The Work
A Grief Observed was first published in 1961 by Faber and Faber under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. Lewis chose a pseudonym because the book was intensely personal - a raw, unvarnished spiritual journal written in the weeks after the death of his wife Joy Davidman from cancer in July 1960 - and because he was unsure it was fit for publication. The book is approximately 80 pages, divided into four sections corresponding to different phases of Lewis's grief. It was reissued under his own name in 1963, after his death in November 1963. A film adaptation, Shadowlands, was produced for BBC television in 1985 and as a theatrical film with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger in 1993.
The book is remarkable in the history of Christian devotional literature for what it does not do: it does not offer comfort, it does not resolve the problem of suffering, and it does not pretend that faith makes grief easier. It documents, with complete honesty, the experience of a man whose intellectual defenses against suffering - defenses he had erected with great care and sophistication in The Problem of Pain (1940) - were entirely inadequate to the experience of actual grief.
Biblical Engagement
Job 3:3 - 'Let the day perish wherein I was born' - provides the emotional key to the book's opening. Job's great opening curse - 'Why died I not from the womb?' - is the form of lament that gives Lewis's journal its permission. Lewis does not curse the day of his birth, but he does give himself permission to be as honest as Job: 'No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.' The book's honesty is Joban in character: it will not sanitize the experience of loss or offer premature consolation.
Psalm 88:14 - 'LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?' - is the lament that most directly parallels Lewis's experience of God's apparent absence in grief. His famous description of grief's effect on prayer - 'A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away' - is a prose rendering of Psalm 88's experience of a God who has hidden his face.
Lamentations 3:8 - 'Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer' - is echoed throughout the first section of the book. The image of prayer meeting a closed door is a development of Lamentations' account of the experience of divine absence and unanswered prayer that the Hebrew lament tradition authorizes and even requires the believer to express.
John 11:35 - 'Jesus wept' - the shortest verse in the Bible - is theologically important for Lewis's gradual recovery of faith. In his analysis of the resurrection of Lazarus, Lewis realizes that Christ's weeping at the tomb of his friend represents a validation of grief as appropriate, not a failure of faith. If the Son of God wept over death, then grief is not a deficiency of trust but a proper response to the reality of loss. This recognition begins to loosen the paralysis that grief had imposed on Lewis's faith.
The book's theological turning point comes in the third section, when Lewis recognizes that his initial angry image of God as a Cosmic Sadist - the God who toys with human beings, removing what they love - was not a description of God but of his own grief. 'My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?' This is the book's most theologically profound moment: the experience of God's apparent absence is itself a mode of God's presence, shattering the inadequate God-substitutes that grief reveals.
The book concludes with a meditation on Joy's transformation in death: Lewis stops thinking about Joy's loss (what he has lost) and begins to think about Joy's existence (what she now is). This shift - from mourning the absence to trusting the presence - is the resolution the book offers, but it is a resolution reached through suffering rather than around it.
Author and Context
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) met Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952, a divorced American woman who had converted from Judaism and atheism to Christianity partly through reading Lewis's work. Their friendship deepened into love; they married in a civil ceremony in 1956 (primarily to give Joy British citizenship) and in a religious ceremony in her hospital room in 1957 when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The cancer unexpectedly went into remission; they had three years of happy marriage before it returned, and Joy died on July 13, 1960.
Lewis was sixty-one when Joy died. He had lived as a bachelor for most of his adult life - sharing a house with Mrs. Janie Moore (the mother of his wartime friend who died) and, later, with his brother Warnie. Joy's death was his first experience of close bereavement as a married man, and the intimacy of the loss - far greater than he had imagined - exposed the inadequacy of the theodicy he had constructed in The Problem of Pain.
The Problem of Pain (1940) had argued, with great philosophical care, that suffering is compatible with divine goodness and serves multiple purposes (humility, sanctification, the realization of human character). The argument was intellectually sound; Lewis himself had been satisfied with it. But when faced with actual suffering - not as an intellectual puzzle but as the death of his beloved - he found that the intellectual solution dissolved.
Literary Character
The book is notable for its literary self-consciousness. Lewis, as a professional writer and literary critic, was aware of the artifice involved in keeping a journal and of the performative dimension of emotional expression. He notes this explicitly: 'Am I perhaps treating God as an imaginary interlocutor? Are all these ideas about His apparent absence, and His presence shattered and re-created, just theological game-playing?'
This self-awareness prevents the book from becoming sentimental and gives it an intellectual toughness that distinguishes it from most grief literature. Lewis is not merely reporting his emotional states; he is analyzing them, challenging them, suspecting their authenticity, and testing them against his prior theological convictions.
Reception
The book was received with confusion when published pseudonymously (several people recommended it to Lewis without knowing he had written it) and with deep recognition when republished under his name. It has become the standard reference for the experience of grief within a Christian framework - the book given to the recently bereaved by chaplains, pastors, and friends who know that premature comfort is useless.
Legacy
A Grief Observed permanently shaped the literature of Christian grief. It established permission for Christians to voice their anger, doubt, and desolation to God without being unfaithful. Its influence on subsequent pastoral care, grief counseling, and honest Christian reflection on suffering extends to works as different as Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son (1987) and Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? (1977).
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 88 (the darkest lament psalm, the one that ends without consolation), Lamentations 3:1-33 (the lament of Jeremiah and its gradual turn toward hope), Job 3:1-26 (Job's great opening lament), John 11:17-44 (Jesus and Lazarus - Jesus wept), and Romans 8:18-28 (suffering, the Spirit's intercession, and the hope of glory).
Further Reading
- Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996) - the standard biographical reference, with a chapter on the Joy Lewis marriage. - Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman (1983) - Joy's biography, providing the other side of the story. - Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (1987) - the closest contemporary parallel, written by a philosopher after the death of his son and similarly combining raw grief with sustained theological reflection.