Spiralling up and down

More on A Grief Observed...

Each time I open the book and flip to a random page, I am thoroughly engaged.
I think all of us, at one time or another, can identify with Lewis's description of his sense of grief and loss.

Loss and grief are profound emotions - thoroughly pervasive and penetrating, yet so unqualified, so absolute, so Unknown. A person in grief, flounders through - somehow. Through the ups, and up the downs - over and over... such is the process of grief. Over and over, but onwards and forwards, over and over.

of Grief

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can't be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put'. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often- will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realised my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.

C.S. Lewis - A Grief Obeserved

I wonder how the disciples felt as Jesus died on the cross...

of Loss...

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.

C.S. Lewis - A Grief Obeserved