Grief Observed
C. S. Lewis

Narrated By: Ralph Cosham

Duration: 1 hour and 52 minutes

What to expect

Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis’ honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: “Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

This is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

Genre

Biography: religious and spiritual, Coping with death and bereavement, Christian life and practice, Relationships and families: advice and issues, Christianity, The arts: general issues

Listen to a sample

“Reading A Grief Observed is to share not only in C. S. Lewis’ grief, but in his understanding of love, and that is richness indeed.”

“[A Grief Observed] is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.”

“A very personal, anguished, luminous little book about the meaning of death, marriage, and religion.”

“Grief exhibits Lewis’ ability to capture the ear…Ralph Cosham gives a fluid and evenhanded reading to this soul-baring expose of emotion itself and the man who wrote about it.”