Catching the light: Finding words for grief with Lewis, Didion and Woolf

Abstract

When my dad said, ‘You’re going to get some very bad news here, so you have to prepare yourself,’ I began to understand the word grief. For most of the 20th century, grief was categorised by stage models and binaries, and described as a process that eventually ends. Philosopher Thomas Attig, however, contributesto a “new wave” of grief theory that dismisses these interpretations as reductive. He describes grief as a process of ‘relearning the world of ourexperience’. As I go about doing just that, ‘relearning the world’ without my mother in it, I rely on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Virginia Woolf’s life and work, and CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed to show me the way. I find a common thread in the feeling of being pushed to the social margins when grieving. I ask, where is the space for grief, if – as Philippe Ariès has suggested–Western culture subscribes to a ‘social obligation’ to strive for happiness? With the help of these three writers from three different eras, I learn that grief does not, in fact, end; and suggest that, as grieving writers, we may have access to a culturally accepted space for grief that the general population does not.