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C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 1961
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Death of his
wife, Helen Joy
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 From Chapter 2
Death
of his wife, Helen Joy:
…The most precious gift that marriage gave me was
this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all
the time unmistakably other, resistant --- in a word, real. Is all
that work to be undone? Or what I shall still call [Helen] to sink
back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor
pipedreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive
that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take so much
trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed
to crawl back – to be sucked back – into it? …
…What pitiable cant to say, ‘she will live 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 of
horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was H. I
loved. As if I want to fall in love with my memory of her, an image
in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest. …
…But there are other difficulties. "Where is she
now? That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is
not a body – and the body I loved is certainly no longer she – she
is in no place at all. And ‘the present time’ is a data point in our
time series. It is as if she were on a journey without me and I
said, looking at my watch, ‘I wonder is she at Euston now.’ But
unless she is proceeding at sixty seconds a minute along the same
timeline that all we living people travel by, what does now mean? If
the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any
clear difference, when we speak of them, between was and is and will
be?
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
my 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 earthy
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. The old life, the
jokes, the drinks, the argument, the lovemaking, the tiny,
heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, "H. is
dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is part of the past. And
the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself if
one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the
former things have past away.’
…One
flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I
the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or
rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee
shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead
– and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by
wreckers. Such was H.’s landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their
landfalls, not their arrivals.
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