Day 10: Grieving, and Thinking About Grieving (1st August)

 

The Reading Today

• Daily Theme: The Weight of Grief and Loss
• Source Material: A Grief Observed / Mere Christianity

My Reflection

"Good grief." Whenever people use that common idiom, I always find myself thinking: What on earth is so good about grief?

In my younger days, I lost both of my maternal grandparents while in my twenties. I was shocked and confused, not quite knowing how to feel, even though I loved them both dearly—especially my grandmother ("Nanny"). Now, in my sixties, I have carried the weight of much more loss: my mother, my step-mother, and a dear, much-loved pet dog named Tegan.

It was through these losses that I felt the true, enduring weight of grief. It isn't something you simply "get over," nor is it something that neatly "heals with time." I didn't realise at first that grief would become a constant companion—walking quietly alongside me, only for some tiny, seemingly unconnected event, a familiar smell, or a passing comment to tear through my emotional armour and disable me for a time. The simple smell of a popular disinfectant, for example, can trigger an almost Proustian moment of memory. You realise, with a fresh ache, that you can no longer share life's tiny, ordinary moments with the ones who have gone.

Lewis understood this intimately. Marrying late in life, he found true, deep happiness only to have it cruelly torn away when his wife, Joy Davidman (Gresham), died of cancer—a poignant period of his life captured so beautifully in the film Shadowlands.

In today’s passage, Lewis describes grief as a kind of "vicious circle." You feel grief, and then you begin thinking about the fact that you are grieving. He likens it to a severe toothache—something I know all too well. You lie there in physical pain, but you also lie there trapped in the mental weight of knowing you have the toothache.

His raw journal of loss, A Grief Observed, was a profound comfort to me when my mother passed away, and again after the passing of my step-mother. Lewis mentions cancer frequently in his writing, which was the very disease that took both my mother and step-mother.

Seeing continuous appeals for cancer research on television serves as a sharp wake-up call. When I find myself closeted in intellectual towers, pondering "the walled garden of the mind and soul," it reminds me that outside those walls, real, fierce battles are raging every day as adults and children fight this disease. It is a reminder of how much grief touches our shared human experience.

 

Why This Matters

Grief changes us permanently; we do not return to the person we were before the loss. Acknowledging that grief is a companion rather than a problem to be solved frees us from the expectation that we ought to "be over it by now." It softens our hearts, pulling us out of self-absorbed abstraction and grounding us in empathy for a hurting world.

My Action for Today

Today, I will honor the memory of those I have lost—not by fighting the sudden waves of grief when they arrive, but by allowing them to remind me of how deeply I loved them, and by extending extra kindness to someone around me who may be quietly carrying their own grief.

Reader Question

Has a book, a film, or a piece of writing ever helped you navigate the heavy landscape of grief? I’d be touched to read your experiences in the comments.