A Grief Observed

I just started...and finished A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis today. It's a very short book--I read it during my lunch break. It's not like the rest of his books; it's more his journaling as he deals with the grief of his wife's death. Since he published it under a pseudonym, he was brutally honest. There is a very sharp contrast between his intellect and his emotions as he strives to understand and deal with the raw pain caused by his wife's departure. The first couple of chapters are a little shocking, as he contemplates the idea that God is really not all that good, and that he might be a Cosmic Sadist. Interestingly, this contradicts the whole premise of the book that he wrote earlier in his life The Problem with Pain. This contradiction coincides with his thought that God allowed his wife to die to topple his "house of cards" which represent all the beliefs that have not been tried to the point of life-and-death. His attitude changes as he continues to write and go through the grieving process. That's exactly what he calls grief: a process. He says at first he started writing to map out a state of being called grief, but later realized that it was really a journey closely analogous to traveling through a long, narrow, winding valley where the scenery around each subsequent corner could become a little more bearable, but then it could also look like the shadow of death that you already passed through earlier in the journey. It was relieving to see that someone viewed as so imminently spiritual could express the course, organic, and undressed frustration that each of us encounter as we live out our journies, but at the same time see how God renewed his heart in the midst of one of the most painful and faltering times of his life.