A Grief Observed

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.

The opening paragraph of C. S. Lewis' small and worthwhile book A Grief Observed.

Grief is the place where love and pain converge

The title is a sentence from Philip Yancey, The Question That Never Goes Away: What is God up to in a world of such tragedy and pain? (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, 111, immediately following a quotation from Bonhoeffer:

 "Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to try and find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation. It remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap. God does not fill it, but on the contrary, he keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Martyred Christian [New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1983], 183)

Later on Yancey observes, "When I was writing the book Where is God When It Hurts? I noticed a detail at the end of Job that had always escaped me. After Job goes through his time of trial, the author notes, God meticulously restored double all that he had lost: 14,000 sheep to replace 7,000; 6,000 camels to replace 3,000; 1,000 oxen and donkeys to replace 500. There is, however, one exception. Job lost seven sons and three daughters, and in the restoration he got seven sons and three daughters - the same number as before, not double. A human being cannot be replaced, like sheep or cattle." (123-124)