It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

This passage comes from C. S. Lewis’s late-life reflections on bereavement after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. In the raw, journal-like notes that became *A Grief Observed*, Lewis pushes back against pious or abstract consolations that treat death as unreal or insignificant. Writing as a Christian who nonetheless feels the full force of loss, he insists on the concrete finality of events in time: death is not merely an illusion to be talked away, and the changes it brings cannot be undone. The remark arises from his impatience with well-meaning platitudes that bypass the lived reality of grief.

Lewis is pushing back against a breezy spiritual or rhetorical denial of death—whether as mere “transition” or as something that “doesn’t matter.” He insists on the moral and existential weight of real events: death is a genuine rupture, and what happens in time has lasting consequences. The point is not to deny hope beyond death, but to reject evasions that flatten human experience and responsibility. By pairing death with birth, he underscores that embodied life is constituted by irreversible thresholds; to pretend otherwise is to refuse reality. The quote reflects Lewis’s broader conviction that Christianity affirms, rather than dissolves, the seriousness of creation, suffering, and choice.