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Wednesday, December 2

Another Grief Observed

From C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed"
"What pitiable cant to say,'She will live forever in my memory!' Live? That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What's left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead.

... But there are other difficulties. 'Where is she now?' That is, in what place is she at the present time?...

...Kind people have said to me, 'She is with God.' In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable...

...But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictures as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them — that is, in earthly life — they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get...

...If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to 'glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild..."


Jack, too many of us know all too well what you went through. There are so many questions that come with loss. They spin around your heart like a hurricane. It seems easier sometimes to let the winds of fear and rains of uncertainty whip you around like a forgotten piece of laundry on the clothesline. No amount of cold or dampness can will your weak spirit to walk inside.

It's hard to tell if memories and dreams make anything brighter. Some are warm and comforting, like amber sunshine on your skin, but others are far less merciful. There are dreams that cut like icy daggers. Sharp "What if's" and jagged "maybe's"...

But you've got to hold to truths. Things like "God loves His children" and "God is good". You have to remember those.

Grief is painful - grueling. But with Christ there is hope, there is a future. There is a home to look forward to.

We're all just wayfaring strangers here. Some of us are just taking the long way home. I think it'll be like Christmas, everyone trickling in the front door like leftover raindrops off a tree branch. Separate during the trip down, but together in one big puddle at the end.

I like the way that sounds...

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