I sat in my wheelchair with Jack standing at my side and stared at the drops of dried blood on the doctor’s sleeve, his stethoscope hanging from his neck like a dead snake, as the words sank into my consciousness with soft mercy.
“Arrested?” Jack and I asked simultaneously.
The man nodded, his brows knit together in confusion. “Not healed. But the disease has been arrested. Your bones are solid as a rock, at least for now.” He paused and fiddled with his stethoscope. “We don’t understand. If you’d like to call it a miracle you could. But it is not what we expected. You, Mrs. Lewis, are growing new bone. Your body is depositing calcium into your bone, strengthening it. Honestly, when we sent you home we didn’t have any other plan but to keep you comfortable. Death was imminent.”
“But it isn’t now.” My voice didn’t rise with a question. “It isn’t imminent now.”
“No, not from this cancer, it is not.”
Jack and I had come to the orthopedic hospital for my monthly checkup, girded as always for the worst news. Jack, Warnie, and I had reached a grieving acceptance, but on that day we were granted a reprieve. We hoisted our hearts onto that life raft and held tight to each other. Jack bent over my wheelchair, his lips on mine, and a burst of laughter after the kiss. “Bloody good news.”
It was early evening in the common room when the truth flooded me—it was a miracle. “You took my pain,” I said to Jack in stunned realization, the truth taking my breath. “Your doc, Old Lord Florey, told you that you have a quite obscure case of osteoporosis, while now we discover that I’m healing.”
Not only had Peter Bide prayed over me, but also Jack, asking to be my substitute. Was there a greater love?
“What?” Jack was red-faced and groaning, strapping a body brace around his waist to support his back. I perched in my wheelchair with a bright metal caliper that held my leg fast in its straight position.
It had been six months since my diagnosis, three months since they’d sent me home to die. We had been told to prepare and pray. But one by one the accoutrements of illness had fallen away: first the pain pills were banished, and then the trapeze above my head gone, then the night nurse fired (she was dreadful as it was). After that, when Jack was at Cambridge, I began sitting to crochet and knit, to write letters and welcome visitors, perched on my bed with our poodle, Suzie, and old cat, Tom. Then came the day when I was able to sit in a wheelchair while Jack wheeled me outside. I’d wept with relief in the pure June air, the fragrance of the pine and spruce, the wet ground and fecund earth. Then eventually I had walked there, with a limp of course—my left leg now three inches shorter than my right.
In what seemed an additional miracle, or maybe just a relief that felt miraculous, Bill had ceased in his threats to take the boys to America. While I’d recovered, while I’d slept, Jack had written Bill the most scathing letter of his life, explaining to him that he would not return the boys, who were both frightened of him. Whose happiness would you foster by forcing them back to you now? Jack asked. Douglas also wrote to Bill, telling him of his need to stay in what was now his home. We didn’t prod Douglas or write the letter for him—this was of his own accord, my precious son whom Jack called “an absolute charmer full of just the right amount of mischief.” Whether it was Jack’s letter or Douglas’s appeal or my own dying pleas, I would never know.
Life again held promise. I touched Jack’s hand. “They gave me my death sentence and now I’ve grown bone. And you’ve lost bone. You’re in pain and in need of a brace, and I’m relieved of so much pain.” I stood shakily from the wheelchair, using a cane to bear my weight. “You shouldn’t have done that . . . you shouldn’t . . .” I gasped on the words. “I’m just now coming to understand what the doctor told us today. I’m getting stronger and you’re getting weaker. Or at least your bones are. Why did you do this?”
“I didn’t do anything, Joy. God granted my request, if that is what happened at all.” He smiled through the pain and then stood straight. “And look at that, I finally figured out the bloody straps.” He patted his waist where the brace held fast. “Now look at the youthful figure this gives me.”
Our laughter entwined and filled the room, and also seemed to fill the world.
We grabbed our individual canes. I wanted to be outside, to touch the greenest leaves of summer, to taste a tomato off the vine, to feel the sun run down my face like honey. I wanted every sensual experience in the world. I wanted to run my hands across Jack’s body, to dip my fingers into the cold pond, to inhale the summer air, to roll in the grass. Some were possible and some soon would be: I was alive! And in remission.
“Jack.” We took a few hobbling steps together down the hallway and through the front door to emerge into the sunshine.
“Yes, love?”
“Can’t you see? Honestly, can’t you see? It’s a miracle.”
“Miracles, my love, never break nature’s laws.”
“Jack! I’m growing bone. You are losing. You are my . . . substitution.”
“Let’s not get into the land of fancy.” He stopped in midstep. “But I thank God every minute I remember.”
“Thank him for your pain?”
“Yes, and for your relief.” He stopped and kissed me deeply. “The love I have for you has built a bridge to my true self, Joy. The self I only momentarily touched before you. If this pain is part of the bargain, so be it.”
“Why did it take us so long to see this? To know?”
His answer was merely a kiss. Sometimes that is the best answer, I thought, and I kissed him in return.
We walked slowly, every step a triumph, as I’d once been told I would never walk again and that my grave would be my resting place by now. I stopped before the garden and released Jack’s hand to touch his face. “The very fact that I’m standing here and the cancer has been arrested feels like a miracle that you orchestrated.”
“Love always chooses for another’s highest good, but I don’t know if I chose this. I only know that I would have, and maybe God has done the same.”
“I will choose you every time, Jack. Even with this cancer. Even with this suffering. Even with all that came before, I would choose you and this one evening in a garden, our bodies leaning against each other.”
Jack drew me as close as he could with calipers and braces, with canes in the way and pain deep within our bones.
Silence, the sublime sort, hovered for a long while until I asked, “Did you write this morning on the new book?”
“I did, but I was also counting the minutes until you awoke. I couldn’t focus knowing you were waiting. It’s difficult to focus on the Psalms when love like this is sleeping downstairs.”
He kissed me with the passion I’d dreamt of for many years. I tasted his pipe tobacco and his humanness and soft mouth. I wanted every inch of the man I loved so dearly.
I didn’t know if others understood his deep love for me. I’d wondered and then let it go—it didn’t matter anymore what Tollers or the Inklings or the Sayers believed. Maybe Jack had admitted his love or maybe he hadn’t, but all that mattered was that I grasped the truth. He loved me when I was brash. He loved me in my weakest state. He loved me after I stopped trying so hard to make him love me. He loved me when I was outwardly unworthy. I thought of Aslan and his words in Prince Caspian, “You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”
I looked over the Kilns property washed in twilight, the golden light of another day’s end, another day Jack and I had together. “It’s time to fix this place up a bit.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lewis, I wondered how long it was going to be before you said so.”
“I mean, honestly, could you possibly still want your blackout curtains and crumbling walls and yellow paint?”
“I could.”
I laughed.
“Remember all those years ago in the pub the night before you left for Edinburgh?” he asked. “It was on your first visit when we talked of what it meant to show our real faces, when
you told me of your decision to always show me your face without veil. That was love, Joy; it’s what we’re doing now.” His brown eyes seemed fathomless, their depths holding the answers. “Although it was your mind I loved first, it is not what I’ve loved best. The heart of you is the heart of me now, and I want to know it fully.”
“You just want me to stay around so I can help you with your work,” I joked, but knew he was being true.
He pressed his cheek to mine and we were there, skin on skin, touch on touch. “It isn’t the work you do or the pleasure you give, it is you, my beloved, that I want. You.”
I kissed him with the same urgency and fervor I would have had when I was well and had rung the bell all those years ago and Mrs. Miller had opened the door. I wound my hand behind his neck and pulled him closer until his free hand, too, was in my tangled hair.
His voice was thick with desire; I had come to know the tone, feel the fullness of it. “Since the day we met and walked over Magdalen bridge and spoke of trees and rivers, I’ve preloved you in the same way my poems prewrote my prose, in the same way your poems and essays preloved God.”
We were quiet, each lost in the desire that had come suddenly for him and exquisitely long ago, flourishing in time, for me. Just the week before I had heard him tell Dorothy Sayers, “Sometimes love blooms when a third adversary enters the scene, and what is a more worthy adversary than death?”
“Look at us,” he said, drawing back to take me in. “Two crumbling old people acting as if we’re in our twenties and desperately in love.” He took my hand. “Come with me, Joy.”
I followed him inside and slowly up the stairs, my caliper making a noise like a hammer on wood with each step. His bed, now ours, waited for our bodies to rest and to make love. Coming together was slow and luxurious and only ours, never to be shared or talked about in the world. On our soft pillows, my body long against his, skin on skin, I rested my head on his shoulder and a righteous grace overwhelmed us both.
We had traveled our individual and secret roads to this destination, both with our childhood mystical hints of nature that followed us—in a small box of moss brought to him by his brother or an ice-laden forest in a Bronx park for me. The signposts and messages along the way had been palpable and evident in hindsight—the lions I’d been drawn to all my life and his Aslan; my Fairyland and his North; George MacDonald and mythology; our lives intercepted and interrupted by the Hound of Heaven; our poetry, our writing, and our reading—all pointing to this one moment in time: Kairos.
But how could I have known how to read those hints and messages? They’d been scattered across many years. Only now did I know. Only now.
“I love you, Clive Staples Lewis.”
“I love you, Helen Joy Lewis,” he said. “For as long as we have. For as well as I can.”
EPILOGUE
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.
When he bares his teeth winter meets its death.
And when he shakes his mane we shall have Spring again.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. LEWIS
Grace does not tell us how long we have in our life, or what comes next—that’s why grace is given only in the moment. Unmerited mercy is never earned.
After that June evening in our Kilns garden, against all doctors’ prognoses, I was gifted three more years with Jack, three more years with my sons and my friends and the very earth that drew me to God. Three more years until I clung to the great Lion, buried my face in his mane, and dropped to my knees in surrender.
Much has been written and told of those three years when Jack and I were husband and wife. I didn’t deserve it: the ecstasy in the pain, the redemption of the past, love that surpassed all understanding. But God and Love don’t dole out their gifts on merit.
Our bodies slowly healed and came together in the love and passion I’d dreamt of for all those years, but more so. There are experiences that even imagination can give no due. No sonnet or words of lovelorn pity can draw one to love as our bodies were finally able. As Jack once wrote, Eros has naked bodies. Friendship naked personalities.
We celebrated our honeymoon in Ireland a year and a half after I’d been sent to the Kilns to die. Boarding the plane, we laughed that we had once vowed never to step foot in one of those dangerous monstrosities—oh, how love changes things. His childhood best friend, Arthur, picked us up at the airport with congratulations and a hearty laugh. It was obvious he was thrilled to see his true friend in love and married. Jack and I cozied up at the Old Inn in Crawfordshire. It was there that I met his storytelling and gregarious extended family, feeling left out at times but surrounded by love. My eyes soaked in the exquisite landscape of the Emerald Isle Jack loved. I was able to walk more than a mile by then, and we relished each day in what I called Gift Time and “unconvenanted mercy.”
When we returned, Jack performed a series of radio addresses that so shocked the conservative American station that they banned his teachings on the four loves and sex! Oh, my man telling the world that “the roughness, even fierceness of some erotic play is harmless and wholesome.” Laughter, he said, “is the right response of all sensible lovers.” It wasn’t quite what they expected to hear from him.
In those years I planted the garden with Paxford and cooked with Mrs. Miller. I redecorated, updated, and renovated the Kilns while rejoicing in nourishing friendships. Jack, Warnie, and I laughed and read and wrote, seeking the most out of every day as well as we could, as often as we could. Thanks to Jack’s resolute love, Bill was unable to take our sons back to America, and our little family flourished at the Kilns. Belle and the Walshes came to visit, as did my parents and others, encouraging my heart as well as my body. I had reconciled with my brother, but I never saw him again.
As much as we could, Jack and I sneaked away for private weekends in cozy inns, understanding the Damocles sword that swung above our heads, ever making the time more valuable, palpable with grace and thrumming with desire.
Toward the end we flew to Greece, the land of our beloved myths, where we climbed the Acropolis and drank the finest wines with friends. It was our last journey together.
But that summer evening in our garden, how were we to know what would happen after our deaths?
I left Jack on July 13 of 1960, more than ten years after I opened his first letter. He grieved with such ferocity that he described death as an amputation. He wrote of this enveloping grief, and it became one of his most beloved books—A Grief Observed. Again pain and loss were redeemed in the service of our lives. This is how he describes us in that book: “I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”
The tiny heartbreaking commonplace, yes indeed.
He became the most extraordinary stepfather to my sons. He wrote two more books, and he would say to all who listened, as he’d always said to me, “These books and these works would not exist without Joy’s love and life, without my love for her.”
Three years after my departure Jack developed a heart condition and died at home in Warnie’s arms, and he too discovered that even his prolific imagination couldn’t do justice to the great unknown.
It was not Fairyland or the Island, nor the Great North, but all of it and none of it all at once.
He was buried in the graveyard of his beloved Trinity Church. Warnie chose the epitaph, words from Shakespeare’s King Lear that had been a quote on the family calendar the day their mother died. Men must endure their going hence.
Books would be written about both of us, mostly Jack, of course. Schools and classes were dedicated to his theories and his works. An Inkling Society was founded and movies made of our life. There would be scholars and theologians who dissected our writing, our stories, our mistakes, our poetry, my sonnets, and our foibles. No one would ever get all of it fully right—who could? Strangers would wander our garden while taking a tour of t
he Kilns, and also Oxford and Magdalen.
My sons, my heartbroken sons, would delve into their own faith—Davy in the Jewish traditions and Douglas in Christ. Both would grow up and find their own loves and lives, and Douglas would write of these days and produce the Narnian movies. There would even be a sign on my 10 Old High Street address that states The former home of writer Joy Davidman, wife of C. S. Lewis. There would be memorials and statues and reading rooms in America at Wheaton College with our papers filed in boxes alongside six more of the most important British authors of our time.
All of these things and many more would happen, but on that evening, the one in the garden, Jack and I knew nothing of what would come to pass. We merely leaned into each other, our bodies and our weight supporting and propping us, two trees entwined, unable to stand alone.
“To me,” Jack said, “you are star, water, air, fields, and forest. Everything.”
These most beautiful proclamations of love would be some of the very lines to be etched on my memorial stone after I finally closed my eyes, Jack beside me. When I would discover that all there is, and all there ever will be is this: Love, waiting for our surrender, from where we came and where we go.
With the great roar of Aslan, I ended my life with these words, whispered in truth to Jack: “I am at peace with God.”
Remember Helen Joy Davidman
D. July 1960
Loved wife of
C. S. Lewis
Here the whole world (stars, water, air
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes yet with hope that she
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Becoming Mrs. Lewis is a work of historical fiction inspired by the life of Joy Davidman and her improbable love story with C. S. Lewis. The world’s fascination with Lewis (Jack to his friends) and his only wife, Helen Joy Davidman Gresham (Joy), has never abated. Their erosstory led to some of C. S. Lewis’s greatest works on love, grief, and faith, yet Joy is rarely offered credit as the muse, editor, best friend, and beloved wife she was to this revered author.
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