeteria while we were having lunch together, “Does life give you a choice? I don’t think so.”

This was at the juncture of yet another medical decision that required my consent.

I smile when people talk so confidently about things that aren’t in our hands at all. I am uncertain whether I’ll get to see tomorrow.

What I’m certain of is that God always has a solid plan. And I’m nobody to question his ways or seek answers.

Do the combined intelligentsia of the world have all the answers in the world and beyond? 

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.‘

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I Surrender All

Ryan and I shared a beautiful, imperfectly perfect marriage. I learned what love is from Ryan. 

‘It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic—as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it (‘None of that here!’). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I could literally visualise Ryan and myself in these lines from the book. God separated us when we were at one of the highest points in our marriage. We were so happy together. Perhaps God was pleased with both of us, our union, lessons we had learned, and decided it was time for the next chapter for each of us.

I’ve taken the path of complete surrender and dependence on God. He knows best. He will take care of me and our family, as he is taking care of Ryan right now. 

My Manna: The Word 

Faith can only be strengthened through trials.

If you claim to be a spiritual person, be prepared because God tests His most beloved ones to the point of desperation. We’ve seen saints and good people across all faiths being tested continuously by God.

What looks like unfairness or injustice at the outset is actually God’s grandest proclamation of love. 

I could find my strength, hope, and faith to move forward only after taking refuge in the Word. The more I read the scriptures from the Holy Bible, the more the truth became apparent to me.

Truth, however brutal and bitter, is freedom and love. 

Rethinking Grief and Vulnerability

Tears are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of courage, vulnerability, and a pure heart.

Mourn as much as you need to, because it is the first step toward moving forward. Those tears are an essential outlet to make space for the new that God has planned for you. 

It is also not wrong for tears and laughter to coexist. Grief and joy can intermingle. It’s not selfish to pursue happiness when you’re grieving. Grief can also transform into joy.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’’

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

For me, I found joy in reading, writing, and music. Writing about Ryan is cathartic. I know him way too intimately, having lived and observed him in such close quarters. While he surely had his flaws and blind spots, his positive traits far exceeded and overrode his negative ones. I don’t know whether writing about him sounds pompous, but the truth is what it is. Most importantly, it’s what makes me happy. Just as listening to Christian songs of praise and worship. I find a lot of joy and peace in these activities during my time of grief.

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

My A-Ha! Moment

I discovered that grief is both a spiralling distraction and deeply disorienting. One needs help to stay anchored in the present. “A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis helped me return to the now—and to a new reality I have to learn to live in from the inside out.

Unarguably, the most surprising part of this book is its conclusion.

While I could relate to the grief outpourings of Lewis’ with a certain predictability while enjoying his writing prowess, the conclusion was a bigger eye-opener than death itself.

I wasn’t expecting something like that…something that would make me think hard.

I had never thought of love and intimacy that way. But Lewis makes his point with strong conviction, drawing on his experience. 

I’d always thought of love as emotional and soulful, not intellectual. Deep down, I knew Ryan’s intelligence, including his spiritual intelligence, drew me to him and still keeps me madly in love with him.

The dead could be like that; sheer intellects.  

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

My biggest takeaway from this book is rethinking the highest form of love as an intellectual act arising from a firm will. In its purest form, love is stripped of all illusion—and even of emotion, which was perhaps the greatest surprise—resting instead on intellect and truth.

There is no nonsense about the dead. 

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Giving no further spoilers from the ingenious conclusion, I’ll leave you, my dear reader, with my favourite line from this essential book.

There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026.