On Sorrow and Death, Consolation and Courage
Misguided efforts to cancel death
To Mrs. Percival Wiseman March 20, 1944
You are quite right to keep clear of the Spiritualists. All that is an effort to cancel death, to go on getting a pale phantom of the same sort of intercourse with our dear ones which we had when they and we were members of the same world. But we must submit to death, embrace the cross.
I think the purpose of the separation is to help us to turn what is merely natural and instinctive affection into real spiritual love of them in Christ. Not that natural affection isn’t good and innocent, but it is merely natural—and therefore must first be crucified before it can rise again. Those who try to escape the crucifixion fall in either with charlatans or with delusions from hell: spiritualism often drives people mad. Of course, we should pray for our dead as I’m sure they do for us.
(CL 2, 607–608)
On the death of his friend Charles Williams
To Anne Ridler June 3, 1945
It is an interesting fact that everyone almost who has spoken or written to me about his death says something different of him and all true. One feels curiously un-depressed, do you find? It has increased enormously one’s faith in the next life and I can’t help feeling him all over the place. I can’t put it into words: I never knew the death of a good man could itself do so much good. I don’t mean there isn’t pain, pain in plenty: but not dull, sullen, sickening, drab, resentful pain.
(CL 2, 659)
The newly dead may have the power to bless those they have left behind
To Vera Mathews March 27, 1951
I have just got your letter of the 22nd containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really “trying to pretend it didn’t happen.” It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high minded people who make out that it “doesn’t matter.” It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel very strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind; His birthday present. Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us. God bless you all and give you grace to receive all the good in this, as in every other event, that is intended you.
(CL 3, 103–104)
Comments to a friend who had recently lost her husband
To Phyllis Elinor Sandeman December 22, 1953
First, you may be quite sure that I realize (I’d be a fool if I didn’t) that there is something in a loss like yours which no unmarried person can understand. Secondly, that nothing I or anyone can say will remove the pain. There are no anesthetics. About the bewilderment and about the right and wrong ways of using the pain, something may perhaps be done: but one can’t stop it hurting. The worst way of using the pain, you have already avoided: i.e. resentment.
Now about not wanting to pray, surely there is one person you very much want to pray for: your husband himself. You ask, can he help you, but isn’t this probably the time for you to help him. In one way, you see, you are further on than he: you had begun to know God. He couldn’t help you in that way: it seems to me quite possible that you can now help more than while he was alive. So get on with that right away. Our Lord said that man and wife were one flesh and forbade any man to put them asunder: and we may be sure He doesn’t do Himself what He forbade us to do. Your present prayers for your husband are still part of the married life.
Then as for your own shock in discovering that you hadn’t got nearly as far as you thought towards loving the God who made your husband and gave him to you more than the gift. Well, no. One keeps on thinking one has crossed that bridge before one has. And God knows that it has to be crossed sooner or later, in this life or in another. And the first step is to discover that one has not crossed it yet. I wonder could He have really shown you this in any other way? Or even if we can’t answer that, can’t we trust Him to know when and how best the terrible operation can be done? Of course it is easy (I know) for the person who isn’t feeling the pain to say all these things. You yourself would have been able to say them of anyone else’s loss. Whatever rational grounds there are for doubt, you knew them all before: can it be rational (of course, it is natural) to weight them so differently simply because, this time, oneself is the sufferer? Doesn’t that make it obvious that the doubts come not from the reason but from the shrinking nerves? At any rate, don’t try to argue with them: not now, while you are crippled. Ignore them: go on. Be regular in all your religious duties. Remember it is not being loved but loving which is the high and holy thing. You are now practicing the second without the full comfort of the first. It was certain from the beginning that you would some day have to do this, for no human love passes onto the eternal level in any other way.
(CL 3, 392–393)
To a newly bereaved correspondent
To Mrs. D. Jessup January 5, 1954
Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. . . .
I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught—that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs & ascetics.
And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my Mother’s illness and death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial and prosaic.
May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal and that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings and with deep sorrow.
(CL 3, 404–405)
God may be most present when we feel his presence least
To Mary Margaret McCaslin August 2, 1954
I will certainly put you in my prayers. I can well believe that you were divinely supported at the time of your terrible calamity. People often are. It is afterwards, when the new and bleaker life is beginning to be a routine, that one often feels one has been left rather unaided. I am sure one is not really so. God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.
Loneliness, I am pretty sure, is one of the ways by which we can grow spiritually. Until we are lonely we may easily think we have got further than we really have in Christian love: our (natural and innocent, but merely natural, not heavenly) pleasure in being loved—in being, as you say, an object of interest to someone—can be mistaken for progress in love itself, the outgoing active love which is concerned with giving, not receiving. It is this latter which is the beginning of sanctity.
But of course you know all this: alas, so much easier to know in theory than to submit to day by day in practice! Be very regular in your prayers and communions: and don’t value special “guidances” any more than what comes thro’ ordinary Christian teaching, conscience, and prudence.
I am shocked to hear that your friends think of following me. I wanted them to follow Christ. But they’ll get over this confusion soon, I trust.
Please accept my deepest sympathy.
(CL 3, 500–501)
Our best havings are wantings
To Dom Bede Griffiths November 5, 1954
About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria [homeland]. It is the bright frontispiece [which] whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.
(CL 3, 522–523)
To a correspondent who was having to put her pet down
To Mary Willis Shelburne August 18, 1956
I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e. at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little.
No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much—i.e. more than every one of God’s works deserves. But you need not feel “like a murderer.” Rather rejoice that God’s law allows you to extend to Fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans. You’ll get over this.
(CL 3, 782)
On aging bodies as old cars
To Mary Willis Shelburne September 30, 1958
I also have been in the hands of the dentist but much less unpleasantly than you; I know a “dry socket” after an extraction can be the very devil and all. We must both, I’m afraid, recognize that, as we grow older, we become like old cars—more and more repairs and replacements are necessary. We must just look forward to the fine new machines (latest Resurrection model) which are waiting for us, we hope, in the Divine garage!
(CL 3, 975)
On lilies and wrinkles
To Mary Willis Shelburne October 30, 1958
I suppose living from day to day (“take no thought for the morrow”) is precisely what we have to learn—though the Old Adam in me sometimes murmurs that if God wanted me to live like the lilies of the field, I wonder why He didn’t give me the same lack of nerves and imagination as they enjoy! Or is that just the point, the precise purpose of this Divine paradox and audacity called Man—to do with a mind what other organisms do without it?
As for wrinkles—pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
(CL 3, 984–985)
To a friend whose wife had just died
To Sir Henry Willink December 3, 1959
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case “What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?”
People talk as if grief were just a feeling—as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.
I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.
I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory.
(CL 3, 1102)
An illusion caused by sorrow
To Phoebe Hesketh June 14, 1960
The most mischievous—and painful—by-product of any sorrow is the illusion that it isolates one, that one is kicked out alone for this from an otherwise cheerful, bustling, “normal” world. How much better to realize that one is just doing one’s turn in the line like all the rest of the ragged and tired human regiment!
(CL 3, 1162)
To a correspondent who had been diagnosed with a “dangerous” disease
To Mary Willis Shelburne March 19, 1963
I’m sorry they threaten you with a painful disease. “Dangerous” matters much less, doesn’t it? What have you and I got to do but make our exit? When they told me I was in danger several months ago, I don’t remember feeling distressed.
I am talking, of course, about dying, not about being killed. If shells started falling about this house I should feel quite differently. An external, visible, and (still worse) audible threat at once wakes the instinct of self-preservation into fierce activity. I don’t think natural death has any similar terrors.
(CL 3, 1415)
On perseverance and its reward
To Mrs. Johnson March 13, 1956
Keep on, keep on: “To him that overcometh I will give the Morning Star.”* All blessings.
*Revelation 2:26–28
(CL 3, 720)
On facing a possibly terminal illness
To Mary Willis Shelburne June 17, 1963
Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Remember, tho’ we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you “Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?”
Of course this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.
Yours (and like you a tired traveler, near the journey’s end)*
*Lewis died about five months after this letter was written. The correspondent lived another twelve years.
(CL 3, 1430–1431)
Coping with physical and mental decline
To Mary Willis Shelburne June 28, 1963
I think the best way to cope with the mental debility and total inertia is to submit to it entirely. Don’t try to concentrate. Pretend you are a dormouse or even a turnip.
But of course I know the acceptance of inertia is much easier for men than for women. We are the lazy sex. Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.
(CL 3, 1434)
The “solemn fun” of nearing the end
To Sister Penelope September 17, 1963
I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma—and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it—but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage and one almost (but nella sua voluntade e nostra pace*) regrets having the door shut in one’s face. Ought we to honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.
If you die first, and if “prison visiting” is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.
It is all rather fun—solemn fun—isn’t it?**
*“in His will is our peace”
**C. S. Lewis died the following month, on November 22, 1963.