Under the quiet passion of the spring;
I would leave you the trouble of my heart
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
They sent me to the Kilns to die in April of 1957.
Helpless to assist, I closed my eyes and allowed the crew of many medical personnel to pack me: my medicines and wheelchair (for the possible day when I might use it); the bedpan and trays. Two nurses had been hired—day and night. This business of dying wasn’t as simple as surrender to the great light. It was real and dirty and untidy. As Jack said, “A walk through the Garden of Gethsemane.”
My emotions clashed brutally—everything one can feel I felt and usually all at once.
When I’d prayed to one day live at the Kilns as Mrs. Lewis, maybe I should have been more specific. Because that prayer was answered as they rolled in a hospital bed and settled me into the common room with the familiar egg yolk– yellow walls and blackout curtains, the well-worn chairs and leaning bookcases. The fireplace with the perpetual aroma of slag, and the faded carpet embedded with cigarette ash. It was my house now as Mrs. Lewis, and yet I might as well have been strapped to the floor to observe a life I’d never live, a happiness tasted and snatched away.
The bed had already been set up when the ambulance crew wheeled me in on a stretcher to gently lift me onto the sheets. But with a sudden shift of their arms a swift pain sliced through my leg, and I cried out.
“Joy!”
“Joy!”
Jack’s and Warnie’s voices comingled as they came running to the side of the bed from the far wall, where they’d been observing and allowing the attendants to do their work.
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth and tears. I settled back onto the hard mattress and tears ran down my cheeks, unbidden. I wanted to be courageous for them, for me, for the memory of me. But the pain and the lost happiness and the fear held sway.
It took some time for the hospital staff to unload and settle me and then to finally leave me alone with Jack, who sat next to my bed and rested his head on the pillow next to me in an awkward bent fashion.
“I want to take your pain away, Joy. I want to heal you.”
I turned my face and kissed him. “And I want you to take me upstairs to your room and make love to me. For as long as you can. We can finally be together, and it’s only my cancer that keeps us apart.” A sob broke loose. There was no more courage remaining at that moment, only despair. And if God couldn’t bear my despair, then he couldn’t bear me.
“My love, the minute you are able, I will take you in my arms and to my bed.” His voice was heavy beneath the burden, and he bowed his head.
Jack’s and Warnie’s voices were murmurs much like background music in a pub or a radio playing in another room. The cadence and accents, the elongated Rs and brief but lovely laughter carried me like waves. I was awake, but not in any real way that they would know I was. It was more like a dreamy consciousness of my surroundings while my eyes stayed closed and I floated in and out of knowing. Much like a dream where one was in one situation and then another without the synapse connection carrying them forward—nothing was in between.
Lying supine—my leg in plaster and a contraption much like a circus performer’s trapeze hanging above my thin bed—nausea suddenly overwhelmed me like a rocking boat lurching me forward. My eyes flew open and I reached up to grab the triangular handle bar and pull myself to sitting. I wasn’t given warning; my body was slow with warning bells for anything at all, and I vomited all over the clean bedsheets and warm brown blanket the day nurse had tucked in around me. I groaned with not only misery but also with embarrassment.
Jack was at my side, so quickly that maybe he’d been standing there all along. “Joy, I’m here.” Then Warnie too.
“I’m sorry.” I fell back on the pillows in shame.
Warnie, lit with the evening sun filtering into the room, held a silver kidney basin—the ubiquitous throw-up basin we’d brought home from the hospital. How I’d hoped that leaving the hospital after five months would mean leaving these accoutrements behind. No such luck.
Jack hastily yanked the blanket from its moorings and then grabbed the bowl from Warnie to lickety-split spill the liquid into it. Warnie placed a wet washcloth on my forehead as I moaned, humiliated and emptied. This was not how I wanted to be seen or remembered.
Jack placed the basin and the blanket on the floor as the nurse bustled in to research the commotion. Jack’s precious face obliterated my view of all else in the room as he bowed over me. In an instant his lips were on mine with a kiss full and kind and overwhelmingly imbued with compassion. He heeded no mind to the sickness that remained on me, to the propriety of asepsis; he only loved me.
I’d felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of the love we shared—an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we’d traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey—riddled with both pain and joy—culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.
Jack rested his head on my pillow, and when I thought he might stroke my head or cheek, instead he began to pray, an earnest prayer that God would give him my suffering, allow him to bear my burdens. Then he rested for a while facing me with his eyes closed and his lips ever so gently on mine.
He’d aged during these last months: I could see this. His hair was thinner, as was his face, but to me he was even more beautiful. His full and beautiful mouth. His deep eyes.
“You want to take my suffering but you can’t, Jack. It’s mine to carry. You’re the one who told me there is no bargaining with God.”
“No.” He lifted his head from my pillow. “Your pain is not yours alone anymore. It’s ours. I want to carry it for you. I’m asking God.”
“This is mine, but with you I can bear it. It’s you who’s guided me here—to faith: I know I’m beloved.”
“You are beloved by more than God, Joy. By me. By Warnie. By your sons and all the friends who have embraced you; I’ve never seen anyone make friends as easily and quickly as you.” His voice cracked, and he rested his head on my pillow. “I love you with all my being.”
“I love you too,” I said in a faded voice. “But just because we love God and are committed to him doesn’t mean we are exempt from the pain and loss in this world. We can’t ask to be the exceptions.”
We rested there for quite a while, the sounds of spring outside: wind, birdsong, and Paxford’s voice calling out. The creak of the floors told us Warnie was upstairs. The kitchen pots and pans clanged together as Mrs. Miller made lunch. I fell asleep quickly and deeply, as I often did now, a sudden sleep completely different from the slow falling of an unmedicated rest.
I awoke when Jack’s head lifted from my pillow.
“Poetry,” I said. “Let’s read.”
He scooted back his chair and fetched Wordsworth from the side table. “Before we read, I have something to tell you.”
“Is it bad news? Because I’m not sure I can take anymore.”
“It’s Bill.”
I girded my heart with what armor remained and clenched my hands into fists at my sides. My foot, raised in traction, began to throb again—the birth pangs of a greater pain. I reached for the bottle of pain pills and swallowed one. “Tell me.”
“He’s written to us.”
“Let me see.”
“I don’t think you should read it, Joy. You just need to know that he’s demanding that if . . . if something happens to you, he wants the boys back with him. He laid some terrible accusations at your feet. But don’t trouble yourself; I’ve written back to him in the sternest way possible. He will not and cannot have the boys return to America.”
“Let me read it,” I said. “Now.”
He didn’t argue, but rose and left the room. His footsteps echoed up the stairs to his office and then back down again. When he returned he handed the letter to me.
Dear Jack,
it began . . .
There were condolences about my prognosis and a reference to the fact that Bill’s only spirituality was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and then the dagger:
Let me tell you my side of the story.
I read on with an invisible hand around my throat.
He told Jack that when I’d left five years ago, I’d been “disturbed.” He claimed my mind had been a mess and my heart set on Jack. He wrote that I’d never made very much of my writing career and that he’d supported me in the Presbyterian Life articles so that I could feel good about myself. He claimed I left my boys too long (he was right), and that when I’d returned I’d been both angry and hostile. And there was more. His bitterness was so palpable it thrummed off the page and into my body, an electric current.
Bill ended with this.
There is nothing more my sons need than their dad.
I closed my eyes and then dropped the pages to the floor, and Jack allowed them to scatter like trash. “No.”
“We won’t let him, Joy. We will not allow it.”
Grief began to heave within me, then made way for anger. My eyes flew open and I attempted to sit, for a moment forgetting that I was bedbound. The traction pulleys clanged against each other in protest, and a knife-pain sliced down my left thigh. But anger won and I slammed my fist into the mattress.
“His accusations, Jack. What a woman that must be for all of those things to be true. A horrible woman. One I wouldn’t want to even know, much less be.”
“It’s Bill’s way of telling a story he needs to believe.” Jack’s voice low and quiet, a balm.
“And nothing of his affair with my cousin? His anger or his rages or his alcoholism and breakdowns? His suicide threats that kept us captive? He doesn’t say why I might have been angry when I returned home? Only that I was bitter and what else . . . violent? What a farce.”
Jack rested his hand on my arm. “Joy.”
I took in a long breath.
“Please get me a pad of paper and a pen. I must write back.”
“I already wrote to him.”
“Then I’ll add to it, Jack. I can’t let him leave this as a legacy, these pages of lies.” Tears flooded my eyes, and I wiped furiously at them. “I’m tired of crying. Of hurting. I want only love now. Only love. It should be all that remains.”
“That is what we have.” He kissed me again and reached for the poetry book. I closed my eyes, let the hostile fury ride its wave, and listened to Jack quote Wordsworth. “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’”
Inside my mind I heard Bill, but when I opened my eyes to Jack, I knew that whatever Bill believed or whatever he’d written did not and could not affect the love that breathed between Jack and me.
I understood for the first time the apostle Paul’s words, “Death, where is your sting?”