Lewis’s grief cannot be mine, and vice versa. Lewis’s disparaging dismissal of a labouring man’s grief for his Mum ( and 51) did expose certain personal attitudes to people he considered intellectually and socially beneath him.But then, like grief itself, this is a very individual book. Let me try thinking instead.” I was left with the impression that, in his obvious shock at losing his beloved H, despite all their prayers, he turned to his outstanding intellect for succour, and found none.Reflecting the social era in which he wrote it (1960), and his own genius (he was an Oxford Fellow), there are also hints of social and intellectual elitism in this book. “Do I hope,” he says on, “that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?” And later, on, he says, “Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. To his credit, he appears fully aware of this, and expresses his own doubts about his painful intellectual ramblings about what is, in truth, a purely emotional experience. While Madeleine L’Engle’s introduction was an erudite and emotional expression of her grief after losing her husband of 40 years, Lewis’s first two chapters were too angrily self-absorbed and incoherent for me to gain any comfort or connection with his writing. Perhaps his sincere grief, and its intensity, is different to my grief because, thankfully, I haven’t yet lost my own much-loved spouse. In the last year, I've experienced a spate of close family deaths, but Lewis’ A GRIEF OBSERVED is a personal diary I could relate to only fleetingly.

Book a grief observed