Lewis, a committed Christian, struggles in A Grief Observed to reconcile his faith in God with his own emotional suffering following the death of his wife, and also the physical pain he watched her endure, during her bouts with cancer. While Lewis always felt God’s presence in times of happiness, he is unable to find solace or comfort in his immediate grief over Helen’s death, asking, “Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?” (6). Lewis is disappointed and deeply bitter about God’s perceived abandonment of Lewis, in Lewis’s time of greatest need. Significantly, Lewis never doubts God’s existence, only his benevolence and relationship to humans: “Not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him” (6). Lewis draws parallels to the experience of Christ on the cross who, “found that the being he called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what he had supposed (29-30). Lewis angrily rejects standard phrases of Christian comfort: “but if so, [Helen] was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here” (27).

Lewis explores the idea of a “bad” God he names the “Cosmic Sadist,” turning his previous beliefs upside down as he imagines God as a “vivisector,” experimenting on and torturing humans like “rats in a laboratory” (29). In his despair, Lewis can find no concrete evidence to convince him that God is benevolent, as he once believed: “if His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell and vice-versa” (32). Almost immediately, after reviewing what he has written, Lewis recants these thoughts as “filth and nonsense,” although he does not yet assert belief in a “good” God (33). A short while later, gaining more distance, he attributes his version of the “Cosmic Sadist” to his anger and desire to offend.

As his grief subsides, Lewis begins to examine God in a new light, replacing the image of a “Cosmic Sadist” with a celestial surgeon, one who “hurts only to heal,” and teacher who “moves you on,” once the lesson has been learned (43, 49). Lewis realizes that it was his own grief that prevented him from finding solace in God, since “you must have a capacity to receive or even omnipotence can’t give” (46). Lewis credits the “merciful good sense of God” for helping him let go of his concerns about his memories of Helen (50). Railing against God for the loss of his wifehas been replaced by Lewis’s gratitude to God for the gift of her. Lewis is able to reconcile his loss with his faith: “loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him” (66). The benevolent and merciful God is more abstract and complex, and Lewis peacefully accepts the ultimately unknowable mystery of God that humans“can not understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least” (75).