I would create myself
In a little fume of words and leave my words
After my death to kiss you forever and ever
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
March 1957
Maybe I deserved all of it—the five months of surgeries and pain and vomiting, the weeks of fear and hospital transfers and inexhaustible disease. Maybe this had all been accumulating with each terrible thing I’d said or done in my life to beset me at forty-one years old. But did God work that way?
No.
He was not meant to be bargained with as he doled out punishment.
My leg was set and plastered and my ovaries clipped out; evidence remained in the form of crooked black stitches that ran along my stomach like tiny spiders. My breast lump had been excised—the cursed lump I’d known about all along but that had been dismissed. Radiation to the hip under groaning machines, and I’d swallowed medicines I’d never heard about before. The cursed-awful list of cancer’s sites: in the left femur, the left breast, the right shoulder, and the right leg.
During these months I went from experiencing the mystical peace of God to black doubt and the abysmal dread of annihilation. But in the end, did I really believe all I claimed to believe? Did I believe God could exist at all? Or was he just like my Fairyland—a tactic to navigate life, imagining there was something more, something better, something out there that I’d longed for but that only existed in dreams? Maybe, just dammit maybe, there was nothing but being human and being in pain and in suffering until there was nothing.
In a ledger I could list the reasons I deserved this fate. I could list and I could flagellate myself, but the vile cancer was doing a just fine job of it all by itself.
Dear God, love finally arrived, and you will take me? Are you that selfish? That jealous? Is this my payment for loving Jack with such fierce intensity? For finally finding a life of peace? Or did I conceive you of my own making for consolation?
As Orual cried out to the Grey Mountain in defense of her love for Psyche, so I cried out to the God I’d felt and believed in and surrendered to in my boys’ bedroom all those many years ago.
You will give me great love and then sweep me to the heavens—if they exist at all?
But did I believe God punished? The old wrathful God who smote his enemies and burned their cities? I was no better than Job or Jonah, railing against my lot in life. Just when it seemed everything might work out, that I might have the life I’d dreamed of for very, very long, I would die?
All my life I’d pushed too hard, tried too much, attempted to convince the head what only the heart can decide. But dying now? When I understood the grace of surrender? When love had arrived? What cruel injustice.
It took weeks, but I slowly emerged from that parched desert of doubt stronger in my faith than ever. Through reading and prayer, holding tight to Jack as he absorbed my doubt and pain, talking until we couldn’t find another word, Jack and I found if not peace, then acceptance. Grace, I wrote to Eva, arrived as I prayed. Whatever my fate, I would be able to bear it with Jack at my side and my Creator’s love surrounding me even as the doubt appeared and disappeared like smoke from the past, whispers of the woman who shadowed me and mocked my belief.
November was a kaleidoscope of pain and surgeries. By December I’d made it clear that only the two most basic of my desires remained: to live out whatever days I had left as Jack’s wife in the eyes of the church and our community, and to keep the boys in England.
While frigid rain lashed the hospital windows, Jack came to me in the worst of the December nausea.
“I’ve gone to the bishop and presented our case for marriage.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked. The nausea—I’d swallowed a pint of anesthesia when they removed my ovaries—was all consuming. I needed something, anything to assuage the suffering. Becoming Mrs. Lewis in God’s eyes was a hope that burned as brightly as any light. I didn’t want to be sick in front of Jack one more time. I wanted to be strong, to be the woman Warnie and he believed I was: courageous in the face of despair. But it was getting harder and harder.
“I told the bishop that your marriage to Bill never bloody counted because Bill had been married before you. But because they deem me a public figure, they are afraid they will be flooded with other requests, other exceptions. His answer was no.”
“That’s what you get for being a public figure.” I tried to smile.
Jack didn’t laugh.
In many ways, in such a short amount of time, our roles often reversed. Instead of it being Jack who held me, it was I who must quote from his favorite mystic—Julian of Norwich. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
I held his hand. “My love, the pain is cleansing me. Soon I’ll be walking with a caliper splint and living with you.”
Together we pretended it to be true, but it was only as real as Perelandra or Narnia.
Weeks passed; the boys returned to school. Eventually I felt well enough that Warnie brought me my typewriter. I began to preoccupy myself while waiting for test results, healing, and treatments by catching up on correspondence and informing everyone of my plight: My parents. Chad and Eva. Belle, Marian, and Michal. And finally, my brother—we reconciled as best as two siblings can when across an ocean with one of them at death’s door. I knit and crocheted everything from scarves to mittens to tablecloths for the Kilns, as if I could move myself there with my hands alone.
It was the January doctor’s announcement that almost destroyed us.
“Months to live,” he told us. “Months at best.”
Together we took the news inside, let it churn our hearts to pulp. “If I could have made you love me all those years ago,” I said, “we’d have had more time.”
“Free will,” he said and kissed me. “It’s the only thing that might make love worth having.”
I nodded in fear. “We cannot look at what horror has happened to us, but at how we will turn to God in it. If I only identify with the three-dimensional world I once believed in, I will despair. But we know better, Jack. We know there is more.”
Jack’s face, the ruddiness now white and sallow as if I’d drained him of his life as well, drew close to mine. “I want more of life here with you.” His voice carried a tremor, and for one split second I thought I knew what he must have sounded like when he was a small boy and his mother was dying in the back bedroom of Little Lea. “I want more of you,” he said.
“As do I want more of you.”
During those months in the hospital Jack was at my bedside as much as possible. For three-day weekends he never left me but to sleep at the Kilns. During the times I believed I’d heal we relished our moments together; he sometimes sneaked sherry into the hospital. We recited poetry and read together. We talked of the future, whether it was a day or a month or more. We kissed and we held each other and felt great expectation of what might be. During the worst moments we prayed, feverishly we prayed.
“It’s hopeless,” I told him on a February afternoon when they removed the cast and found that the bones were not healing. “We must stop living in denial.”
Crochet needles wrapped in gray yarn sat on my lap, abandoned mittens for Davy.
“It is not hopeless,” he said with surety. “It is uncertain, and this is the cross God always gives us in life, uncertainty. But it is not hopeless.”
“Jack, all I’ve ever wanted was to bring you happiness. And here I am bringing you pain. It would have been best if you’d never met me at all.”
“Not met you at all?” He stood and paced the hospital room and then turned to me with fire on his face. “My life would have been but dry dust compared to having you in my world. With whom could I have ever been this close? Till We Have Faces would not exist. My biography would be but half what it is. My heart would still be hibernating, too troubled to feel.” He came to my side and kissed my face, first one cheek, then the other, and then my lips. “Whatever we face together is better than never knowing you at all.”
“There is so much to live for now. So much,” I said and closed my eyes, shook off the dread.
“It does seem fate designs a great need and then frustrates it.”
I smiled at him. “Now tell me how the boys are doing. Give me news from outside this cellblock of a room.”
“I’ve restored the old falling-down guesthouse for them,” he said with a grand smile. “Now they have a place all their own to play and hide. And guess what they found in there.”
“Dead animals?” I asked.
“Your ham! On a top shelf. There it was. I used the guesthouse for storage during the rations.”
I laughed so heartily that Jack wiped tears from my eyes. “I remember sending that to you.”
“They ate it,” Jack said with his own laughter. “They took it right back to the house, and Mrs. Miller opened that tin and it was still good.” Then he grew serious. “I cleaned that little house because I think they need to get away as best they can.”
“Or you need to be away from them.” I kissed his hand, which held mine. “It must be a burden, Jack. I am so sorry.”
“It’s not a burden, Joy. I love them. But they do bloody well fight.” He paused. “I don’t believe Warnie and I ever brawled like that. Douglas often takes off into the woods leaving a roaring Davy behind; I found him one midnight skating on the pond under a full moon.”
“They have been knitted together so differently.”
“Yes. And that clashes. But also they worry. They worry about you. And they don’t know what to do with those emotions.”
“It breaks my heart in more places than my moth-eaten leg. If only we could promise them answered prayers.” Immense weariness settled on me again, as it often did without warning. “Read to me, please. It takes away the pain.” I closed my eyes. “Anything at all, Jack.”
It was Shakespeare he chose that day, and I dozed, slipping in and out of the cadence of his words. It was only when I opened my eyes to see why he’d stopped that I realized he hadn’t been reading at all, but quoting from memory.
Whenever I believed I could not love him more, I did.