November 14 2022

Thinking of our theme, “Is Grief Your Friend or Your Enemy?” I appreciate this quote by author C. S. Lewis when he was writing about the death of his wife, “And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier. “To me, C.S. Lewis is suggesting that spending time with grief as his friend allowed him to gradually release it. The gift he received was that he then remembered his wife best. If we treat grief as an enemy, it’s my experience that it grows inside of us and pushes welcomed visitors out, making it difficult to remember our loved ones with love.