For instance, while attending Officer’s Training School during the First World War he made what many have considered an ill-advised pact with his training school roommate Paddy Moore. Lewis’ loss of his mother impacted his relationships with women his whole life. What Lewis could not have in real life, he gave to himself in a fantasy. It comes when Digory, who stands in for the child Lewis, receives an apple from Aslan that heals his dying mother. Perhaps you will also remember the one moment in the book where you cannot help but sob. The publisher’s blurb says the book is about, “How Aslan created Narnia and gave the gift of speech to its animals.” But if you’ve read it, you will remember the book is really about two children, Digory and Polly, and the spiritual lessons learned through their interactions with Aslan, who, as you know, is a representation of Christ. In his mid-fifties, long after he had become a best-selling Christian author, Lewis would write The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth of his seven Chronicles of Narnia. He would later convert, first to theism, and eventually to Christianity, but on some level he never stopped grieving the loss of his mother. It impacted his childhood confidence in God to the point that within three years he had announced himself an atheist. The defining event in Lewis’ life is arguably the loss of his mother to cancer on August 23, 1908, when Lewis was not yet 10 years old. Nevertheless, I think some biographical background will be useful. Such is the clarity of Lewis’ writing that you can benefit from diving into A Grief Observed without knowing anything about the author’s life.
Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis, or Jack to his friends) can come and sit down beside you, and perhaps by sharing his pain, somewhat lessen yours. I will instead try to serve as a conduit through which C. So please understand that I have no intention of trying to tell you what to do. Let me begin by saying that I am very conscious of being in the presence of people who have suffered greatly, and whose grief exceeds anything I’ve ever experienced. The text of my talk appears below, but because it was a talk designed to last about 45 minutes (and it did), you need to know that this is quite long (perhaps over-long) for a blog.
I was recently privileged to speak to their monthly gathering on C. Since then they have focussed their lives on helping other hurting people, including taking up the mantle of leading a city-wide grief recovery ministry called Tidings of Hope. In 2016 Jason and Shauna Caldwell lost their twin sons in a tragic bobsledding accident at Calgary Olympic Park.
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