A Grief Observed

Lewis, a committed Christian, struggles in A Grief Observed to reconcile his faith in God with his own emotional suffering following the death of his wife, and also the physical pain he watched her endure, during her bouts with cancer. While Lewis always felt God’s presence in times of happiness, he is unable to find solace or comfort in his immediate grief over Helen’s death, asking, “Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?” (6). Lewis is disappointed and deeply bitter about God’s perceived abandonment of Lewis, in Lewis’s time of greatest need. Significantly, Lewis never doubts God’s existence, only his benevolence and relationship to humans: “Not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him” (6). Lewis draws parallels to the experience of Christ on the cross who, “found that the being he called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what he had supposed (29-30). Lewis angrily rejects standard phrases of Christian comfort: “but if so, [Helen] was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here” (27).