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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How many hours of healthy sleep did the author finally get in Chapter Three?

2. To what length would the author have gone if it could have cured H.'s cancer?

3. What metaphor does the author use with which to compare with a God who hurts to heal?

4. How long did "low-hung grey skies" hang over the author?

5. Thinking so much about his grief causes the author to doubt what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What choices does Lewis think that people have when it comes to their ideas about God?

2. What question does Lewis ask to begin to reason his way through his pain? How does this question lead Lewis onto new ground?

3. What does Lewis mean when he writes that he can believe that God is a vet? Conversely, how is it difficult for Lewis to think of God as a vet?

4. How does the consolation that previously so wearied Lewis, "She is in God's hands", strike Lewis by the last chapter?

5. What hopeful similes does Lewis use to describe a moment he experiences one night?

6. How does Lewis admit that he goes about restoring his faith?

7. What enormous gain in his sense of God and of H. has Lewis made by the fourth chapter?

8. What does Lewis reflect can withstand suffering better, the body or the mind? Briefly explain.

9. What feelings follow from Lewis's experiences when he is not thinking about H.? How is his feeling related to his grief?

10. Why does Lewis think that H.'s physical anguish might not have ended when she died? What images does Lewis use when reflecting on what happens to H. after she died?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Lewis begins his reflections in the midst of great pain. His wife, H., has died. Describe three examples of Lewis's pain, as he describes it throughout the book.

Essay Topic 2

Before H. died, what were her nearly last words to Lewis? How do those words compare with words of consolation that Lewis hears after H.'s death? Who does Lewis believe and why? If H.'s words were true, what does it mean for her continuing in God's hands? Describe Lewis's feelings about a God in whose hands Lewis sadly finds his departed wife.

Essay Topic 3

Lewis comes to a point in which he reflects on H.'s anguish as she was dying and the possibility that, with her death, H.'s anguish is over. Write in detail about what Lewis thinks may be H.'s condition now that she is dead. How is the very reflection of a condition different from Lewis's earlier worries about H.? What does this alteration in perception mean for the process of Lewis's grief? What does H.'s possible current condition mean about Lewis's ideas about God? Whom, of Lewis's characterizations about God, might God actually be? Explain what Lewis thinks God might be doing with H. and what that means God does with everyone.

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