"In this terrible pandemic year, it has been oddly difficult to find ways to talk about the onslaught of bitter and unrelenting grief.

"More than half a million Americans are dead. And even if you don’t personally know anyone who died, you still have to reckon with the loss of the world that used to exist. But as a nation, America has been afforded little space to stop and feel the grief that comes with the tragedy of this moment in history.

"One of the best literary examinations of grief that I know of is C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. This slim volume is a transcript of Lewis’s journal after the death of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, and in its pages Lewis tracks the process of his own mourning: its repetitions and its strange boredoms, its agonizing small moments. Lewis is a precise and scrupulously honest chronicler of his own thoughts, and the result is a portrait of a mind in the throes of very personal grief, which is why it is perhaps strange that what he describes feels so similar to the grief of living through an era of mass death worldwide."

Book Review: The Boredom and the Fear of Grief