The Still Point Of The Turning World (17 page)

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Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape . . . Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one you are presented with, exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.

—
C. S. Lewis,
A Grief Observed

T
hat summer I sat at a great wooden slab of a writing desk in southern Spain, on a retreat with other writers, looking out over a hump of mountain crowned with lights. Earlier that day, dropping through the thick layer of clouds, a hoop skirt of sunshine opened like the bones of a parasol but offered no shade. It was summer solstice, and that night there would be a bonfire on the beach and free sardines
(gran sardinada!),
live music and booze and “treats for kids.” Noche de San Juan.
Equinocio
—the equinox. People would throw what they wanted to cast off into the fire, little sins or sadnesses scribbled onto slips of paper and scooped up in the blaze. I had nothing to burn and everything to lose. I was not in the mood for fiestas. Instead I sat reading C. S. Lewis and writing about Ronan.

C. S. Lewis knew how to do grief: how to write it, how to think about it, and how to live through it and finally dwell in it. Originally published under a different name, the sleek little missile of a book is the almost journalistic chronicle of the minutes and seconds and hours and weeks and months of grief after the death of Lewis’s beloved wife, a woman he fell in love with late in his life and much to his brooding but delighted surprise. He married her while she was ill, fully aware that their time together was limited. The book is angry, profound, wrenching and, above all, full of questions that Lewis attempts to answer using both faith and intelligence together, a pairing that feels wholly unexpected, a colorful weasel popping out of an ordinary cardboard box. What’s a devout Christian guy (indeed, an
apologist
)
to do with a big fat heap of despair when the God he believes in has arranged for a fabulous, postresurrection afterlife that doesn’t accommodate despair and actually might equate it with sin? He digs and digs with the sharp instrument of his mind. He’s a virtual cutter, and he will not let the difficult topics lie. He goes right for them.

Grief is a sickness, Lewis reasons, and a deadly one without a cure—“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms”—and he searches his formidable, very wise and devout brain for answers or cures that might include the notion of a good (or bad) God, the time-space continuum and logic. He comes up short in every respect. He is dizzy, whirling, lost and sad, but he does not give up. He thinks and thinks and thinks. Each day he goes back, each day he wrangles: why, where, how, when, what? Do people (their bodies, their minds, their “sum totals,” whatever we might mean by that) become “sheer intellects” in our minds and memories, able to peer through our enchantments and reveal our self-delusions? Do dead spirits become ghosts housed in memory or are they actually physical ghosts, and if so, are they chain-rattling and pesky, floating about in the dead of night, or are they calm and contented fairies fluttering about? Are the long-dead beloveds wandering through Kafka’s letters actually real? If one begs God for mercy, does that mean that God is capable of withholding it, and what does that say about the quality or effectiveness of God’s mercy in the first place? How is God truly merciful if, in every case, he’s making a choice? It’s like love: you don’t decide to be in, you
fall
into it or else it’s not love but something else entirely. Lewis lets it all fall into his head and then out again. He is a shackled journalist seeking to write a factual article without the opportunity to gather any evidence or empirical proof or even move off the floor of some smelly old prison in some faraway place. All he can do is scratch on the walls and wonder and writhe around on the bare floor. The only place to search, the only landscape he can visit, is his heart. Turns out that’s a pretty big and interesting place.

Why is his method of thought so interesting, so new? In the middle of his grief experience, Lewis acknowledges the limits of empathy. We are constantly told (and sometimes taught, if this is possible) to be empathetic, to develop empathy, to use it when thinking about or talking about another person’s difficult situation. It’s like a marketable skill, something to deploy, detonate,
use
. We are asked to extend our empathy (or, more accurately, our sympathy, which is more of a distancing maneuver) almost every day. Tsunamis. Terrorist attacks. Bombs. Famines. Hurricanes. Child abuse. Rape. War. We get facts and are asked to imagine and we say
isn’t that terrible
and we believe that we empathize.
I feel you,
we say, and
the world is wicked
and
I’m so sorry.
Nice theory, Lewis concludes; too bad the whole notion of empathy is completely bunk. “You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain.” You can’t really test the strength of a rope until you’re asked to hang from it over a cliff. There have to be stakes. After his wife dies, Lewis understands that nobody—ever—can feel another person’s agony.
Not even God.
It is this last bit that makes him truly weary, as prayer (his old standby) has become useless to him. If God has limits, then what?

Without prayer to sustain him, Lewis is stranded
in
(not
by
) grief, and, what’s worse, it’s a landscape of his own making, and the geography is constantly shifting. It’s a place, sure, but nobody can come and visit; nobody has the password, nobody can really, truly walk through that wardrobe door and see what you’re doing on the other side of it, or what you’ve been imagining or experiencing. Grief as a place is textured and variable in terms of weather, chance inhabitants, and geographical location. It might be lunar, alpine, subtropical. It might have birds or beetles or very large and hungry bears roaming about, hunting. It might be a house, an apartment, a mansion, a shack. Each day requires a reorientation, a brutal schooling in the vicissitudes of grief:

Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment, or, in short, when he experiences the environment as meaningful. Dwelling therefore implies something more than “shelter.” It implies that the spaces where life occurs are places, in the true sense of the word. A place is a space which has a distinct character. Since ancient times the genius loci, or “spirit of place,” has been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life.

—
Christian Norberg-Schulz
, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture

You inhabit grief and grief inhabits you, which means you have to learn how to dwell within it. The problem with this is that each time you open a door or look behind a pretty-looking tree there’s something terrible and stinking and life-threatening flowering behind it.

As Lewis navigates his feelings of being cursed (his beloved wife gone at forty-five), he realizes that grief is a mobile landscape and it’s not wholly bad or to be avoided. Yes, you never know when it might show up at your door and start planting some rotting trees or tasteless garden gnomes. You also don’t know when you’ll notice a perfect, blooming rose, or experience a moment of utterly uncomplicated happiness that no drug could provide. But I still felt deeply afraid. I felt the yawn of some terrible loss that was to come, that had, in some respects, already arrived, a gravitational tug of pure, unadulterated horror. Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” Yes, I thought, yes. Being in the world while grieving, while holding the “doomed” child in front of you or thinking about that child, means that you moved through the world tired, or uncaring, indifferent and detached, as if you were slightly drunk. Prayer may seem pointless to Lewis—“But when you go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside”—but thinking and imagining
do not.
He gets up and gets right back into his landscape of grief. He starts planting, weeding, tearing up, building, burning everything to the ground and starting over.

In
A Grief Observed,
in the middle of all his spiritual and intellectual activity, Lewis gets technical; he searches, flounders. What happens to the physical body, he muses, and/or to the soul, to the
person,
this “cloud of atoms,”
after death? “That is,
in what place
is she
at the present time?
” Part of what infuriates Lewis about the “she’s in heaven” angle is that it presumes that his beloved wife is either static, and therefore might as well be dead, or alive, and then how does that work? Does she age in the way we understand it in our own universe and in our own bodies? Or is there reverse aging? Do we morph into various creatures at various angelic whims? “Jung said that there is no coming to life without pain, and that may well be true of what happens to us after death. The important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.” Is there some death initiation? Some physical or moral hoops? How can we ask a God to be both mysterious and all-powerful and also understandable? “All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round?” Lewis is an algebra teacher trying to explain the actual physical size of an imagined number—is it the size of a basket, a kitten, an ocean, the microscopic head of a pin?

Kind people have said to me, “She is with God.” In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable . . . Unless, of course, you believe all that stuff about family reunions “on the further shore,” pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back.

No alternative realities, then. No Ronan growing up in some other dimension, on some other planet or in some other place, in some imaginary heaven. But then why the dreams of his walking into my room and asking for a story, a glass of water, a hug, asking for comfort after a nightmare? Why these images of him at six, ten, sixty, thirty-two? Why were the images so vivid? Had part of him already crossed over and these dreams were a glimpse of a parallel universe not unlike the one Lewis creates behind the wardrobe door? And how could I square a nonbelief in God’s existence with this desire to blame God for not being good, for allowing evil, and for demanding that some part of my son go on after his physical death? Lewis: “What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the
prima facie
evidence suggest exactly the opposite. What have we to set against it?” But then who or what creates the afterlife, the secondary world, the other place? He revises this logic in the next chapter, describing it as “a yell” instead of a thought, and in the end he decides that the depiction of God as sadist is too anthropomorphic to be an adequate description of God’s alleged powers, even more inaccurate and offensive than an old bushy-bearded man looking out for humankind’s best interests.

Of course, like Lewis, I would never
not
be without Ronan, from the moment after his last moment and until the final moment of my own life. His absence, like Lewis’s wife was for him, would be “like the sky, spread over everything.”

C. S. Lewis would have likely identified with this passage from
Frankenstein: Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture?

I realized, with horror and despair and with a strange, breathtaking relief, that life would always be amiss in some way. And also that I would never forget Ronan; that it would be impossible. There were a lot of mountains in the land of grief, a lot of gut-busting treks, a lot of
work
to do: tunnels and high rises to dig and build; tourist attractions to promote. And that needed to be done on a daily basis, mind you, because the beloved died again and again. Rebuilding was always required. It’s easy to get lost in the work of creating a whole new country of grief, and Lewis worried about the days after the “mad midnight moments.” I, too, dreaded the moment after the final moment, that “landfall,” as Lewis would describe it (different from an “arrival,” which implies safety). No wonder grieving people are so exhausted all the time; no wonder we retreat to trash television and episodes of
Law and Order
or hypomanic episodes or liters of vodka or brief and lurid love affairs with people we hardly know
.
Especially in this culture where we’re taught that all of our value rests, somehow, in the future and what we do or accomplish there, what do we do when what’s coming for us is death?

If it is impossible to truly care about the sorrows of the world until they are our own, as Lewis claims, meaning that our faith and sympathy are revealed for what they truly are—acts of imagination—then what? Imagination is okay, Lewis decides. It is all we have; it is enough. When the grief lifts, he remembers his wife best; when he is not thrashing and screaming, he can feel her, he can rest, he’s at peace. The intensity of our longing to understand, he believes, is what makes that understanding so uniquely impossible.