The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage in quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of God’s presence than I did during the months of my husband’s dying and after his death. It did not wipe away the grief. The death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other (xii–xiii).

Such insightful and poetic words from Madeleine L’Engle. It is true: Either Carla or I will predecease the other, and that will feel like an amputation.

Reading A Grief Observed during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique (xiii).

I must remember that as I age and my friends’ spouses die.

Like Lewis, I, too, kept a journal, continuing a habit started when I was eight. It is all right to wallow in one’s journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends (xiv).

I appreciate her recognition that, as Carla has taught me, it is important to vent so that we don’t hurt those around us.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul’s growth (xvi).

Geez. Had I only known people were so comfortable with their own doubts about God and Jesus and the whole shebang when I was going through my throes of existential doubt!

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? (5)

Warning! When Carla dies, still take your walks. Call people to hang out. Do your work. Unless you want to just die, too.

The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. (11)

Lewis is not outshone in poetry by his formidable foreword writer. I am certain Carla’s death will seem just like he describes. It will (dis)color everything.

But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment into a whimpering child. (16)

Again, I suspect the same will be true of me when Carla dies.

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? (27)

The poor Calvinist!

Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him. (28)

Wrong.

Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. (28)

No, it’s not.

Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite [of God being good]? (29)

No.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing I haven’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No, And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards (36–37).

Crucial, both for those who know they are doubting because of the problem of evil and for those who think they aren’t.

In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, our because I only dream that I believe them? (39)

That’s an important distinction of which I’d never thought.

They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal? (41)

An excellent one-liner. Ah, but it was Lazarus’ experience that brought us the Gospel according to “John”!

A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made brighter (42).

Who knew belief in purgatory existed among Protestants? Certainly not I. But now I do: Richard Beck, Jerry Walls, C.S. Lewis, Brad Jersak—heck, all the universalists, I suppose. Thinking of the afterlife makes so much more sense with a purgatorial hell.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never been to a dentist? 43

I love it when Lewis zings.

You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately; anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when think about our dead? (45)

I remember those October laps around the Holiday Inn in Orlando.

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. :perhaps more. (47–48)

This is how I view Carla, and I told her so.

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis in one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again. (52-53)

My, but does his man has a knack for finding the right metaphors to explain his thoughts! L’Engle and Lewis agree: Losing a spouse to death is an amputation.

The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. (62)

God, You equipped me to not repeat Lewis’ mistake here. Thank You.

An incurable abstract intellect

Excuse me, Mr. Lewis. Did you call me?

To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? (66)

Sure seems like it.

And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. (69–70)

Amen, preach it, Brother.

To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’ To take a poor primate, a beast with never-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, ‘Now get on with it. Become a god’ (72)

Indeed. Thanks a bundle, God. No really, I mean it: It’s absurd and exactly what I want at the same time.

My overall takeaway: It scares me a little that I have read this and Dementia in the same year. Carla may very well predecease me, and I appear to be attempting to get ready for that contingency.

The main way to be ready: Remember to continue to live after she dies! But remember to grieve ferociously in order to do that!

“…[w]ith humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves…” (Paul). This is a crucial verse for me if I’m going to bear the fruit of love. It’s this regard of others as more important than myself that is going to turn up my inner hearth of love for others. Without that phrase, my love risks being too mechanical, too principled. If I can honestly regard others as more important than myself, I will fulfill the second Great Commandment.

“Given the issue is so fundamentally important to our view of who we are, a claim that our free will is illusory should be based on fairly direct evidence. Such evidence is not available.”

— Benjamin Libet, in a 1999 quotation I found via a current article in The Atlantic today that blows away the Goliath in the room of the question of the soul

“‘Come near to God and he will come near to you,’ wrote James, in words that sound formulaic. James does not put a time parameter on the second clause, however.”

— Philip Yancey

But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did not express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed.

— Ben Patterson, as cited in Philip Yancey’s Prayer

“Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.”

— Philip Yancey

My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!

— Carla, to Frank

“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings” (Psalm 115:16). This jibes with my theodicy.

“[T]he presence of gender disparity is not always evidence of bias.”

— Graham Drope, “Who’s Afraid of Ludwig Wittgenstein? Explaining the Lack of Women in Philosophy”

“It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“The dark paradox, then, is this: the more we seek to alleviate our loneliness through digital connectivity, the more lonely we will feel. Along the way, we will forsake solitude as a matter of course. Curiously, it may not even be loneliness as a desire for companionship that the design of social media fosters in us. Rather, it is a counterfeit longing that is generated: for stimulation rather than companionship. In the end, we will be left with the most profound loneliness: perpetually feeling a need for connection that we cannot satisfy and finding that we have not even our own company. To recap: no abiding sense of companionship, no solitude, no place for thought.”

— Michael Sacasas, “Solitude and Loneliness”

“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”

— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others

“Next time, before you proclaim that ‘we never talk about X’—remember this only unveils how small your ‘we’ is.

— James K.A. Smith

“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully”—and in the meantime, it drives me my ignorance drives me crazy.

“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”

— Richard Beck, riffing on Paul

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

— Roger Scruton, “English Character” in England: an Elegy

“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

— Roger Scruton, on the supposedly English “quiet suspicion of sensuality”

“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”

— Mike Friesen

Here are my notes on Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

On reading at Whim:

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free” (p. 48). Reading these sentences was electrifying to me coming off of Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasure of Reading. It also captures some of why I don’t read the news: I don’t wish to be subject to what people I don’t know, who are paid to write, say is important.

A double standard:

“…they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them…” and so on through the paragraph (78–79). Earlier in the book, he calls Samori to respect the story of each individual, to not let the experience of single souls get wiped away by the necessarily generalizing statements of history. But here, he pins the blame for the “sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects” on me. It’s wrong to conflate an individual’s helpless inaction with his will.

On the burden of “television”:

It occurred to me reading page 82 that we think that because we can see something, we can do something about it. But in these days of telegraph, tele-audio, and television, we still haven’t invented teleportation or omnipresence. We are closer to omniscience than ever before, with omnipresent eyes, and perhaps omnibenevolence, but we have neither true omnipresence nor omnipotence.

On godless holiness of the human body:

“And hell upon those who shatter the holy vessel” (87). What makes vessels holy if not the imago dei?

On personal moral fatalism:

“But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn’t. Not all of us can be Jackie Robinson…” (95). I do not understand moral fatalism. I agree that sin is inevitable. But I disagree with anyone who says so. How anti-inspirational can you get?

On grand change:

“’It only takes one person to make a change,’ you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen” (96). RIGHT!

On the good old days and wicked men:

“…I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such” (98).

On the myth of race:

“’Race’ itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem” (115).

Finally, at the end of the book, Coates takes an unexpected environmentalist turn that inspires me.

“Things getting worse isn’t always a bad thing.”

— Carla

“Rule of thumb for my life: When God seems absent, or there’s not enough God, I’m on the verge of finding more God than I could have imagined.”

— Mike Friesen

“God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11).

This evening, I am uncomfortable with men ascribing action to God. It makes me want to throw out all of the parts of the Bible where that happens. Why would God send a deluding influence on anyone?

I don’t always mind the aches and pains and the memory glitches that attend aging. They remind me that night comes. My hope is that light shines in the darkness.

— Dale Allison, “Heaven and Experience,” Night Comes (2016)

For this reason we don’t lose heart. Even if our outer humanity is decaying, our inner humanity is being renewed day by day. This slight momentary trouble of ours is working to produce a weight of glory, passing and surpassing everything, lasting forever; for we don’t look at the things that can be seen, but at the things that can’t be seen. After all, the things you can see are here today and gone tomorrow; but the things you can’t see are everlasting (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, KNT).

We look at the things that can’t be seen. That’s a religious paradox strict empiricist might choke on. But besides being poetic, it’s true, and whether the objects of our gaze are real or not, our hope in them has real sustaining power.

It’s also leads to a thought we as believers ought to remember: We are, in the end, talking about Someone invisible. Why balk at the idea that some folks don’t believe?

“Happy Thanksgiving! Let’s hear it for a people (Wampanoag Indians) who embraced a few undocumented immigrants (Pilgrims) over a meal!”

—Evan Wickham