Biography - marriage and later years
Surprised by grief
In 1952 Joy Gresham came to England. Joy was a New York teacher of English literature, a former communist and a recent convert to Christianity: her parents had been Jewish, though her father was secular and her mother was not very religious. Joy had a husband, though at the time their marriage was in trouble. They had two sons, Douglas and David.
Joy had been corresponding with Lewis for two years before her visit. She was a sharp, outspoken and witty woman, just the sort to appeal to Lewis. When, on her return to America, she found her husband committing adultery and their marriage beyond repair, she moved to England with her sons.
Lewis had taken a teaching job at Cambridge university, spending weekends and holidays at home. Joy and her sons moved into a house not far from the Kilns. They were frequent visitors. In 1954 Joy's husband divorced her. In 1956 her work permit expired and she faced having to move back to America. Lewis decided to marry her.
Lewis claimed the civil marriage ceremony, quietly performed in a registry office, was a purely legal measure to allow Joy to stay in the country. Nobody is quite sure of their feelings for each other at that stage, but shortly afterwards some news arrived that changed everything. Joy was diagnosed with advanced cancer and did not have long to live. Lewis realised he loved Joy and decided to make their marriage public. The ceremony was performed around Joy's hospital bed. When she was able to leave hospital, Joy, Douglas and David moved into the Kilns.
Her health improved. Lewis prayed to be allowed to take some of her pain on himself. It seemed to work. His health deteriorated for a few months while Joy recovered: an occurrence he happily described as a miracle. Married life seemed to suit Jack even at his late age (he was in his 60s). He enjoyed more than three years with Joy before her cancer returned and claimed her life in July 1960.
The story of Jack and Joy's marriage is told, with some liberties taken with chronology, in a play and film called Shadowlands.
Joy's death was hard for Lewis to cope with and tested his Christian faith. He kept a record of his thoughts and feelings throughout the grieving process, and published it, using a pseudonym, as A Grief Observed. (So many people recommended the book to Lewis to help in his own grief that at last he was forced to admit he wrote it.)
"No one ever told me grief felt so like fear," reads the opening sentence of A Grief Observed. "I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." It is an honest account from a mourning widower: Lewis did not flinch from recording the times when his faith was tested. By the end of the book he had made his peace with God.
C.S. Lewis died on the 22nd November 1963. He never wanted his death to be widely acknowledged, and he got his way. John F Kennedy, president of the USA, was assassinated on the same day. The author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, also died on the 22nd.
The last book Lewis published, and one he considered his best, was Till We Have Faces, an unusual retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche.