30/10/2025
One of the best books ever to unmask the beast that is grief. A raw, wild reckoning revealed. And by the author of my all time favorite book series -Narnia.
Xx❤️🩹
I thought I could observe grief. Watch it from behind glass like some clinical specimen. I was a fool. C.S. Lewis doesn't let you observe anything. He grabs you by the throat and drags you into the pit with him. This book strips away every comfortable lie you've told yourself about love and loss and suffering itself. Lewis bleeds onto the page, and the blood is still warm. His beloved Joy is dead, and he is shattered—not metaphorically, but actually broken into pieces that no longer fit. He doesn't write about grief. He is grief, and you can't help becoming it too. You feel his rage. His confusion. The sickening vertigo of a world that has stopped making sense. The brilliant mind that gave us Narnia is here reduced to a howling animal, and he has the devastating courage to show you every ugly, undignified moment. No polish. No distance. No mercy.
This book will gut you. It will force you to look at the one truth we all run from: that love always, always ends in devastation. Either you die first, or they do. There is no third option. Love is a contract written in blood, and grief is the price we pay for daring to sign it.
Here Are Five Truths From The Book That Will Transform You:
1. Grief Doesn't Come in Stages—It Comes Like a Beast That Circles Back to Devour You
Forget the "stages of grief." Lewis shows you the truth: grief is chaos. A predator that strikes without warning. One moment you're laughing, the next you're on your knees, crushed by absence so heavy your chest caves in.
He writes of grief arriving "like the sound of a door opening in the next room"—and when you rush toward it, desperate, you find only emptiness. Just air where a person used to be. That image will haunt you because grief is that door opening over and over, promising presence and delivering only void.
You cannot control when the wave will hit or how hard it will slam you against the rocks. All you can do is learn to breathe underwater, to survive the drowning again and again.
2. Faith Doesn't Survive Grief Intact—It Gets Burned Down and Built Back From Ash
Here is C.S. Lewis, one of Christianity's greatest defenders, confessing that God feels like a sadist. That prayer is shouting into a locked door. That heaven now seems like a cosmic joke.
"Where is God?" he asks. And the answer is silence. Not comfort. Not peace. Just the terrible, echoing silence of a universe that has stopped caring.
Lewis doesn't give you platitudes. He shows you faith in its most vulnerable state—naked, trembling, stripped of every certainty. He shows you that doubt isn't the opposite of faith. Doubt is faith under pressure, faith in the furnace, faith being burned down to its essential core.
Sometimes you have to lose God to find God. Sometimes grief is the fire that burns away everything false, leaving only what's real—even if what's real is terrifying and nothing like you expected.
3. Grief Doesn't End—It Just Changes Shape, Becomes a Scar You Carry Forever
The pain doesn't go away. Anyone who promises you it will is lying. What happens is you become someone new. Someone who has lost a limb and learned to walk again, but differently. Forever off-balance. Forever aware of what's missing.
At first, grief is an amputation—raw, screaming, impossible. But time doesn't heal that wound. Time just teaches you how to live with it. You learn to function around the absence, to build a life on top of the scar tissue.
And some days, grief becomes almost gentle. "Like a blanket, soft and warm," Lewis writes. A bittersweet companion that reminds you of what you had, of how deeply you loved, of the fact that you survived the unsurvivable.
4. You Never See Love Clearly Until It's Ripped Away
Lewis discovers that he has never seen Joy more clearly than in her absence. Every detail he took for granted—the sound of her laugh, the spark of her mind, the comfort of her presence—now burns with unbearable clarity. Loss is a developer fluid that brings the photograph into perfect, agonizing focus.
When someone is alive, they're just there. Background. Ordinary. But when they die, suddenly every moment you didn't pay attention becomes a crime. Every time you scrolled your phone instead of looking at their face. Every "I love you" you forgot to say.
The cruelty is this: we don't know what we have until we lose it. And by then, it's too late. The full weight of love reveals itself only in retrospect, only in the unbearable clarity of its absence.
5. The Only Way Out Is Through—And Through Means Straight Into the Heart of Hell
Lewis doesn't run. He doesn't numb himself or bury the pain under activity and noise. He walks straight into the fire. He sits with the loneliness. He feels the physical ache of absence. He lets grief do its terrible work.
This is the hardest lesson: grief demands to be felt. You can postpone it, but you cannot avoid it. You can run for years, but it will catch you. And when it does, it will be twice as fierce.
Lewis shows you what courage actually looks like—not the courage of warriors, but the courage of staying present to your own pain. Of not flinching from the horror of loss. Of allowing yourself to be broken because breaking is the only way to become whole again.
He discovers that grief is not the enemy of love. Grief is love. It's love with nowhere to go. And the only way to honor that love is to let it transform you, to let it carve out new space in your heart.
A Grief Observed is a wound that never truly closes. It reminds us that to love is to accept inevitable heartbreak—and still, we choose love. Because the alternative, to never love at all, is a quieter kind of death. Read this book when you’re ready to be undone. Read it when you’re ready to be remade. Read it when you’re brave enough to face grief not as a problem to solve, but as something to endure—and through enduring, let it shape you into something that almost resembles grace.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3Jt2pTz
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