A Grief Observed

A Meditation on a Book by C.S.Lewis

“Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A few weeks ago as I was scrolling through my many emails, I stopped at an article in the online version of the New York Times called “HOW COVID REMADE AMERICA,” and clicked to open it. The article was accompanied by several photos taken during the COVID-19 psyop.

Then the unthinkable happened. The first photo I saw showed a large city park with dozens of white circles painted on the fresh green grass, indicating where two (at most) people could gather without risking contaminating, or getting contaminated by, those within any of the other circles nearby. Suddenly, and all over again, I started boiling over with rage.

Who on earth came up with this idea? Who on earth could have possibly complied with it and thought they were doing the right thing? Who on earth could have thought any of this had anything to do with “the science” that all the obedient guinea pigs in that deadly experiment had worshipped as if it had divine attributes? Looking at that photo and at the other photos brought the utter stupidity and sheepish compliance of so many billions of people in those terrible times—and my anger about it all—right back into my life as if it was all still happening right now.

I felt sick to my stomach. It made me so angry and, at the same time, so sad. There, alone in my house, I wanted to scream and cry in the same breath. Howl, I think that’s the word for it. I’ve been thinking that I’ve been suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking at these photos that accompanied the litany of lies—people sitting in their cars and allowing medical professionals in fully armored hazmat suits shove those long swabs up their noses painfully close to their frontal lobes to test for the asymptomatic presence of a virus that was supposedly so dangerous that it easily spread in the air all around us; the emptied shelves in grocery stores because of panic buying and forced factory closures; masked children outside in a park on a sunny day; the vacant office buildings and empty city streets—and gauging my reaction to them, confirmed my self-diagnosis.

We popularly refer to moments like this as being “triggered.” We make fun of snowflakes being triggered by, say, Trump’s presidential victory that sent many college students across the nation scrambling to “wellness spaces” for a good cry as they piled on the pounds with free cookies and milk. But being triggered is a real phenomenon. Ask war veterans. Ask abuse victims. Ask car accident survivors. A traumatizing event enters the body and lodges in places out of reach of normal consciousness. Until, that is, something happens in the world around us that brings those memories welling up from the unconscious—unwelcomed, unwanted, unavoidable—and into the here and now. A photograph. A sound. A dream. A scene from a movie. A person from your past you catch a glimpse of on a city street. And when that happens the traumatizing event is relived all over again and in real time but only in the mind in a kind of endless and inexpugnable film loop.

There were subheads, equally disturbing, describing how “it” (the virus) remade America: “It broke our faith in public health.” “It shattered our cities and disordered society.” “It shackled the U.S. with debt.” “It destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere.” “It scarred children.” “It left us sicker.” But there was not any “it” that rained down upon us with so much destruction. It was “they,” and I’m not talking about woke pronouns. I’m talking about the complicity of the New York Times and an entire global army of media apparatchiks for creating the panic about a virus out of thin air by lying about how deadly it was. They and their nefarious collaborators bear the responsibility for the annihilation of so much life on earth and of what we hold dear.

I remembered seeing people being arrested while strolling on beaches or in parks; a cowering, elderly woman in a grocery store signaling at me to pull my mandated mask up over my nose (I was so oxygen-starved and furious that I wanted to ram my cart into hers right there in the condiment aisle); the heinous outdoor seating at restaurants on cold New York City streets; the blocking of my Facebook posts alerting my few hundred contacts about the war that had been launched against us; a friend insisting that everyone invited to her 50th birthday party, which was now going to be held outdoors, wear a mask (I was invited and did not go); seeing people alone in their cars with a mask on; being disinvited to weddings of friends and members of my extended family who were requiring all attendees to be jabbed “out of an abundance of caution”; fake president Joe Biden’s televised, maniacal speeches scolding scofflaws like me to get injected with the bioweapon or else….

***

While looking for a certain book I wanted to write about for this edition of Underlined Sentences, I found A Grief Observed. When the thin volume caught my eye, sandwiched between two bigger books, I knew right away that I wanted to write about it instead of the one I had been looking for. Call it a happy accident. Synchronicity, as Carl Jung might say. I’ve been wanting to write about grief for some time now, so my stumbling upon this book seemed to have a meaningful if not causal connection. It was as if my desire and this book had mysteriously found one another. As if I had not chosen it but rather it had chosen me.

It’s been five years since governments around the world shut down their nations and mandated lockdowns, school closures, and ultimately, in many instances, injections with a bioweapon peddled as a vaccine, and began what would become the death of the world as we’d known it brought down by the greatest of all crimes against humanity. That’s not the only thing I am grieving.

A Grief Observed is a brief and poignant memoir about the loss of a woman who Lewis—an aloof professor and theologian (first at Oxford University then at Cambridge University), a prolific and influential writer, and a devout Christian—met late in life and who died of cancer not long after they had married. Although they had known each other for only eight years, and four of those years as a married couple, Joy Davidman Gresham had come from America and changed Lewis’ life forever: He fell deeply in love for the first and, as fate would have it, the only time, in his life. And he despaired when she died.

In the days immediately following her death, Lewis wrote cursive journal entries in several exercise books for children. And what he wrote in those four books would become A Grief Observed, in which he writes: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

Douglas Gresham, the younger of Joy’s two sons, both of whom had eventually come with her to England to live with Lewis, writes in his introduction to my copy of the 1994 edition of A Grief Observed: “The book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”

***

For the past five years, I’ve lived in grief and have thought about living in grief. What I’m grieving is a different kind of loss from the one that brought Lewis to his knees, yet also deeply personal. I’m grieving the loss of trust and of the people who had broken my trust in them. As the COVID-19 psyop swept o’er the land, I trusted my friends and colleagues to see the evil hoax for what it was, as I did, and to ignore it or rise against it and just say no. To do the right thing and carry on.

But they didn’t. The heart of the matter for me was not what the governments around the world did to us; it’s what so many billions of people, including most of those closest to me, allowed the governments around the world to do to us. It was their uninformed and sheepish and, in some instances, enthusiastic, compliance that felt to me like a stab in the back. We all go through life with crosses to bear. I’ve had—and have—several. But this one—the anger I’ve felt because of this mass compliance—would become, and remain, my gravest, heaviest, and most persistent cross for the past five years.

Curiously, though, with the coming of warmer weather and longer days here in the Northeast where I’ve lived most of my life, I thought I had finally made some kind of tenuous peace with this wretched betrayal of not only myself, but also of all of us who knew better—and, indeed, against the very essence of our shared humanity. I’d started to tap into the energies and introspections of the Christian Lenten season to change something inside me, as Jesus always calls on us to do but during these forty days are asked to pay particular attention.

Over the past five years, I might have passed through the five stages of grief famously described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was beginning to find myself at the fifth stage of an uneasy acceptance with the way things had gone with the COVID-19 psyop, although not without intermittent flare-ups of all the other stages, especially the anger. That’s the one that has most persistently dogged me in my attempts to move on. Never in my life have I felt so angry for so long.

I have turned to some familiar ancient and timeless wisdom for guidance. I have continued to remind myself of a memorable teaching from my years of Buddhist study and practice, which I have noted in previous columns: Harboring anger against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

As if that simple phrase were not enough to remind me of anger’s toll, there’s this lesson about love as taught by Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, a lesson many of us are familiar with because it is frequently recited during wedding ceremonies and which I’ve been reading from time to time these days: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13: 1-3)

Then there’s this teaching from the mouth of Jesus himself that I’ve also been re-reading in my Bible: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteousness. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-47)

Above all, there are Jesus’ dying words as he hangs in excruciating pain on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

What are ordinary, imperfect mortals like me supposed to do with all these timeless, perfect wisdom teachings about forgiveness and love in the midst of the immense brokenness and deadly ignorance of the world in which we’ve found ourselves? One commentator in his blog called Christian Art has these sage words of advice: “Many of us might struggle to identify anyone we’d consider an ‘enemy.’ We often reserve that term for war situations or for people we intensely dislike. However, if we broaden the definition to include anyone who has hurt, upset, or wronged us (even in minor ways) perhaps a few faces come to mind? When Jesus asks us to love these people, He isn’t calling for warm, fuzzy feelings. He appeals to our will, not our emotions. At the very least, we can choose to wish the best for those we find difficult. How do we do this? Through prayer. Praying for someone we struggle with is not only an act of love but also a step towards healing—both for us and, potentially, for them.”

I’ve been praying the last five years, but mostly for myself, to be honest. I’ve prayed for spiritual healing, divine intervention. Not that I’m all that skilled in praying. No matter. As Lewis himself writes in his 1963 book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best…. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

I pray to be caught off my guard. I pray for a spontaneous remission of the cancer of my wrath. I pray because I’ve sometimes felt that I’ve been slowly dying, both inside myself and to the world around me. I pray because I’m also grieving my former self, a self that no longer is. Just like someone who dies no longer is. In my body I am here and appear not much different than I was five years ago. But I sometimes hardly recognize the man inside.

The insane lockdowns may have passed but I’ve continued to isolate myself more than I did before the COVID-19 psyop, and not because I’ve ever been afraid of contracting a supposedly deadly virus that posed no threat to any normally healthy person. It was because I became fed up with anyone and everyone who fell for the ruse, which happened to be nearly all of my old friends and colleagues. And the bitterness lingers like a bad dream that I can, unfortunately, recall in astonishing detail simply because it went on for so long and destroyed so much. Only it was not just a bad dream.

Like a refugee is forced to flee his home country that’s been taken over by a murderous despot and his henchmen and to take up his life in a new country, I’ve felt like an exile even though I’ve never left my home. And now I’m trying to find my footing in this strange, new world that surrounds me.

For the America I once knew is no more. In March 2020, it had been sacked and plundered in a coup d'état run by a shadow state, known by many as the deep state, an unelected bureaucratic cabal of a military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media complex that is accountable to no one. And where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, a bastion of liberals, who with the invasion of the COVID-19 psyop had suddenly and, to me, inexplicably, abandoned their once proud heritage of supporting free speech, individual sovereignty, and world peace—and among whom I once counted myself—have left me feeling as if I am living behind enemy lines.

For they support none of this now and instead shoot their misguided arrows of blame for all the ills of the nation at the wrong target, thereby missing the mark. It bears noting here that the Greek word for “sin” is “hamartia,” which means “to miss the mark” or “to fail in one’s purpose.” It is commonly used in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, to describe various forms of wrongdoing or moral failure. Or, in a word, sin. Which has nothing to do with any sort of lascivious life we normally envision when we think of a sinful world. This sort of sin is far more subtle, as evil often is. It is the sin of ignorance.

***

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” Lewis writes in A Grief Observed. “It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people…. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”

When billions of frightened souls fell for the ruse, that rope that Lewis writes about—the ties that commonly bind us to one another—snapped. All I had in my hands then was the equivalent of the frayed end of a rope, the other end of which was held by billions of others as they plunged into an abyss of imaginary fear whipped up by those very same lies that I and a pitifully small number of others so easily saw through. And as this happened, I was reminded of another Buddhist teaching of the grief felt by an armless mother watching her only child get swept away by a raging river.

All I could do was roil against that raging river of propaganda for sweeping away my trust in human intelligence and discernment that I had expected would have instinctively led us all to higher ground and out of harm’s way; roil at the deluge of lies that so suddenly flooded the earth in a kind of recurrence of the biblical account of the great flood and Noah and his ark. Only in this version, it was not God who was destroying the world; it was the scorpions that we read about in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

***

To grasp how grief-stricken Lewis had been after Joy died, let’s explore how these two middle-aged people met, who they were to each other, and how they eventually came to love one another.

Joy Davidman Gresham sailed across the Atlantic in September 1952 with the intention of meeting Lewis in Oxford, where he lived. The two had written letters to each other for a couple of years before that. Joy’s first letter to Lewis arrived in January 1950 at The Kilns, a small, partially forested estate in Oxford where Lewis and his elder brother, Warren, or “Warnie,” lived as confirmed bachelors. “Both Jack and Warren found it unusually amusing and well-written,” recalls George Sayer of that letter in his biography of Lewis, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. “Jack was stimulated to write a reply that was, according to Warren, ‘rather brilliant.’ The correspondence that followed intensified Joy’s feelings and led Jack to want to meet her.” (Jack was Lewis’ nickname that he’d had since childhood because he never liked his given first or middle names, Clive Staples.)

When they met, Joy was 37 and Lewis was 54. Although Joy was well-educated, smart (she took her M.A. in English literature at Columbia University in 1935 when she was only 20), bookish, a writer, and a former atheist who later in life discovered God—all qualities she shared with Lewis—they would seem an unlikely couple, and not merely because of the age difference between them. They first met during a lunch that Lewis hosted in his rooms at Magdalen College in Oxford. Joy was accompanied by a friend. Lewis’ brother Warren was supposed to have come to the party but withdrew. Sayer, Lewis’ former student and now a friend and colleague and later his biographer, joined them instead. Sayer writes:

“She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views. Everything she saw in England seemed to her far better than what she had left behind. Thus, of the single glass of sherry we had before the meal, she said, ‘I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start your meal drunk and end with a hangover.’ She was anti-urban and talked vividly about the inhumanity of the skyscraper and of the new technology and of life in New York City. Even in the countryside, she said, it was hardly possible for a woman to go for a walk without being molested. She attacked modern American literature, finding that most of it had its reputation manufactured by publishers’ publicity departments….

“Of course, Jack liked this. It fitted in with his own anti-American prejudice.”

After the lunch, Lewis asked Joy to stay for some time at The Kilns. Sayer later heard from Warren about the visit. Warren told Sayer, “We treated her just as if she were a man. She loved the pubs, walked fairly well considering that she was not used to it, drank her pints of beer and often made us laugh. Her ability to make him laugh was one thing that Jack enjoyed about her. Another was her flow of sharp, almost outrageous comments. He had not met anyone like her before.”

Joy was married at the time, but her marriage was faltering. And, apparently, she was falling in love with Lewis, deepening an affection for him that had begun in their correspondence before they met. They met again on December 6 in London when Lewis’ teaching commitments were completed for the year. At that meeting, Lewis invited Joy to spend Christmas at The Kilns. Sayer writes:

“She stayed two weeks, cooked a turkey dinner on Christmas, and went with him on long walks and to some of his favorite pubs. At one pub, much to Joy’s astonishment, Jack lustily sang the choruses of some popular songs, just as he would have done in the Belfast music halls of his boyhood. She read some of his unpublished work, and he read the draft of her newest book, Smoke on the Mountain, told her how to improve it, and wrote an introduction that ensured its success.”

During her stay at The Kilns, Joy told Lewis about her husband—that he was an unreliable parent (they had two children together) and an unfaithful spouse who even boasted to Joy about some of his conquests. While in London, she received a letter from her husband telling her he was in love with another woman. Lewis advised her to divorce her husband, not because he wanted to marry her, or so it would seem, even it was possible according to the marriage regulations of the Church of England, of which Lewis was an esteemed member. At first, she herself was opposed to the divorce on theological grounds.

Joy returned to the States only to find that her husband and this other woman had settled into the home in Staatsburg in Dutchess County, New York (just a few miles from my home) that he and Joy had shared, and learned that her husband, who suffered from bouts of alcoholism, was drinking again and that he and this other woman were sexual partners. Joy stayed in the house with them and her children, wrote to Lewis about her miseries, stayed long enough to settle her financial affairs and file for divorce, and returned to England. Arriving in Liverpool in November 1953 with her two sons, David (born in 1944) and Douglas (born in 1945), she found an apartment in London and enrolled them in an expensive prep school, paid for in part by Lewis.

Joy and her sons returned to The Kilns for a four-day visit in December 1953. But after that, until August 1955, Jack and Joy didn’t see much of each other except for the times when she and her sons stayed at The Kilns in the summer and Christmas holidays of 1954, the year her divorce became final. Also in 1954, Lewis accepted a prestigious teaching position at Cambridge University, where he stayed in a small, monk-like set of rooms during the week, returning home to Oxford on the weekends. Cambridge had created a new position with Lewis in mind and made him chairman and professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. In 1955, Lewis paid for the lease on a house for Joy and her sons at 10 Old High Street in Headington. The place was not far from his own and Lewis took advantage of her proximity to have her help him with his writing. They met almost every day when he was in Oxford and when Lewis, uncharacteristically, was suffering from a lack of ideas to write about.

Sayer writes of Joy:

“She thought that her real gifts were, not those of the original writer, but those of the editor-collaborator. To judge from Till We Have Faces [a book they worked on together], she was right. Her part in the book, and there is so much of that she can almost be called its joint author, put him very much in her debt. She stimulated and helped him to such an extent that he began to feel that he could hardly write without her.”

In 1956, for reasons that were as mysterious as they were alarming, the British government had decided not to renew Joy’s visa. She and her two boys would soon have to return to America. Neither Joy nor her sons wanted to leave. And Lewis didn’t want them to leave. Douglas Gresham, who was 10 years old at the time, recalls this fateful moment in his memoir, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis: “Jack did not want us to leave, for he had grown to love Mother deeply and had also, I believe, grown fond of the two small, active satellites who hurtled around her in wildly divergent, though equally eccentric orbits.”

On April 23, 1956, Joy and Lewis were married in a civil service ceremony at a registry office, making British citizens of Joy and her two sons. But the couple continued to live separately. In his memoir, Douglas recalls, “No announcement was made; Warnie was told that the marriage was one of convenience and charity, to allow Mother to escape from the proposed return to America, and that she would continue to live at 10 Old High Street as ‘Mrs. Gresham.’”

But Douglas was not convinced that Lewis’ marriage to his mother was one of mere “convenience and charity.” He writes: “Most of the ‘experts’ and academics seem to agree that Jack never contemplated marrying mother, until 1956, when he apparently made up his mind to do so very quickly.” Douglas believes that Lewis had considered marrying his mother as early as 1954, when he had left Oxford, which was tantamount to treason, for that much better paying job at Cambridge. Once when Douglas had worked up the courage to ask Lewis why he changed from one university to another, Lewis told him, “It’s a much better job, you see, and when a man is considering getting married, and acquiring two children into the bargain, he has to consider things like a better salary with which to support them.”

***

In June of 1956, two months after Joy and Lewis married, Joy began to feel sharp pain in the upper part of her left leg, back, and chest. She was diagnosed with a disease called fibrositis. Also, around this time, Joy was given notice requiring her to quit the Headington house. Lewis decided that she and her sons should live with him and Warren in The Kilns. Joy agreed.

Then on October 18, 1956, while still at the Headington house, she fell and was unable to get up. Later that day in the local hospital, X-rays revealed that her left femur was riddled with cancer. The bone had broken when she fell after tripping over the wire of the telephone she was rushing to answer. The doctors also found a malignant tumor in her left breast, in her right leg, and in one shoulder. Over the following month she underwent three operations, including a total hysterectomy.

The news about Joy’s cancer must have struck Lewis to the very core of his being. He’d lost his mother to cancer when he was a mere eight years old. Brian Sibley, in his book, Shadowlands: The True Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, writes:

“For Jack, it marked the return of a grisly spectre [sic] from the past. Listening to the doctor’s doomful diagnosis, all the anguish and terror of his mother’s illness and death must have come flooding back to him.

‘“No one,’ Jack once observed, ‘can mark the exact moment at which friendship becomes love’. This, however, was as good a moment as any; as he tried to take in the fact that he might soon be parted from Joy, so he began to realise [sic] just how agonizing that parting would be for him.”

While Joy was recovering in the hospital, she and Lewis decided they wanted a Christian marriage. Standing on official grounds, the Church of England’s Bishop of Oxford refused. Joy had been married once before and, although divorced, if she were to marry again it would be considered adultery in the eyes of the Church. But a former pupil of Lewis, Reverend Peter Bide, agreed to marry them. When she was well enough to be discharged, she and her sons moved into The Kilns, their new, and for Joy, her final home. Douglas writes, “Mother was sent home to die; come home she did, but die she did not…. Instead, her health began to improve, at first almost imperceptibly, but soon by leaps and bounds. ‘Miraculous,’ said the medical men and, of course, they were right, whether they knew it or not.”

Joy, who dropped her married name of Gresham and was now known as Helen Joy Davidman (the “H.” in Lewis’ A Grief Observed stands for Helen) lived another three years and four months. According to Sayer, “it was the happiest period of their lives.” Both were often in pain, Joy from her cancer and Lewis from osteoporosis. Lewis came to believe that his illness was due to his praying to become a substitute for Joy, to take some of her pain on himself. It was a phenomenon he’d learned about from Charles Williams, a friend and a fellow “Inkling.” Sayer writes: ‘“The intriguing thing,’ he said later to a friend, ‘“was that while I (for no discernible reason) was losing calcium from my bones, Joy, who needed it much more, was gaining in hers. One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution!’”

In spite of their pain, they traveled to Ireland, where Lewis had been born and raised; to Greece, where Joy had longed dream of visiting; and took frequent drives through the English countryside and went on holidays to some seaside resorts. They had also settled into a comfortable domestic life together. Sayer, who often spent some time with them at The Kilns, writes:

“There was no striving to be something they were not, to be clever or even good. They just were. They accepted each other simply, naturally, without fret or fuss. They were kind to each other and unusually quick to grasp the nuances of each other’s thoughts.” And: “Every extra day or hour that she could spend with Jack was immensely precious to her, as she knew it was to him. She was in love with him, as he with her, and knew that, almost as long as she was conscious, she could rise above the pain and discomfort so that they could be happy together.”

In the summer of 1960, however, Joy’s health rapidly declined. On the morning of July 11, Joy awoke—and woke others in the house—screaming in pain. Lewis ran down the stairs to the common living area where Joy was now sleeping to avoid the stairs to the bedroom, and he summoned her doctor from his home. Joy was given “a heavy shot,” Lewis wrote a few days later in a letter to a friend, which Sayer quotes, and was rushed in an ambulance back to the hospital. In his letter Lewis continues: “She was conscious for the short remainder of her life, and in very little pain, thanks to the drugs; and died peacefully about 10:15 the same night.”

***

“And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief,” Lewis writes in the opening pages of A Grief Observed. “Except my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth….? It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.”

Allowing himself to be “dirty and disgusting” is a far cry from the man Lewis had been before Joy’s death. His attire may have been a bit frumpy, but in his being I get the impression that he was nothing if not buttoned-up, prim, and proper. And while I am no fashion plate, I at least dressed for the day even if I was only staying home to work. But when the lockdowns hit, I had to wonder why even get dressed? Why not just stay in my pajamas all day if I’m never leaving the house? Which I was suddenly loathe to do.

Then came the apathy. All my writing projects—the articles and essays I had been working on, the novel I had completed and had just begun to shop around to agents, the interviews I was lining up to publish in a magazine in which I had previously published interviews—all of that came to a screeching halt. It was as if the world in which I had been living had died. I eventually turned to the one thing I like to do but had little time for: reading. But I hated everything else about what was happening to us, or rather, what too many were allowing to happen. I despaired. And I simmered with anger.

“Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis asks out of frustration and desperation. “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”

Some say Lewis lost his faith on account of losing Joy. There is evidence of this in the book. But in its final pages, however, you realize that he has not. He writes: “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”

Perhaps my temple, too, had been a house of cards before the COVID-19 psyop knocked it down. And the friends who abandoned or turned on me were not true friends, after all. “Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there,” Lewis writes in A Grief Observed. “What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.” The “vacuity” Lewis was referencing was the absence of there ever being a person named Joy. “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people.”

Similarly, everyone I called a friend were simply those who had not yet been unmasked. And the life I’d been living for so long was but a charade that I had managed to convince myself had meaning and purpose. Or if it did have meaning and purpose, it had no more, at least not what I had believed it was for all those years.

***

On St. Patrick’s Day after long hours of working on this essay, I decided to go for a walk. And since I was out walking, I decided to stop by an Irish pub in the small village where I live to get a take-out order of corned beef and cabbage, which I love. On my way there, I wondered if I might run into a couple with whom five years before my girlfriend and I had been quite chummy for a long time. We’d even had them over to our house for dinner after the stupid lockdowns were lifted but before the jabs were rolled out. After the jabs were rolled out, I saw that they’d made it known on Facebook that they got the jabs and were proud of it.

Sure enough, when I walked in I saw the couple and they also saw me. I worked my way through the boisterous crowd and they both held out their hands for me to shake and I returned their hearty welcome. We were cordial and chatty. So much so that I wondered if I might enjoy my dinner there at the bar and to hang out with them. Or at least get a pint of Guinness and catch up while I was waiting for my order. Or maybe buy a round for all three of us! Here was my chance to dive in and act on what I’d been thinking about doing! But in those few moments I realized I wasn’t ready. My heart wasn’t in it. I was still too shell-shocked to be with people who five years previously had once been so friendly but who then smugly espoused the fanatical diktats of the Cult of Covidians.

I waited for my order alone at the other end of the bar and wished them a happy St. Paddy’s Day on my way out the door. As I walked the mile home in the gray, late afternoon chill with my dinner getting cold in a plastic bag, I felt a mixture of relief that I was able to remain friendly with these people but also a haunting, unnameable sadness deep within me. I just couldn’t break bread with them while having to paste a disingenuous smile on my face and pretend that everything was now just fine. Because everything was still not fine at all and might never be fine again.

“The psyche’s normal reaction to a traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene of the injury,” writes Donald Kalsched in his remarkable book, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Self. “If withdrawal is not possible, then a part of the self must be withdrawn, and for this to happen the otherwise integrated ego must split into fragments or dissociate…. Dissociation is a trick the mind plays on itself. It allows life to go on by dividing up the unbearable experience and distributing it to different compartments of the mind and body, especially the ‘unconscious’ aspects of the mind and body.”

I’ve felt all of that happening to me. Withdrawal is not possible because the war is everywhere. Dissociation is an adaptive strategy. In other words, it is a reasonable response (withdrawing) to an unreasonable situation (the COVID-19 psyop). This is a war against the sacrosanct citadels of individual sovereignty and universal truth—and against the very soul of humanity. So much has been stolen from us that we will never get back—jobs, money, friendships, health, livelihoods, time. And millions of lives. And while the insane rampage of the past five years seems to be letting up some, here in America as well as in other nations around the world as more and more people wake up to put a stop to the madness, there’s no telling what’s coming. Bedlam, perhaps.

Life is a pilgrimage and I feel that I’m at a crossroads. Although sometimes it feels more like a frenetic traffic circle. I know that I alone am responsible for my inner life but I also know that God is my compass. And I want to figure out how to be true to myself and to God in what the world has become and is becoming. To not betray myself in the shattering aftermath of the betrayal of others.

In that Irish pub I realized that I still need more time before I can even attempt to mingle with those in my circle of friends who betrayed me, if it ever happens. And to even get out into the world more, as I once had. I need time and patience and the prayers of the solitary seeker on his journey of healing to continue, as Thomas Merton writes in his book, Disputed Questions, “the lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working his way through the darkness of his own mystery until he discovers that his mystery and the mystery of God merge into one reality, which is the only reality.” Which is another way of saying as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane in the hours before his crucifixion and death: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” (Mark 14:36)

I go through my days now more than ever wanting to know what I’m doing here, what God wants me to do. Not only what I want but also what God wants, and to merge those two mysteries into the one and only reality. I used to know what that looked like. I’d had it all planned out. This, too, I am grieving. Because the world has changed so dramatically since March 2020, along with my role in it, I’m now having to stumble through the smoking ruins of what the destroyers and their gang of accomplices these past five years have done to our civilization. To mourn with one step and move on with the next.

As Lewis writes of God and of the currents of grief that flow through us in the wake of death: “The teacher moves you on.”

***

A Grief Observed was originally published in 1961, a year after Joy’s death, and under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk. (Sibley writes: “Jack often used the initials ‘N.W.’, or the name ‘Nat Whilk’ on contributions to The Oxford Magazine and later Punch. The name was derived from the Anglo-Saxon ‘nat whilc’, meaning ‘I know not whom’. ‘Clerk’, taken again from Anglo-Saxon, simply implied a scholar, one able to read and write.”) Lewis used the pseudonym to avoid the notoriety and the flood of letters he was sure would arrive at his home and which he knew he would be unable to read or reply to. After Lewis’ death, the executors of his estate allowed the publisher to re-issue the book under this real name. Today, it is among his best-selling books.

The book was favorably reviewed when it was first published. Sibley quotes a reviewer of The Times Literary Supplement: “Begun after his wife’s death from a long and painful illness, the Journal might itself have become an instrument of escape. But its honesty dissection is the negation of self-pity…. Drawing firmly back from each conventional posture of the mourner, Mr Clerk invites not sympathy but cooperation in his attempt to argue out a grief.”

Lewis lived just another three years after the death of Joy. I sometimes wonder if he had been surprised by his love for her. He seemed not the sort of man to lose himself to the love of another person, especially to the depths that he loved Joy. Sibley writes: “Many years later, Warnie was to reflect on his brother’s life with Joy, describing it as ‘a short episode, of glory and tragedy: for Jack, the total (though heartbreaking) fulfillment of a whole dimension to his nature that had previously been starved and thwarted.”

To lose himself in love of the natural world was more Lewis’ cup of tea. Lewis had a mystic’s appreciation for the wonders of God’s creation. And yet without Joy in his life he seemed to have lost that sense of wonder and gratitude, as well as any interest in carrying on in any way. Lewis writes: “Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back—to be sucked back—into it?”

Douglas Gresham writes that “the fact that Jack did not really want to live any longer, all contributed to his physical deterioration.” Suffering several ailments in succession and then all at once, he finally succumbed to kidney failure. He collapsed in his bedroom November 22, 1963, at age 64. (It was the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Aldous Huxley died in California.) Warren died 10 years later on April 9, 1973. He was 77.

I’ll let Douglas, who had left The Kilns several years before and returned in 1973 from Australia, where he and his wife were living at the time, to attend Warren’s funeral, close out this story:

“The Kilns at last passed into the past. I attended Warnie’s funeral, but I can remember very little of it except that it took place on a fine, bright spring morning, such as Warnie would have found a delight in its heralding of the coming of summer. When I entered The Kilns itself, I found that it was empty, sacked as thoroughly as if by a band of Viking marauders. Everything was gone; all the furniture, books, paintings. Everything….

“The Kilns was sold to property developers who, of course, destroyed the property by building ugly houses on every square inch of it possible, where once lovely trees had stood, now stand maisonettes, and thus are the memories of childhood swept away. The wood and the lake have passed into the hands of the Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists Trust, and although for a while they were well cared for, the lake is now, probably through lethargy and shortage of funds, being allowed to silt up. Soon it will disappear altogether, becoming merely a sodden patch of boggy ground; with its passing will go many phantoms.”

---

Postscript One

The 1993 film Shadowlands presents an account of Lewis’ and Joy’s life together, beginning with their first meeting and ending with her death. The movie was based on a play originally presented at The Theatre Royal, Plymouth, England, on October 5, 1989. It opened on November 11, 1990, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York City.

Both the play and the film script were written by William Nicholson. Both the play and the movie are based on Sibley’s 1985 book, which was a tie-in to a BBC television play that Sibley had originally written under another title and for another television company.

In his biography on Lewis, Sayer, who’d spent a considerable amount of time with Lewis and Joy, writes: “The film Shadowlands is inaccurate as a picture of life at the Kilns. I think that the author of the script, William Nicholson, makes Lewis lose his faith for dramatic effect…. He was perhaps not much concerned with accuracy; his main object was to write a powerful; and successful TV play.”

The term “Shadowlands” is used in Lewis’s The Last Battle, the final novel of his The Chronicles of Narnia. The term expresses Lewis’ Christian understanding that the world in which we live is “but a shadow of something greater,” Alister McGrath writes in his Preface to Sibley’s book.

Postscript Two

In an additional important way, A Grief Observed strikes close to home. I lost my former wife to cancer in 2001. I published an essay about it in The Sun magazine, which you can read here.

Selected Bibliography

Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Meeks, Wayne A., et al. eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York, New York. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Gresham, Douglas H. Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. New York, N.Y. HarperCollins Publishers, 1988.

Kalsched, Donald. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. New York, N.Y., 1996.

Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York, N.Y. HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.

Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. Wheaton, Illinois. Crossway, 1988.

Sibley, Brian. Shadowlands: The True Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. London, England. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1985

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