When the Dead Are No Longer Simply Absent

C.S. Lewis, grief and the mysterious presence of those we love

The Darkness of Grief

C.S. Lewis is well known as one of the great Christian writers of the twentieth century. Many readers know him as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and many other works in which he defended the Christian faith with clarity, imagination and courage. Perhaps, however, fewer people know the darker Lewis: the man who, after the death of his wife Joy, entered a period of grief so intense that even God seemed absent.

In A Grief Observed, Lewis does not write as someone calmly explaining suffering from a safe distance. He writes from inside the wound. His grief is raw, bewildered and at times frightening. He never really denies God’s existence. But perhaps something even more terrible happens: he begins to fear that God may not be good. He writes: “The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”

This is why the first chapter of my book, Love Beyond Loss: Holding Tight through Death and Grief, published by the CTS, focuses precisely on this feeling of desolation. I wrote the book at the end of 2024, only a few months after the sudden death of my father. Grief, especially after a sudden death, can be a kind of earthquake. It changes the way we see reality and the things we experience within ourselves. The world looks the same, and yet nothing is the same any more.

Lewis experienced something similar at the sudden death of his friend Charles Williams, who was also a member of the Oxford literary circle known as the Inklings. On the morning Williams died quite unexpectedly, Lewis went from the hospital, where he had received the news, to the pub The Eagle and Child, where the other Inklings had already gathered for their usual Tuesday beer. It was only a short walk, but Lewis later remembered that “the very streets looked different.”

That is grief. The streets may be the same, but the interior landscape has changed.

Altarpiece from a side altar in the Basilica of St John Lateran, Rome. Photo © Lawrence Lew. Taken from our book Love Beyond Loss: Holding Tight Through Death and Grief.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis never really denies God’s existence. But perhaps something even more terrible happens: he begins to fear that God may not be good. He writes: “The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”

A New Kind of Presence

But then what? The experience of desolation is real, and we should not deny it. Allowing time – as I titled the first chapter of the book – is often the only meaningful thing left for us to do. Yet desolation is not the whole story. There are also other experiences in grief: unexpected, delicate, mysterious experiences of presence.

The dead person is no longer present as before. The voice is not there. The body is not there. And yet sometimes we receive the strange certainty that the relationship has not been destroyed, but transformed.

I try to describe this in the book when speaking about the moment in which I learned of my father’s death:

“I believe this is what happened to me right after learning of my father’s passing. Amidst the shock and adrenaline, I was overwhelmed by the certainty that, in that moment, my father was closer to me than ever before, knowing and loving me in a way he never could have on this earth. A gift filled with clarity and intensity that I may never receive again.”

This was not an apparition or a vision. It was not something merely sentimental. It was simply a certainty: that my father was alive in God, and that his love for me had entered a new mode. I cannot prove this in the way one proves a fact of history or science. Nor do I want to make this kind of experience the measure of Christian hope. Many people do not receive such a gift, or receive it only rarely, or in ways too hidden to name.

This is why I am cautious when people seek signs all the time. Sometimes this can become a kind of superstition or wishful thinking. I do not want to mock this because it often comes from real pain and real love. But we must be careful.

What I am referring to is something different: not something we produce, force, or manipulate, but a form of presence that comes as a gift. The point is not to seek the extraordinary at all costs. As I write in the book:

“When speaking of these experiences that stand on the threshold of mysticism, I do not mean to suggest that they are the goal of processing grief, nor can I promise that they will happen to everyone. I wish I had that certainty myself, before anything else. The point, in fact, is not to seek out the extraordinary – it can only arrive as an unexpected gift.”

And yet, if such gifts are indeed given, we should receive them with gratitude. We should not be embarrassed by them. We can and should ask for consolation. We can rejoice when the Lord allows us to feel, even for a moment, that those we love are not lost. These experiences are not the foundation of our faith, but they can be real anticipations of the eternal communion that awaits us in the world to come.

Lewis, Joy and Charles Williams

Lewis himself knew something of this. After a long period of barrenness following Joy’s death, he suddenly had a sense of her presence. But he insists that it was not emotional in the ordinary sense. It was not a romantic reunion, not a flood of feeling. He writes that it was more like “intelligence and attention,” an “extreme and cheerful intimacy” which had not passed through the senses or the emotions.

I find that very convincing. If the dead are alive in God, then their nearness to us is not simply the continuation of earthly presence. It is not the same as before. It is a new mode of presence.

Lewis had already experienced something similar at the death of Charles Williams. In a letter to Williams’s son, Michael, he wrote: “My friendship is not ended. His death has had the very unexpected effect of making death itself look quite different: I believe in the next life ten times more strongly than I did. At moments, it seems quite tangible.” On the day of the funeral, Hugo Dyson expressed what many of them felt: “It is not blasphemous to believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its less degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.”

Lewis admitted that, only a month earlier, he would have dismissed such a thought as “silly sentiment.” But now he could only say: “Now I know better.” Williams seemed to him, “in some indefinable way,” to be all around them. And he adds: “I do not doubt he is doing and will do for us all sorts of things he could not have done while in the body.”

This, I think, is one of the paradoxes of Christian mourning. The dead are gone. And yet they are not lost. They are no longer present as before. And yet they are not simply absent either. Their friendship, their love and even their actions in our lives have not ended; it has entered another mode.

Hidden in God

This is what Love Beyond Loss tries to say. Grief is not only something to be endured. It can also be spiritually inhabited. I do not want to glorify grief. Death is an enemy, and separation is heartbreaking. But Christian hope does not ask us to deny the wound. It asks us to let Christ enter it.

The experiences of presence we sometimes receive are small lights in that darkness. They do not abolish grief, and they do not give us back the dead as they were before. But they can remind us that love is stronger than death, that communion is not destroyed, and that those we love are not behind us in a lost past.

In Christ, they are ahead of us, hidden in God, awaiting the day when every fragment of love will be gathered into the eternal communion for which we were made. Then, at last, we shall hold tight to one another forever.