Becoming Mrs. Lewis(114)
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.