A Grief Observed

“The poems in Once illuminate and echo themes of loss and grief.”―Vanity Fair The incandescent poems in Once, the second collection by an astonishing and formidable poet, explore loss, violence, and recovery. Facing a moth

Characters

C. S. Lewis (15)C.S. Lewis (1)

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left?

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

leave behind Lonely Regrets

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left?

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

Abandoned Love

You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

Life emotions

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant…

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn…

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

And then one babbles — 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it…

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

Not my idea of God, but God.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living i…

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

— C. S. Lewis, amazon.com

No one ever told me that grief felt like fear.

— C.S. Lewis, amazon.com

Grief Lose Grieving Fear

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