(From my CaringBridge site in honor and memory of our grandson Sully. Written on the day after Good Friday, 2010.)

A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis’s journal of his grief when his wife Joy died after a painful battle with cancer.  His stepson, Douglas Gresham, wrote the forward to my copy of this little book.  “All human relationships end in pain–it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love,” Gresham writes.  “The greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”  He gives Satan his due for the suffering in this world.  Later in the forward Gresham wrote of his mother’s death and the love she and Lewis shared.  “It almost seems cruel that her death was delayed long enough for him to grow to love her so…