July 1, 2026 — PATIENT 4
A man who has buried a father, a friend, a brother, a son, and a wife — and the quiet temptation to let that count become a throne.
Some patients in this correspondence are new to their grief. Patient 4 is not. By the time this letter opens, he has already stood at five gravesides across five decades — his father, a close friend, his brother, his son, his wife — and he is still standing. That alone should be the end of the story. It isn’t. It’s where Screwtape’s letter actually begins.
What follows is written in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters — a senior demon instructing his junior tempter — and it’s meant to be read inverted. Whatever Screwtape is trying to accomplish is the opposite of what the letter is actually pointing toward. This is my own writing, not Lewis’s, written for a real man whose story deserved more than silence.
Content note: this letter discusses suicide and grief.
Letter I — RE: On a Patient Who Has Already Survived the Worst
My Dear Wormwood,
I have your intake report, and I confess it gave me a moment’s pause — which is more than most files earn from me.
Father, dead by suicide, when the boy was sixteen. A friend in uniform, dead by suicide, in front of him, three years later. A brother, the same door, twelve years after that. A son — not by his own hand, mercifully, but the road took him just as finally. And a wife, worn down slowly by disease rather than taken suddenly, which is its own particular cruelty, since it gives grief time to rehearse itself before the final performance.
Five funerals across five decades, Wormwood, each one a different room of his heart.
You are frightened by this file. I understand why. You are thinking: how does one tempt a man who has already stood in the whirlwind? What is left to threaten him with? He has nothing left to lose that he has not already lost.
You are thinking like an amateur.
The mistake every young tempter makes with a man like this is assuming grief has already done our work for us. It has not. Grief only clears the ground. What gets planted in that ground afterward — that is still very much our department.
Here is what you are not to do: do not tell him God abandoned him. He has already had that thought a thousand times in the middle of the night and found, infuriatingly, that he was still there in the morning, still breathing, still — against all reasonable expectation — capable of loving someone new without flinching. That argument is spent. Move on.
Here is what you are to do instead: help him count.
He is already counting, bless him — it began, I suspect, as an act of simple honesty, a refusal to minimize what he has carried. Five losses. Four core relationships. Suicide, suicide, suicide, accident, disease. This is, statistically, an obscene amount of grief for one man to metabolize. Encourage the counting. Encourage it warmly. Let him arrive at the conclusion that he has survived something categorically different from what ordinary men survive — that he is, in some sense, set apart by the sheer volume of what has been asked of him.
Do you see the elegance of it, Wormwood? I am not asking you to make him despair. Despair is loud, and men who despair tend to fall on their knees, which is the last place we want him. I am asking you to make him exceptional. Let him become, quietly, the foremost expert and chief exhibit in his own suffering. Let him mistake the size of his wound for the shape of his calling. A man convinced he has survived what almost no one else could survive begins, without noticing, to require almost no one else’s counsel, almost no one else’s correction, almost no one else’s God — because he has become his own witness, his own theologian, his own proof.
This is precisely the error of the man of Uz’s comforters, Wormwood, only run in reverse, which is why it works so beautifully on a man who is theologically literate enough to have already rejected the comforters’ version. They told their patient his suffering meant he had sinned greatly. You will tell yours that his suffering means he has become greatly — hyper-resilient, deeply wise, uniquely fitted to sit with other men’s pain in a way lesser men cannot. Both are the same lie wearing different coats. Both replace the actual God with a theory about the man.
You will know you are succeeding when his answer to “why did this happen” quietly becomes “because I was built to carry it” rather than “I do not know, and I am loved regardless.”
I will grant you one genuine difficulty, since I promised you honesty in this correspondence: the man of Uz’s story does not end with an answer. It ends with a whirlwind, and a God who declines to explain Himself, and a servant who is somehow satisfied by that non-answer in a way none of us in this department have ever managed to reproduce artificially. If your patient ever stops asking what does this make me and simply says, unprompted, I do not understand You, and I trust You anyway — retreat. Immediately. That posture has survived every instrument we possess for six thousand years, and I have no reason to believe your generation will be the one to finally crack it.
Until then: keep him counting his losses. Keep him proud of his endurance. Keep the exhibit well-lit and the witness stand comfortable.
Just do not, under any circumstances, let him put down the magnifying glass long enough to notice the whirlwind is still speaking.
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
P.S. — Should he ever weep for his son, or his wife, or his father, or his friend, without immediately converting the tears into evidence of his own remarkable capacity to endure — do not report it to me. I will only be disappointed in you, and there is nothing to be done about it from here.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
Part of the Screwtape Correspondence — Patient 4: Holdfast.
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