Shortly after my father’s sudden death, a friend gave me C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed.” I read it post-funeral, in the awkward days when visiting relatives have returned home, when you’re supposed to re-embrace work and routines. The book offered little comfort — it’s an often self-pitying look at Lewis’s “mad, midnight moments” following the loss of his wife. But one passage stood out. Lewis writes of tales he’s read, “in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it…It made the dead far more dead.”

I’ve thought often of those words. I wrote a memoir in the aftermath of my father’s death, and while the book was many things — a search for meaning, a travelogue, the story of my adventures as a global volunteer — it was largely a book about Dad. I was measuring my life against his, telling his stories, making him the ghostly muse in my midlife crisis, and I wondered if I, too, was doing some kind of wrong.

They beg us to stop… It made the dead far more dead. Read more…