06/02/2025
The journey and pain of grief and loss- insights from A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
Have you ever lived with someone and didnt ever imagine them dying? That was how I lived with my grandma until the day they got back from the hospital without grandma. Death has taken a lot and we just do not know how to live with it or grief, every death scratches the old pain, every perfume, color, cup or fabric just reminds you of them.
A Grief Observed told the truth about what grief really is. C.S. Lewis doesn’t offer neat answers. He offers his heart—broken, questioning, furious, searching. A Grief Observed isn’t written from the healed place. It’s written from the middle of the ache.
When I read it, I felt less alone. Like someone else had also sat on the floor in a quiet room, surrounded by silence, trying to understand how the world keeps moving when your person is gone.
Here are 7 lessons I took from this beautiful, brutal book:
1. Grief doesn’t follow stages—it crashes like waves.
Lewis doesn’t describe grief as linear. He writes it as it feels: shifting, unpredictable, at times unbearable. One moment you're composed, the next you're sobbing in a supermarket. It helped me stop expecting my sadness to behave. It also helped me forgive myself for the days I couldn't hold it together.
2. Losing someone you love can feel like losing your identity.
Lewis writes about the death of his wife, and how it left him not only missing her, but missing the version of himself he was when she was alive. This felt deeply familiar. Grief isn't just about who is gone—it’s about who you are without them. You have to rebuild not just a future, but a self.
3. Faith, even strong faith, can feel like it vanishes in grief.
C.S. Lewis was a Christian scholar, but this book isn’t a sermon. It’s a crisis of belief. He asks, "Where is God?" and admits he only hears a locked door. That kind of honesty was a relief to me. You can love God and still feel abandoned. You can believe and still question. That doesn't make your grief or your faith less valid—it makes them real.
4. The world moves on while you stay behind—and that hurts.
One of the most painful parts of grief is how quickly life resumes around you. Lewis writes about feeling like an outsider in his own life, as though he’s living in a ghost world while others carry on untouched. If you've ever walked through the day feeling like you're made of glass, you will see yourself in these pages.
5. The pain of memory is in proportion to the depth of love.
Lewis doesn’t shy away from love. He talks about her laugh, her presence, her essence—and how much it physically hurts to remember. But the ache is sacred, too. It’s proof of what was real. “The pain now is part of the happiness then,” he writes. “That’s the deal.”
6. Grief doesn’t end—it changes shape.
You don’t get over it. You get through it. You carry it differently. Lewis moves from despair to reflection, from raw pain to quieter questions. He doesn’t claim closure. What he offers is gentler: a growing capacity to live beside the loss, and to let love remain without unraveling.
7. Writing or speaking your grief can be part of your healing.
This book is Lewis’s journal. His heart, on paper. And in reading it, I learned the value of putting my own grief into words—not to make it pretty or understandable, but to pull it out of the shadows. Grief isolates. But storytelling reconnects. It reminds us we are not the only ones trying to make sense of a world without someone we love.
A Grief Observed is not a book of comfort. It’s a book of recognition. Of being seen in your sorrow. C.S. Lewis gives us permission to doubt, to rage, to feel completely undone—and still believe that slowly, quietly, painfully, we might begin again.
If you’re grieving—or if you love someone who is—read this. Not to fix anything. But to feel less alone in what can feel like the loneliest experience in the world.
Book: https://amzn.to/3Hs35ak
Audiobook also available using the link above.
