A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  The incredible thing about the stream of callers, at Mole End and later, was that they came with love to cheer her and they went away cheered and strengthened. Her love and strength flowed out to them. One of the students, later, did a painting of Davy, smiling in the light, leading a darkly silhouetted student towards a tree— the Tree.

  Davy and I, facing what must be faced with as much courage and hope and love as there was in us, prayed together that month, the old lovely prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, I kneeling beside her bed. The Rector came to give us Holy Communion. Since Dr. Craddock had said that I might take her out on to the wide lawns of the mansion, I borrowed a chaise-longue for her, and every afternoon we sat out there in the shade of a giant oak. We were reminded of Glenmerle, there under the tree, with Flurry lying beside us instead of Laddie. We read together a lot that month. One thing we read and talked about was Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation. And of course the old dear poems that were part of the very texture of our life. It seemed to us that now was the time to read our Journal: and out there under the oaks we did so, beginning with happy Glenmerle days—’when we were so happy in May’ and our love was young. It was almost all Glenmerle that month: Glenmerle and wandering there by the lily pond, the club and the fire, the dawn flight and the canoe drifting under the stars. And the building of the Shining Barrier. Sometimes, though, we were reminded of later days and would turn ahead to read of the schooner or of Oxford. It gave us an awareness of the whole of our life—and of a sort of unified wholeness that marked it.

  Davy was not in pain. She didn’t, to my occasional moments of despair, have much appetite for the salt-free diet, despite my efforts. The immediate problem was the build-up of fluid in her abdomen. Nothing could stop it building-up, we knew—up to the point where it would have to be drained by tapping—but the more slowly it built-up the more hopeful we could be. And, in fact, it was not until early September that she had to go in hospital, locally, for a few days for the tap. The doctor said that I might take her in the MG if I would go slowly, so we had a merry little creep in what was essentially a merry little car, our books at Mole End open to mark our place for when she came back.

  But she was not to come back. For one reason and another the days in hospital drew out. For weeks it was always next week that she would be coming home; but she never did. Perhaps it was best that we had that month of August at Mole End without the pressure of knowing it to be the last.

  From September through November she felt quite good. The doctor said, and I said to inquirers: ‘She’s holding her own.’ The watchword of those months. She was on cortisone much of that time, a drug that has a rather euphoric effect. At first she was troubled by heat; and I was agonised for her, remembering the summer before when she began to feel good with the advent of the blessed coolness. By an irony of fate the heat hung on this year until October and Hurricane Hazel which, though not striking Lynchburg directly, ended the heat wave in a big wind that brought down tree branches and cut off the hospital’s electricity for a bit. But Davy exulted in the wind and encouraged other patients who were afraid.

  During the months in hospital I was not to miss even one day in coming to her, almost always twice. Otherwise I taught my classes and that was all. Everything that was not Davy was a blur. Except that I looked at her paintings at home. And I always watched the dawn, the dawn we loved, and she watched it. We knew we were both seeing it.

  In September there arrived in the post an old shoebox. It was Julian’s priceless, fragile, medieval crucifix. Carved in wood, it had not only the Crucified One but, at the top, God the Father looked down from a cloud and the Dove descended, and, at the bottom, Mary stood with a sword through her heart. This was by Davy always. Julian himself could not come, though both he and I begged his prior to let him. But Julian, saying masses for us, praying long hours before the Sacrament, was peculiarly with us all the same in spirit. His cross, his letters made him near, and, even more, his poems. One of his poems, in particular, was pinned up beside Davy and often on her lips:

  If everything is lost, thanks be to God

  If I must see it go, watch it go,

  Watch it fade away, die

  Thanks be to God that He is all I have

  And if I have Him not, I have nothing at all

  Nothing at all, only a farewell to the wind

  Farewell to the grey sky

  Goodbye, God be with you evening October sky.

  If all is lost, thanks be to God,

  For He is He, and I, I am only I.

  Davy, too, was saying farewell to the wind, farewell to the wind and sky, watching it all go, fade away, die—and thanking God. And yet she was human, heart-breakingly human, and she did not want to die.

  She obediently did everything the doctors and the nurses told her to do: everything except to stay in bed when someone else was in need. Over and over again she was discovered out of bed in the night, sitting beside some other patient who was suffering, soothing her, holding her hand, praying for her. The doctor told me to persuade her to stay in bed; and Davy would look guilty and grin and promise—and then she would hear a sob or a cry in the night. Later, I was to get dozens of letters, some almost illiterate, from people who had been in hospital with her, saying that she had helped and sustained them. One said she was like an angel of God.

  The nurses loved her and the hospital servants, too. She enlisted my help to make a grand medal ‘for faithful service’ for one of the black maids, who wore it proudly. Many of the nurses were praying for her. There was one nurse, especially, named Joan, whom we called St. Joan, who loved Davy and was loved. St. Joan was young and swift and valiant, and the name fitted her. Davy never lost her gaiety and sense of humour. People laughed to be around her. Someone gave her a floppy-eared creature which she always spoke of as ‘St.-Paul-the-dog-or-rabbit’; and she used it to speak ‘aside’ to about how kind people were. It is simply true, without exaggeration, to say that she was a tower of strength to everyone— nurses, doctors, ministers no less than friends—all drew strength from her cheerful, brave, deeply loving spirit. Love shone forth from her; and love not only begets love, it transmits strength.

  It might be appropriate to say here, although I was not to know it until the end, that the hospital—the Virginia Baptist Hospital— would not take a penny for all their care of her over months, not even for the meals they occasionally brought me. They said that Davy had done more for them, for their nurses and other patients, then they had ever been able to do for her. And Dr. Craddock, in my opinion a deeply skilled doctor as well as a deeply Christian gentleman, who with his partner saw her daily during all those months, also refused all payment. I didn’t ask either doctors or hospital for help and didn’t expect it; I had made arrangements to borrow. Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.

  Davy strove to do God’s will. More important, she strove to make her own will conform to God’s will: to will what He willed. Her prayer—and mine, too, often—was the prayer from one of Charles Williams’s novels: ‘Do—or do not.’ She wanted, humanly, to live; and she, humanly, feared death: yet she was surrendered to God. Her watchword, the phrase always on her lips, was: ‘All shall be most well.’ And: ‘All manner of thing shall be well.’ She worked on her ‘maxims’ of the Christian life, the first of which was: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; and if thou canst not yet love Him, thou shalt trust Him with all thy mind, soul, and heart.’ Another one was: ‘Thou shalt not do anything contrary to love.’

  But if Davy was a tower of strength to everybody else, I was allowed to be, a little, her strength. That is an exaggeration, for her real source of strength was her crucified Lord, and yet, humanly, she leaned on me. Perhaps it was her divine courtesy; and, indeed, there was a courtesy between us a
nd, sometimes, a sort of supernatural justice. At all events, she did not, perhaps could not, conceal from me her human longing to live and her human fear of death. In Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell he sets forth his Doctrine of Substituted Love: carrying one another’s burdens is not just a figure of speech or something meaningful only in terms of physical burdens like a trunk. Davy’s burden was not death but the fear of death. I asked her to give me that burden, a real handing over, like surrendering a trunk to a porter. An act of handing over. And I took it—also act. I then entered into the fear, her fear, with all my heart and mind and imagination, felt it, carried it along with my own fear, which was also real but other. And her burden grew lighter.

  Her room was at the end of a corridor and beyond was a veranda. Every day in a wheelchair I took her, warmly bundled up, out on to that veranda. The MG would be parked where Davy could look down and say hello to Flurry. When I wheeled her out of the room and along the corridor, Davy always cried out gaily to every-body she saw: ‘This is the high moment of my day!’ And every-body would smile. Out there on the veranda we talked and read poems and kissed each other and held hands. How much happiness we had, even under the sentence of death! Usually I brought the yellow roses out there, too. Sometimes a nurse would bring us tea or I would have brought a thermos flask of ‘proper tea’from home. If there was a letter from Julian or some other friend, we would read it there together; and we would talk about the dawn we had both watched. Usually this time out of doors would be on my earlier call at the hospital, but sometimes I would take her out in the late afternoon or evening, too.

  One mild late-October evening, Hallowe’en, in fact, I took her out there, bringing along some fresh yellow roses. I told her, jokingly, that I had made a special trip to Glenmerle for these particular roses, and she chuckled, pretending it was so. We talked that evening of Glenmerle days, feeling them to be but yesterday. We pretended that we had just been in the rose-garden and then, still carrying roses, had walked down to the bridge. The veranda in the twilight, we pretended, was the bridge, and Davy would look over the veranda railing and say, ‘Oh, look! I see a fish!’ And I would say, gesturing towards the lights on the distant avenue, ‘Lots of fireflies tonight.’ Once Davy said in a low voice, ‘Maybe we’ll be allowed to meet again at Glenmerle, if . . .’ And I put my arm around her and said, ‘A heavenly Glenmerle. If there’s anything I’m sure of, it is that heaven is a coming home. And, for us, Glenmerle.’ And she said, ‘The waiting won’t be long.’ Then she said, as a car came in the hospital drive, ‘Look, there’s your father coming home.’ It was a particularly happy and loving evening, there in the clean cold autumn air with the faint scent of the roses.

  That night when I left her, blinking the MG’s instrument lights as always as I drove out and seeing the answering blink of her bed lamp, I went home and wrote a poem:

  ALL HALLOWS EVE

  Tonight, while weighing wild winged hope with fears

  Of loss, again the girl’s voice crying gay

  And sweet—O playmate of lost pagan years!—

  Comes ringing in the glory of the May.

  O singing beauty! singing though there nears

  The moment of all finding and all loss:

  Together in our laughter and our tears,

  Wind-driven to the centre where ways cross.

  Rose garden in blue night, where souls embraced

  In holy silence, timeless ecstasy:

  Truth grew between us, final beauty laced

  The stars, and awed we knew eternity.

  A secret sharing passed from eye to eye:

  In death the singing beauty does not die.

  I brought it to her next day. I whistled our recognition signal under her window, as I always did, and she whistled the second part back. This time I added, ‘Thou Art the King of Glory’. Then, out on the veranda, I read her the poem. A few tears rolled down her cheeks, but they were tears of joy, and she smiled through them at me.

  That night, too—All Souls’ Eve—I wrote a poem for her. This one, also, moved her deeply; and she kept them both pinned up beside her, along with Julian’s poem. My poems and his, together, say how it was:

  DYING

  Bright with God’s spirit

  Awed at that beauty

  —You who are near it —

  Unafraid at that footstep

  Now that you hear it

  Reckless in pity

  Eager in loving

  —High in the City —

  Wearing in beauty

  Holy simplicity.

  T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets says what it is to be a Christian: ‘A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than every-thing).’ I might not altogether understand those lines but for Davy: it was the condition she had attained.

  In November came a worried letter from C. S. Lewis, whom I had had no time to write to since the July letter telling him the position. I did take time to reply to this letter:

  It is a long time since you wrote and told me of your wife’s grave illness. You asked my prayers and of course have had them: not only daily, for I never wake in the night without remembering you both before God. I have sometimes tried, by sophistical arguments, to persuade myself that your silence might somehow be interpreted as a good omen . . . but how could it? If you can bear, will you tell me your news. If she has gone where we can feel no anxiety about her, then I must feel anxious about you. I liked you both so well: never two young people more. And to like is to fear. Whatever has happened and in whatever state you are (I have horrid pictures in my mind) all blessings on you.

  One day in December it was a bit too cold for the veranda, so I wheeled her into our alternative place, a sort of many-windowed sunroom. We talked about Hawaii—the blue sea and the trade-wind clouds—and how she had gone into the sea from the yacht after my uniform cap. She chuckled at the incident and was her usual gay self, but it seemed to me that she was a bit fuzzy and confused.

  The following day when I came and whistled the recognition signal under her window, there was no reply. Of course she might be talking to the doctor. But when I entered the room, I saw that they had put bed-railings up to keep her from falling out. The nurse told me that she was going into coma. The nurse spoke to her, but there was no reply. I spoke to her and said I had come. She smiled angelically, but did not open her eyes. I said, ‘Open your eyes, dearling.’ She smiled again, but that was all. I said, ‘Your eyes are still shut. I can’t see you if your eyes are shut, can I?’ She gave a faint giggle, but nothing more. I sat there beside her for an hour or two, holding her hand; and then I had to leave.

  That night when I returned she had sunk deeper into the coma. The doctor came and spoke to her, but there was no response. He thought that she would never come out of it. I had prayed that she would not die in coma and so had she, that she would die, if die she must, clear-eyed and aware. But now it seemed that it must be in coma. Perhaps it would be better so. I took the bars down so that I could hold her hand. I leaned over and kissed her, and, for some reason, I thought of the line in my early poem to her: ‘One April kiss as dark comes flooding.’ Darkness for her, and a sort of poignant sorrow flooding through me. I kissed her cheek again, and she said in a small, far-away voice: ‘Oh, love . . .’ I spoke to her, but she was silent; so I just sat there, holding her hand. After a few minutes she again said in that little voice: ‘Oh, love . . .’ All that evening, at intervals of about thirty seconds, came the murmur: ‘Oh, love . . .’ Twice nurses came in to give her injections. Each time as the needle pricked her, she said—as though it were she hurting another: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Then, after a few minutes of silence, the little voice would begin again, saying: ‘Oh, love . . .’ She was saying it to me, I knew. Wherever she was, whatever remote land she was wandering in, she was reaching to me. The slow hours passed, and every minute or half-minute the gentle little remote voice. If it isn’t just a meaningless form of words, I suppose my heart broke that night. It rea
lly means, though, loving past all measure.

  The next day they began intra-venous feeding. She was totally unresponsive to doctors or nurses. Then I found that I could reach her. If I spoke of Laddie or Glenmerle, she would murmur. I told her about Laddie having hold of the pig’s tail, and she gave a delighted giggle—to the amazement of a nurse who came in just then. I asked the nurse to bring me something for her to eat. The nurse said it wouldn’t work but brought it. I told Davy to open her mouth, and she did, and I put the spoon in it, telling her to swallow, and she did that. I fed her the whole dishful, as though she were a baby. The nurse tried it, but Davy could not hear any voice but mine. After that the hospital forgot visiting hours and I forgot classes: I fed her all her meals.

  And I talked her out of that coma. Maybe she would have come out of it by herself. But, beginning with that meal and extending over the next few days, I talked to her, and she heard me. I hummed the Humoresque, and she murmured happily. She laughed gaily when I spoke of amusing things we both remembered, and she squirmed happily when I said loving things. I gently whistled the recognition signal, and she puckered up her lips and tried to respond. She would even try to speak. When I said, ‘Sweetheart’, she would utter a pathetic little, ‘Sweee . . .’ But the next day she was able to say ‘Sweetheart’. Finally I tried the ‘Alert’ whistle, and her eyes fluttered open for a moment. Gradually she came out of it.