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 the 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.