Grief was everywhere last week. The grief of families and friends of 146 victims of a high-rise fire in Hong Kong, grief at the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington DC, grief at the deaths of Jimmy Cliff and Tom Stoppard.
Unless you’re a stoic, the risk of grief is the price you pay for love. Stoics shrug and say there’s not a lot you can do if someone you care about dies. Concentrate on the things you can change and forget the rest. Do all you can to avoid succumbing to sadness. Sadness is a useless emotion that will colour your life grey.
But that’s a kind of philosophical machismo. Personally I’m more comfortable with those who recognise that feeling intense grief at the loss of loved ones is inevitable and debilitating, and at the same time understandable and right.
CS Lewis, who was born 127 years ago on November 29, wrote perceptively about this in A Grief Observed, his memoir of how his wife’s death from cancer just four years after their marriage affected him. He compares his grief to fear, to being concussed, and even to being mildly drunk.
He observes how it made him uncharacteristically lazy, loathing the slightest effort. He functions at work, but nowhere else, and recognises how someone grieving can easily give up on self-care and end up living in squalor.
Lewis tries to pull himself together in that stiff-upper-lip way, attempts to persuade himself that love is not the whole of life, that he has inner resources, that he can cope, since after all, he coped before he met his wife. But then “a sudden jab of red-hot memory” comes from nowhere and that commonsense “soldier-on” attitude vanishes “like an ant in the mouth of a furnace”.
For Lewis grief isn’t a state, but a process. He talks of the long winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape – or exactly the same one again.
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He knows the risk of feeling sorry for himself, describing “the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging in it”. He expresses disgust as he sees himself sinking down into that rewarding but destructive state.
But his most perceptive and painful observations are about grief and memory, the risk of sentimentality that could distort who H (his wife) was and transform her into a kind of doll to cry over, rather than the real woman he knew.
He tries to cling to his fresh memory of her, of her mind as “lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard”.
Visiting places where they had been happy together, a favourite pub, a much-loved wood, he expects to be afflicted by her absence, but forces himself to go nevertheless, likening this to a pilot taking to the air again as soon as possible after crashing. But, surprisingly, those places don’t carry any particular pain for him. It’s far worse than that.
H’s absence spreads everywhere. It’s not tied to locations. Lewis experiences this through his whole being: “Her absence is like the sky spread over everything.”
This is reminiscent of a passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness where the philosopher describes going to meet his friend Pierre in a cafe. When Sartre arrives, Pierre is not there. Pierre’s absence colours Sartre’s whole perception of the place.
We usually think of ourselves as perceiving what is around us. But we can experience what is absent with equal intensity when someone is not where we expect them to be. When they die, their absence is the hollow centre of grief.
Lewis can’t find consolation in photographs. He has no good image of H. He can’t visualise her face accurately, even though he can recall the faces of complete strangers he has passed in the street.
His explanation is that he has seen H from so many different angles, with so many expressions – “waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking” – that all those recollections crowd his memory, and leave just a blur. A single image can’t capture her in her rich, varied and animated being.
He doesn’t want to be in love with a memory of H. He worries that his memories are already being softened, that he can’t recapture the “rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness”, an otherness that 10 seconds with her would restore, but which time is gently covering up like snow.
In an important sense he has lost the real her. And that is a terrible loss.
