This blog briefly interrupts the sequential appearance of the several sections of my Personal World View, but for what I believe to be a good reason. As with virtually all of my blogs, I write them because they deal with some subject that I care about, something that has been fermenting in my brain for a while, a topic that is relevant to current affairs, or, more rarely, something related to an existential occurrence in my life. As the topic should make clear, the latter is the case for this post!

Most readers will know that in just over three months, as I write this, I lost both of my daughters: Melissa Lynn Leininger Daley on March 30^th and Deborah Kay Leininger Weidenhamer on June 2^nd, thus the reason for my grief and the “Mine” in the title of this blog.

Shortly after Melissa’s death, my cousin and dear friend, Gay Fitting, sent me a copy of C.S.Lewis’s book,  A Grief Observed, reflecting on the death of his wife. As a frequent follower of Lewis’s writings, I had read this book some years earlier, but as I read it again from this very different perspective in my life, a number of his observations, the open sharing of his grief, and especially the stark issues he raised related to his faith, caught my attention anew—thus, the obvious reason for the topic and the appended “His” in the title of this blog. Since I will be offering numerous quotations from his book, please note the following disclaimer:

I make no contention that I am in any way offering a precis, abstract, or comprehensive summary of C.S. Lewis’s book or his full response to his wife’s death! I have, rather, “cherry-picked” from selected parts of his book those quotations that spoke to my own mental and emotional struggles!

That said, I will proceed.

The loss of my youngest daughter, Melissa, was completely unexpected. She had MS for a number of years but, while there is no cure, she was under treatment and we assumed she was stable. Then her husband came home from work on March 20^th and found her lying in the back yard, dead. Since the coroner found no other discernible cause of death, he attributed it to complications from MS.

As I said to numerous people who offered their sincere and heartfelt sympathy, losing her was level of grief I never could have anticipated or imagined–we’re not supposed to outlive our kids! Then the death of Deborah, my oldest daughter, added yet another level of heartache—and the two of them together have been devastating beyond anything conceivable!

Deb had a urinary tract infection for days at home that no one knew about—she didn’t tell anyone about the symptoms because she didn’t want to go to the hospital—but eventually she hit a critical point and by the time the ambulance reached the emergency room, the infection had already triggered the chain reaction throughout her body that lead to a sepsis infection. It was by then untreatable, had led to tissue damage, and would cause organ failure. She was from that point until her death, unconscious and unresponsive.

The emergency room physician was confident that she would not make it through the night, and the doctors and nurses who cared for her thought every day and night would be her last. Although we held on to a dim but unrelenting hope, we knew this could have only one conclusion, even though she hung on for seven days!  I guess that stubborn streak she always possessed had asserted itself at the most subconscious level of her mind and body until it could no longer prolong her life.

One of the images that won’t go away—both a blessing and a curse—were my last few minutes with her in the hospital, an experience that Melissa’s sudden death sadly did not offer!  Deb was completely unconscious, unresponsive, had not moved even once all day long. I stroked her hair, caressed her cheek, kissed her forehead, and whispered to her that her Dad was present, that I loved her unreservedly. Now, she has been cremated, her ashes in an urn, and although I believe in cremation—it’s in my own will—I can’t shake the consciousness that the hair, forehead, cheek I stroked and kissed no longer exist! It tends to make me weep, but I wish I could have had those moments with Missy.

I will soon be using Lewis’s own words related to the ways his wife’s death challenged his faith. Of course, his grief experience itself—as it affected his mind, his body, his imagination, his daily life—was strongly connected to his relationship to her—as her husband, her lover, her “keeper” in her terminal illness.  As a result, his descriptions of his grief never fit with my own sense of the loss of my daughters, with whom I had a parental, not a marital, relationship and with whom I not lived for forty years. I have no doubt that the “feelings” were much the same but the contextual words with which he describes them were not. I will return, however, to this subject in closing.

That said, those who have read some of my earlier blogs and/or will read my subsequent World View posts, will know that I have struggled for some time with issues related to the faith in which I was raised and which was strongly present during my undergraduate and graduate education. Losing both of my daughters in less than three months–in addition to the inevitable grief process which must run its course–has raised for me the specter of those struggles anew, but now in “monster” form!

C. S. Lewis has starkly and clearly raised these very issues in his struggle with the death of his wife. Since they “jumped out” at me as I read his book for the second time—fitting my heart and mind like the proverbial glove in the shadow of my own grief—I’m going to use his words that are better than mine and will avoid redundancy. Once again, I must be clear: I make no claim that these quotations are a legitimate summary of his book—they are the words that caught my attention and touched my own struggles as he grappled with the issues and chronicled his grief in utter and agonizing detail. And so, Lewis’s words will now appear, these from Chapter 2, first with regard to religion’s claims about “a life after.”

“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is . . . 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” (p. 25).

And then, these words, as he grapples with the nature of God:

How do they know she is ‘at rest?’  ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. . . . If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine (pp. 27-28).

    What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe 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?

    We set Christ against it. But how if he were mistaken?  Almost his last words . . . . found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung on the cross (pp. 29-30).

This, then, was my comment at the end of Ch. 2: “He’s raised all the right difficult questions. Can he answer them?”

And this at the end of Ch. 3: “So far, I find no real answers to the difficult questions he raised in Ch. 2.”

Allow me to turn back now to Lewis’s words, which I have lifted from Ch. 4, as he considers the questions he has raised:

    When I lay [all] these questions before God I get no answer. . . . Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think (pp. 68-69).

    The mystical union on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the other. I can’t reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a feeling, that combines them. . . . Heaven will solve our problems (pp. 70-71).

  We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least (p. 75).

Then this was my comment at the end of Ch. 4: “He did not really answer the questions he raised in Ch. 2—perhaps because, as he said, ‘we cannot understand.’ He seems at peace with that.” Note, for example, these words:

Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind. One is that the “Eternal [Vet]” is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode. But the other, that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ (pp. 64-65. Quotation marks and underlining, mine).

I wish I could be at peace with it, too, but, at this point, I am not. For the closest I can come, I have to substitute for his use of “understand” the word “know”—we cannot “know” but we can choose to “believe.”. Which brings me back to the “reverent agnosticism” of which I spoke in the previous post, the 2^nd post in my “Reflections on a Personal World View.”

To close on a positive note, there was one point on which we are in amazing agreement—our understanding of the grief process:

His, which is far more descriptively articulate than mine:

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history . . . . there’s something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long . . . winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape (pp. 59-60).

And Mine, written before I read Lewis’s book:

The deaths of both of my daughters have been devastating beyond description. But somewhere, down the road, the grief process will run its predictable course in an unpredictable amount of time. Meanwhile, life all around me goes on and I do find comfort in the love and support of my dear friends and family.

Finally, I need to say that—despite our disagreements and, in some important ways, the differences in our grief experiences—I am grateful for Lewis’s book and for the opportunity to read it a second time from a different perspective. I profited from his writing, his insights, and his expressiveness, as always.

So it has been, so it is, and so it shall be.