Laying the bow down (the frustration in grief)

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had [Helen Joy] for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to [Helen Joy] I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier—post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 41.

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