Could you listen to your devoted lover?
Listen just a while, it will soon be over
“ACROSTIC IN HENDECASYLLABICS,” JOY DAVIDMAN
It was a Thursday, March 21, the spring equinox, the time I’d told Jack at our first meeting was a signal of new beginnings. He’d believed new beginnings were heralded by autumn. But it looked like I was right, for this was our wedding day. A real one.
My hospital room, now so familiar I could see it with my eyes closed, was cluttered with books and papers, with my typewriter and notepads. Newspapers and even a Scrabble game were scattered on the rolling table across from my bed, yet it would become a sacred cathedral in the next moments.
Plaster held my leg in place and my foot was propped high in traction, metal poles overhead, pulleys and gears, as I lay supine in the bed. Pillows were stuffed behind my back and shoulders to prop me. A clean white blanket was tented over my raised leg. My hair, brushed and clean with the help of the orderly, fell over my shoulders. From the wife of a patient down the hall, I’d borrowed a tube of red lipstick and swiped it across my lips.
Warnie came to my bedside first. “Joy, I have loved you like a sister, and now you will be my sister.” His sober eyes were clear and yet filled with tears. “I have never loved you more.”
“Warnie, look at us, loving each other and loving the same man.”
He placed his hand in mine. “I pray for you every day.”
Warnie moved away as Jack leaned close so only I could hear him, his lips soft against my ear, his voice filling me. “You have allowed me to become my true self with you. I hide nothing. Now let us become as one.”
I took Jack’s face in mine and kissed him, not as ardently as I’d have liked, for next to me stood the priest, Peter Bide, a former student of Jack’s, his white collar a comma against his throat and his black robes swishing like smoke with every move.
“Are you ready, Joy?” Peter asked in such a serious tone that I wondered if he’d practiced.
“I believe I’ve been ready for this moment all my life,” I said.
Jack squeezed my hand. “How is it that my heart is breaking and yet I’ve never been so happy?”
A ward sister in a prim habit stood with Warnie, who wore a suit pressed so straight he looked frightened to move. He smiled at me and held his hands clasped behind his back as if hiding something. Sober, his cheeks red with health, he stated to all present, “I love Joy as a sister, and now we will make it official.”
Jack entwined his fingers in mine. He was handsome in his black suit and knotted blue tie, his hair slicked back. Without a cigarette or pipe, his mouth held only a shy grin. A great wash of love and admiration, and the realization of miracles, filled me with a swelling ecstasy that surged inside me like a sacred sea.
“Can I ask you something before we start, Father Bide?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“How did you finally decide that this was sanctioned? That the Church of England would give permission? We’ve asked everyone we know, even the bishop.”
“I asked the only source that mattered.” Father Bide paused and closed his hands around the black prayer book in his hand. “The only court of appeal I thought had the final argument—and that was God himself. What would he do in this case? And the answer was clear.”
“Then let’s get married,” I said and turned my face to Jack.
He squeezed my hand. “Yes, then let’s be married.”
So it came that on March 21, 1957, while I lay in bed in a nightgown with my left leg lifted high on ropes and pulleys, I finally married the love of my life.
Father Bide began to speak the words of the ceremony, and I listened to the melody of the Church of England’s holy matrimony litany.
In the presence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
We have come together
To witness the marriage of Helen Joy Davidman and Clive Staples Lewis
To pray for God’s blessing on them
To share their joy
And to celebrate their love . . .
Peter continued in the most serious voice, as if we were standing at the altar of Westminster Abbey and the queen herself was in the congregation—the hospital room no deterrence to solemnity.
“Jack,” he finally said, “will you take Joy to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and protect her, forsaking all others, and be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”
“I will,” he said, and then again for emphasis, “I will.”
“Joy,” Peter asked, “will you take Jack to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and protect him, forsaking all others, and be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”
“I will.” Tears rolled from my eyes and down my face where Jack kissed them away, the wetness of them on his lips.
Warnie and the ward sister, whose name I never learned, also cried silently. Maybe it was the line “as long as you both shall live,” or the boundless love that filled that room, I didn’t know. Peter finished the ceremony—vows, rings, and declaration.
It wasn’t the wedding a small girl dreams of—the white lace dress and a flowing veil. There were no bridesmaids or a symphony orchestra or long trails of white roses. But what does a small girl know of real love? I hadn’t ever known how to dream. I hadn’t known that love would arrive in the most unlikely of places—a hospital room where fear and despair usually reigned. I hadn’t known that love could not be earned or bought or manipulated; it was just this—complete peace in the other’s presence.
All the years wasted believing that love meant owning or possessing, and now the greatest love had arrived in my greatest weakness. In my supreme defeat came my grandest victory. God’s paradoxes had no end.
Peter ended the ceremony with the final prayer. We closed our eyes, Jack’s hands in mine.
“The Holy Trinity make you strong in faith and love, defend you on every side, and guide you in truth and peace; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always.”
It was Warnie who let out a great whooping sound. “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis.”
“My wife,” Jack said, and laughed that resonating merry sound that had buoyed me all these months.
“My husband.”
We set to laughter, and the ward sister shook her head. “I’ve never seen such celebration in a hospital room.”
“Well, you’ve never seen anyone quite like the three of us,” I said.
“No, I haven’t.”
I knew what she believed: that this was a deathbed marriage, one to satisfy the sad woman in the cast with cancer. But it was no such thing. It was holy matrimony between a man and a woman who had grown to love in ways that no words or explanations could contain.
It was then that Peter turned around and brought a tray to us both, offering us our first Holy Communion as husband and wife.
“Peter,” Jack said when we had finished the Eucharist. “If I may impose with one more request.”
“What is it?” Peter placed the tray on the bedside table.
Jack cast his eyes to Warnie and then to Peter. “I know you don’t like to make much of it, but I do know that when you prayed over that young boy dying of meningitis, he recovered. I don’t believe it is in you that healing is given, but if you would pray over Joy right now as my wife . . .” Jack’s voice broke. “Please.”
My wife.
Peter didn’t answer with words, but instead placed both his hands on my head, the warmth of them comforting me. He closed his eyes. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known . . .”
I closed my eyes to his prayer, his voice mingling with the cleansing power of a holy marriage and Holy Communion. The space around us shimmered, as sacred as if we knelt at a candle-festooned altar on red velvet cushions in the grandest cathedral on earth. If there was a time heaven might hear our pleas, this consecrated moment swelled around us, this boundless mystical silence beneath Peter’s voice as he uttered the prayers of the Church of England and then those of his own, pleading for healing and restoration, but in the end, for God’s will to be done.
After Peter finished, the silence extended, enveloping us all. The hospital and the world paused with us; time was suspended. It lasted for only seconds but felt an eternity in my soul. Outside, a songbird sang a single note. A tray banged across the hallway. A child called out below my window. A doctor called for a nurse, and the world began again.
It all began again.