She and Lewis were close friends - before she even moved to the UK, they had corresponded about books and theology - and so Lewis agreed to marry her out of what he described to a friend as “a pure matter of friendship and expediency.”ĭavidman and Lewis did not consider themselves to be truly married after their civil ceremony in 1956, in part because they weren’t married in a church. They met when he was in his 60s and she in her 40s, and they married, at first, for immigration purposes: Davidman, an American-born poet, wanted to stay with her son in the UK, and a marriage would help her do so. Lewis is a precise and scrupulously honest chronicler of his own thoughts, and the result is a portrait of a mind in the throes of very personal grief, which is why it is perhaps strange that what he describes feels so similar to the grief of living through an era of mass death worldwide. This slim volume is a transcript of Lewis’s journal after the death of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, and in its pages Lewis tracks the process of his own mourning: its repetitions and its strange boredoms, its agonizing small moments.

One of the best literary examinations of grief that I know of is C.S. But as a nation, America has been afforded little space to stop and feel the grief that comes with the tragedy of this moment in history. And even if you don’t personally know anyone who died, you still have to reckon with the loss of the world that used to exist. More than half a million Americans are dead. In this terrible pandemic year, it has been oddly difficult to find ways to talk about the onslaught of bitter and unrelenting grief.

A grief observed by cs lewis