A Bedside Wedding

“A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;” — Ecclesiastes 3:4 (KJV)

Joy Davidman was born in New York in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents and grew up an atheist. She was astonishingly clever: university at fifteen, a master's degree at twenty, a national poetry prize in her early twenties. She joined the Communist Party, then married a fellow writer, Bill Gresham. They had two sons, David and Douglas. The marriage was unhappy. Bill drank, was unfaithful and had violent moods. One night in 1946 he phoned to say he was having a breakdown and didn't know what he would do, then hung up. Alone and helpless with two small children, Joy found, for the first time, that she was aware of God. She ended up on her knees.

She had been reading Lewis's books, and in January 1950 she wrote to him. Warnie remembered that her letters stood out: lively, direct, and plainly a match for Jack in argument. They first met for lunch in Oxford in September 1952. She was blunt, funny, fearless and not at all overawed, and he enjoyed it hugely. That Christmas, while she was staying at the Kilns, Bill wrote asking for a divorce. The next year she moved to England with her boys. She was poor, and Lewis quietly helped pay the boys' school fees.

In 1956 the government refused to let her stay in England. Lewis couldn't bear to lose her company, so he offered a solution: a civil marriage, a legal formality only, to give her the right to stay. On 23 April 1956 they were married at a register office. They didn't live together, and he didn't think of it as a real marriage.

Then, in October 1956, Joy's thigh bone snapped. Cancer had eaten it away, and it had spread. The doctors didn't expect her to live long. Facing the loss of her, Lewis realised that he loved her. The legal marriage now felt like a mockery. He wanted to be married before God, but the Bishop of Oxford refused, because Joy was divorced. Lewis wouldn't go behind his back.

In March 1957 Lewis asked a former pupil, a priest named Peter Bide, to come and pray for Joy's healing. When Bide understood the whole situation, he decided he could not in conscience refuse to marry them. On 21 March 1957, in her hospital room, with Warnie there, he married them, then laid his hands on Joy and prayed. She was sent home to the Kilns to die.

She didn't. To her doctors' astonishment, the cancer stopped and then went back, and her bones began to heal. By the end of the year she could walk with a stick. Lewis believed God had answered prayer, but he never treated it as proof of anything. Meanwhile his own bones began to weaken. Remembering Charles Williams, he wondered whether he had been allowed to carry a little of her pain. He didn't claim it. He thought it possible, and was glad if it was so.

The next three years were the happiest of his life. Joy brought the shabby old house back to life, argued with him as an equal, read his drafts and shared his faith. In 1958 they had a honeymoon in Ireland. In October 1959 the cancer returned. In April 1960, in pain, she toured Greece with him. On 13 July 1960 she died, with him beside her. She was forty-five.

Ecclesiastes says there is a time to weep and a time to dance. Lewis and Joy were given a short time to dance, overshadowed by illness the whole way through, and they took it as a gift anyway. Don't wait for perfect conditions to love people well.

One thing to do this week: tell someone you love, in words or in writing, one specific thing you are grateful for about them. Do it now, not someday.