Becoming Mrs. Lewis(122)
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.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Becoming Mrs. Lewis is a work of historical fiction inspired by the life of Joy Davidman and her improbable love story with C. S. Lewis. The world’s fascination with Lewis (Jack to his friends) and his only wife, Helen Joy Davidman Gresham (Joy), has never abated. Their erosstory led to some of C. S. Lewis’s greatest works on love, grief, and faith, yet Joy is rarely offered credit as the muse, editor, best friend, and beloved wife she was to this revered author.
When I read A Grief Observed and felt Lewis’s palpable pain in losing the great love of his life, I wanted to know more about the woman he loved so fiercely.
You see, I fell into my own kind of love with Lewis when I was twelve years old and read The Screwtape Letters, years before I knew what the words satire or allegory meant. I read Lewis’s other works later in life with as much abandon and fascination. When I learned about Joy Davidman, I felt an odd kinship with her Lewis-adoration. Who was this woman? Who was this poet and novelist who had lived a world away from Lewis both culturally and literally and yet fallen in love with him?
A brilliant writer herself, Joy was a multi-award-winning poet, a novelist, a critic, a protégé of the MacDowell Colony, and much more. She graduated college at fifteen years old and received her master’s degree in fiction from Columbia. Her résumé is nearly as long as Lewis’s.
Everything about Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and author of Narnia living in England. She was a married woman who lived in upstate New York with her two young sons, and she was a converted Jew, former atheist, ex-Communist. On paper there was not a more impossible pairing. Everything blocked the way to love, but in the end it was not impossible at all.