chronicles of loss and grief

When i read C. S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed" i started writing down some of the statements and questions within. It's such a brutally honest journal of loss and emotion i could not help but record some of his more profound realizations and queries. Here are a few i loved.

"It is hard to have patience with people who say 'there is no death' or 'death doesn't mater.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequence, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than in all those vast times and spaces, if i were allowed to search them, i should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? she died. she is dead. is the word so difficult to learn?"

"It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on."

"They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?"

"what do people mean when they say 'i am not afraid of god because i know he is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?"

"God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find their quality. He know it already. It was i who didn't. . . he always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was the knock it down."

"You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. . . apparently the faith - i thought it faith - which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because i have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not. yet i thought i did."

"As i have discovered passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them."

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that i can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. how much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?"