Grief and fear

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.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

From A Grief Observed by C S Lewis

On facing death

Cicero wrote a book called the Tusculan Disputations,  five books on death, pain, depression and related passions, and happiness as a state of mind. In the third book of Robert Harris' trilogy on Cicero, the narrator, 'Dictator', Tiro (Cicero's secretary and right hand man) sums up the last book: 

In the fifth book, Cicero offered his practical prescriptions. A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is - to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts.

page 249, paperback edition. 

Cicero was declared a righteous pagan by the Early Church, and therefore many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation.

Just a body?

To suggest in the early goings of grief that a body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize it as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from the dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches?

Thomas Lynch
The Undertaking