One of the best essays on the state of being is C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, written in 1956 after the death of Lewis' beloved Joy Davidman. Lewis was a bachelor until he met the American poet when she was visiting London. The two became a couple after Davidman pursued Lewis with affectionate, passionate letters and poems.

When Davidman died four years later from a quickly metastasized cancer, Lewis was bereft; his life-giving faith was suddenly called into question, and when he finally summoned the pen to release into words, A Grief Observed was the result.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called 'resources'. People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice, but it seems to be making out a good case for a while. Then comes the sudden jab of red-hot memory, and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

In September 2022, British novelist Dame Hilary Mantel (July 6, 1952 – September 22, 2022) died unexpectedly as she was about to hit her creative stride. Although she did not expect death, Mantel was already in the environs of illness, suffering from severe endometriosis her entire adult life. She had episodes of debilitating pain and constant fatigue. Her introduction of a reissue of Lewis' famous essay (found in a posthumously published collection of Mantel's work) expands the physicality of grief as it infects the mind and body. -

'No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. With his first line, C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed reacquaints his reader with the physiology of mourning; he brings into each mouth the common taste of private and personal loss. 'I know something of this, you think. Even if you have not experienced a 'front line' bereavement, such as the loss of partner, parent or child, you have certainly lost something you value: a marriage or a job, an internal organ or some aspect of mind or body that defines who you are. Perhaps you have just lost yourself on your way through life, lost your chances or, your reputation or your integrity, or chosen to lose bad memories by pushing them into a personal and portable tomb. Perhaps you have merely wasted time and seethe with frustration because you can't recall it. The pattern of all losses mirrors the pattern of the gravest losses. Disbelief is followed by numbness, numbness by distraction, despair, and exhaustion. Your former life still seems to exist, but you can't get back to it; there is a glimpse in dreams of those peacock lawns and fountains, but you're fenced out, and each morning you wake up to the loss over again.

Mantel observes that disbelief (an emotional response) is followed by numbness (a physical response). 

Grief is like fear in the way it gnaws the gut. Your mind is on a short tether, turning round and round. You fear to focus on your grief but cannot concentrate on anything else. You look with incredulity at those going about their ordinary lives. There is a gulf between you and them as if you had been stranded on an island for lepers; indeed, Lewis wonders whether a grieving person should be put in isolation like a leper to avoid the awkwardness of encounters with the unbereaved, who don't know what to say and, though they feel goodwill, exhibit something like shame.

Maybe the expectation of grief, a pre-grief, resides in us as fear. Did Mantel have fear in her bones? The same way Keats might have done when he wrote the words, "I have a sense of my real life having passed," knowing his entire family died from an inherited disease.

Mantel continues:

Sorrow is 'a long valley, a winding valley that may reveal a new landscape. The dead person recedes, losing selfhood, losing integrity, and becoming an artefact of memory. The process creates panic and guilt; are we remembering properly? Are we remembering enough? A year passes, but each day the loss strikes us as an absolute novelty. When Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, he did not objectify his grief in the language of psychology but alternated between the terms available to, on the one hand, the spiritual seeker and, on the other hand, the stricken child.

Using such a physical metaphor - this landscape of sorrow - wraps us in the embodiment of pain. Our self has become a body, captured and contained in this physical space of grief.  

August Macke's "Circus," oil on cardboard, 1913. An injured equestrian is carried away by her colleagues; the bright shapes echo the energy and physicality of grief, punctuated by the black back of the man in the foreground. Learn more.

Simultaneously, that landscape is fundamental to our healing. The embarrassment of grief, as Lewis wrote, "being in grief, and knowing I'm in grief," ultimately makes grief one of the most solitary things we endure. Namely, because anyone who dies who is that close to us might be that close to us because they provided some level of comfort. The person is gone, and the comfort they provided - the warm aegis of their mere presence - is also gone. Mantel echoes this need for physical space and comfort, even if we dwell in grief. 

But where else can the bereft person dwell except in his grief? He is like a vagrant, carrying with him the package of tribulation that is all he owns. As Lewis says, 'so many roads once; now so many cul de sac. It is hard to spot signs of recovery, hard to evaluate them. Lewis asks: 'Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?' The first acute agony cannot last, but the sufferer dreads what will replace it. For Lewis, a lightening of the heart produces, paradoxically, a more vivid impression of his dead wife than he could conjure when he was in a pit of despair. Recovery can seem like a betrayal. Passionately, you desire a way back to the lost object, but the only possible road, the road to life, leads away.

Grief is a lonely, solitary state of being, and yet, these two literary marvels inadvertently create a space between them of trust, love, support, and meaningful collaboration. A web that catches us holds us and provides comfort where it lacks. They expound on their grief, making us feel at ease in our own. 

There is a shared dialogue here: the enormity of shared emotion, each distinctly unique yet similar. Christopher Hitchens wrote about Joan Didion's Blue Nights when he was dying and summoned a poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Read more on the physical space of memory and how we connect it to objects and space to make it real and make ourselves vital.