1 AUGUST
1 AUGUST
Grieving, and Thinking About Grieving
Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:
Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
—from A Grief Observed
August 1960 Following Joy’s death in July 1960, Lewis writes A Grief Observed.