A Grief Observed
“Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
A few weeks ago as I was scrolling through my many emails, I stopped at an article in the online version of the New York Times called “HOW COVID REMADE AMERICA,” and clicked to open it. The article was accompanied by several photos taken during the COVID-19 psyop.
Then the unthinkable happened. The first photo I saw showed a large city park with dozens of white circles painted on the fresh green grass, indicating where two (at most) people could gather without risking contaminating, or getting contaminated by, those within any of the other circles nearby. Suddenly, and all over again, I started boiling over with rage.
Who on earth came up with this idea? Who on earth could have possibly complied with it and thought they were doing the right thing? Who on earth could have thought any of this had anything to do with “the science” that all the obedient guinea pigs in that deadly experiment had worshipped as if it had divine attributes? Looking at that photo and at the other photos brought the utter stupidity and sheepish compliance of so many billions of people in those terrible times—and my anger about it all—right back into my life as if it was all still happening right now.
I felt sick to my stomach. It made me so angry and, at the same time, so sad. There, alone in my house, I wanted to scream and cry in the same breath. Howl, I think that’s the word for it. I’ve been thinking that I’ve been suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking at these photos that accompanied the litany of lies—people sitting in their cars and allowing medical professionals in fully armored hazmat suits shove those long swabs up their noses painfully close to their frontal lobes to test for the asymptomatic presence of a virus that was supposedly so dangerous that it easily spread in the air all around us; the emptied shelves in grocery stores because of panic buying and forced factory closures; masked children outside in a park on a sunny day; the vacant office buildings and empty city streets—and gauging my reaction to them, confirmed my self-diagnosis.
We popularly refer to moments like this as being “triggered.” We make fun of snowflakes being triggered by, say, Trump’s presidential victory that sent many college students across the nation scrambling to “wellness spaces” for a good cry as they piled on the pounds with free cookies and milk. But being triggered is a real phenomenon. Ask war veterans. Ask abuse victims. Ask car accident survivors. A traumatizing event enters the body and lodges in places out of reach of normal consciousness. Until, that is, something happens in the world around us that brings those memories welling up from the unconscious—unwelcomed, unwanted, unavoidable—and into the here and now. A photograph. A sound. A dream. A scene from a movie. A person from your past you catch a glimpse of on a city street. And when that happens the traumatizing event is relived all over again and in real time but only in the mind in a kind of endless and inexpugnable film loop.
There were subheads, equally disturbing, describing how “it” (the virus) remade America: “It broke our faith in public health.” “It shattered our cities and disordered society.” “It shackled the U.S. with debt.” “It destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere.” “It scarred children.” “It left us sicker.” But there was not any “it” that rained down upon us with so much destruction. It was “they,” and I’m not talking about woke pronouns. I’m talking about the complicity of the New York Times and an entire global army of media apparatchiks for creating the panic about a virus out of thin air by lying about how deadly it was. They and their nefarious collaborators bear the responsibility for the annihilation of so much life on earth and of what we hold dear.
I remembered seeing people being arrested while strolling on beaches or in parks; a cowering, elderly woman in a grocery store signaling at me to pull my mandated mask up over my nose (I was so oxygen-starved and furious that I wanted to ram my cart into hers right there in the condiment aisle); the heinous outdoor seating at restaurants on cold New York City streets; the blocking of my Facebook posts alerting my few hundred contacts about the war that had been launched against us; a friend insisting that everyone invited to her 50th birthday party, which was now going to be held outdoors, wear a mask (I was invited and did not go); seeing people alone in their cars with a mask on; being disinvited to weddings of friends and members of my extended family who were requiring all attendees to be jabbed “out of an abundance of caution”; fake president Joe Biden’s televised, maniacal speeches scolding scofflaws like me to get injected with the bioweapon or else….
***
While looking for a certain book I wanted to write about for this edition of Underlined Sentences, I found A Grief Observed. When the thin volume caught my eye, sandwiched between two bigger books, I knew right away that I wanted to write about it instead of the one I had been looking for. Call it a happy accident. Synchronicity, as Carl Jung might say. I’ve been wanting to write about grief for some time now, so my stumbling upon this book seemed to have a meaningful if not causal connection. It was as if my desire and this book had mysteriously found one another. As if I had not chosen it but rather it had chosen me.
It’s been five years since governments around the world shut down their nations and mandated lockdowns, school closures, and ultimately, in many instances, injections with a bioweapon peddled as a vaccine, and began what would become the death of the world as we’d known it brought down by the greatest of all crimes against humanity. That’s not the only thing I am grieving.
A Grief Observed is a brief and poignant memoir about the loss of a woman who Lewis—an aloof professor and theologian (first at Oxford University then at Cambridge University), a prolific and influential writer, and a devout Christian—met late in life and who died of cancer not long after they had married. Although they had known each other for only eight years, and four of those years as a married couple, Joy Davidman Gresham had come from America and changed Lewis’ life forever: He fell deeply in love for the first and, as fate would have it, the only time, in his life. And he despaired when she died.
In the days immediately following her death, Lewis wrote cursive journal entries in several exercise books for children. And what he wrote in those four books would become A Grief Observed, in which he writes: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
Douglas Gresham, the younger of Joy’s two sons, both of whom had eventually come with her to England to live with Lewis, writes in his introduction to my copy of the 1994 edition of A Grief Observed: “The book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”
***
For the past five years, I’ve lived in grief and have thought about living in grief. What I’m grieving is a different kind of loss from the one that brought Lewis to his knees, yet also deeply personal. I’m grieving the loss of trust and of the people who had broken my trust in them. As the COVID-19 psyop swept o’er the land, I trusted my friends and colleagues to see the evil hoax for what it was, as I did, and to ignore it or rise against it and just say no. To do the right thing and carry on.
But they didn’t. The heart of the matter for me was not what the governments around the world did to us; it’s what so many billions of people, including most of those closest to me, allowed the governments around the world to do to us. It was their uninformed and sheepish and, in some instances, enthusiastic, compliance that felt to me like a stab in the back. We all go through life with crosses to bear. I’ve had—and have—several. But this one—the anger I’ve felt because of this mass compliance—would become, and remain, my gravest, heaviest, and most persistent cross for the past five years.
Curiously, though, with the coming of warmer weather and longer days here in the Northeast where I’ve lived most of my life, I thought I had finally made some kind of tenuous peace with this wretched betrayal of not only myself, but also of all of us who knew better—and, indeed, against the very essence of our shared humanity. I’d started to tap into the energies and introspections of the Christian Lenten season to change something inside me, as Jesus always calls on us to do but during these forty days are asked to pay particular attention.
Over the past five years, I might have passed through the five stages of grief famously described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was beginning to find myself at the fifth stage of an uneasy acceptance with the way things had gone with the COVID-19 psyop, although not without intermittent flare-ups of all the other stages, especially the anger. That’s the one that has most persistently dogged me in my attempts to move on. Never in my life have I felt so angry for so long.
I have turned to some familiar ancient and timeless wisdom for guidance. I have continued to remind myself of a memorable teaching from my years of Buddhist study and practice, which I have noted in previous columns: Harboring anger against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
As if that simple phrase were not enough to remind me of anger’s toll, there’s this lesson about love as taught by Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, a lesson many of us are familiar with because it is frequently recited during wedding ceremonies and which I’ve been reading from time to time these days: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13: 1-3)
Then there’s this teaching from the mouth of Jesus himself that I’ve also been re-reading in my Bible: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteousness. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-47)
Above all, there are Jesus’ dying words as he hangs in excruciating pain on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
What are ordinary, imperfect mortals like me supposed to do with all these timeless, perfect wisdom teachings about forgiveness and love in the midst of the immense brokenness and deadly ignorance of the world in which we’ve found ourselves? One commentator in his blog called Christian Art has these sage words of advice: “Many of us might struggle to identify anyone we’d consider an ‘enemy.’ We often reserve that term for war situations or for people we intensely dislike. However, if we broaden the definition to include anyone who has hurt, upset, or wronged us (even in minor ways) perhaps a few faces come to mind? When Jesus asks us to love these people, He isn’t calling for warm, fuzzy feelings. He appeals to our will, not our emotions. At the very least, we can choose to wish the best for those we find difficult. How do we do this? Through prayer. Praying for someone we struggle with is not only an act of love but also a step towards healing—both for us and, potentially, for them.”
I’ve been praying the last five years, but mostly for myself, to be honest. I’ve prayed for spiritual healing, divine intervention. Not that I’m all that skilled in praying. No matter. As Lewis himself writes in his 1963 book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best…. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
I pray to be caught off my guard. I pray for a spontaneous remission of the cancer of my wrath. I pray because I’ve sometimes felt that I’ve been slowly dying, both inside myself and to the world around me. I pray because I’m also grieving my former self, a self that no longer is. Just like someone who dies no longer is. In my body I am here and appear not much different than I was five years ago. But I sometimes hardly recognize the man inside.
The insane lockdowns may have passed but I’ve continued to isolate myself more than I did before the COVID-19 psyop, and not because I’ve ever been afraid of contracting a supposedly deadly virus that posed no threat to any normally healthy person. It was because I became fed up with anyone and everyone who fell for the ruse, which happened to be nearly all of my old friends and colleagues. And the bitterness lingers like a bad dream that I can, unfortunately, recall in astonishing detail simply because it went on for so long and destroyed so much. Only it was not just a bad dream.
Like a refugee is forced to flee his home country that’s been taken over by a murderous despot and his henchmen and to take up his life in a new country, I’ve felt like an exile even though I’ve never left my home. And now I’m trying to find my footing in this strange, new world that surrounds me.
For the America I once knew is no more. In March 2020, it had been sacked and plundered in a coup d’état run by a shadow state, known by many as the deep state, an unelected bureaucratic cabal of a military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media complex that is accountable to no one. And where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, a bastion of liberals, who with the invasion of the COVID-19 psyop had suddenly and, to me, inexplicably, abandoned their once proud heritage of supporting free speech, individual sovereignty, and world peace—and among whom I once counted myself—have left me feeling as if I am living behind enemy lines.
For they support none of this now and instead shoot their misguided arrows of blame for all the ills of the nation at the wrong target, thereby missing the mark. It bears noting here that the Greek word for “sin” is “hamartia,” which means “to miss the mark” or “to fail in one’s purpose.” It is commonly used in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, to describe various forms of wrongdoing or moral failure. Or, in a word, sin. Which has nothing to do with any sort of lascivious life we normally envision when we think of a sinful world. This sort of sin is far more subtle, as evil often is. It is the sin of ignorance.
***
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” Lewis writes in A Grief Observed. “It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people…. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”
When billions of frightened souls fell for the ruse, that rope that Lewis writes about—the ties that commonly bind us to one another—snapped. All I had in my hands then was the equivalent of the frayed end of a rope, the other end of which was held by billions of others as they plunged into an abyss of imaginary fear whipped up by those very same lies that I and a pitifully small number of others so easily saw through. And as this happened, I was reminded of another Buddhist teaching of the grief felt by an armless mother watching her only child get swept away by a raging river.
All I could do was roil against that raging river of propaganda for sweeping away my trust in human intelligence and discernment that I had expected would have instinctively led us all to higher ground and out of harm’s way; roil at the deluge of lies that so suddenly flooded the earth in a kind of recurrence of the biblical account of the great flood and Noah and his ark. Only in this version, it was not God who was destroying the world; it was the scorpions that we read about in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
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