Men Must Endure

“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:” — 2 Timothy 4:7 (KJV)

After Joy died, Lewis did what he had always done with experience: he wrote it down. In some old exercise books, almost every day, he recorded what grief was doing to him. The first sentence has become one of the most quoted he ever wrote:

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

He described the restlessness, the inability to concentrate, the awkwardness of people who didn't know what to say, and his terror that his memories of Joy were already fading. He was honest about his faith too. He didn't stop believing in God. What frightened him was that God might be cruel rather than loving. When he turned to God, he felt he met a shut door and silence. He wrote things he would never have let a student write in an essay, because they were what he felt and he had decided not to lie.

Slowly the notebooks change. He began to see that a man who is shouting can't hear, and that his picture of God, like his picture of Joy, had partly been his own invention, which the real one kept breaking. He didn't find answers, but the questions began to look different, and he came to a kind of peace. He published the notebooks under a made-up name as A Grief Observed. After his death it came out under his own name, and it has helped millions of grieving people, because it doesn't pretend.

Lewis became guardian of Joy's sons, David, sixteen, and Douglas, fourteen, and treated them with kindness and respect. When David chose to live as an observant Jew, Lewis supported him, asking Jewish scholars for advice and helping him learn Hebrew.

His own health was failing. In July 1963 he had a heart attack, fell into a coma, and was given the last rites. About an hour later he woke up and asked for a cup of tea. He said, half seriously, that nearly dying had been gentle and that he was almost sorry to be sent back, like Lazarus. He resigned from Cambridge, and he and Warnie spent quiet last weeks together at the Kilns, reading, doing crosswords and remembering their childhood. He was calm about dying.

On 22 November 1963, at about half past five, Warnie heard a crash and found him collapsed at the foot of his bed. Within minutes he was dead, a week short of his sixty-fifth birthday. About an hour later President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and the death of an Oxford don was barely noticed. Warnie was too overcome to go to the funeral. He chose the gravestone, and on it he had cut the line from their mother's calendar of 1908: “Men must endure their going hence.”

Paul's words, “I have kept the faith,” are not about never doubting. After Joy died, Lewis went down into the dark and came back up. Faith isn't the absence of anguish. It's what holds when anguish has done its worst. If you are grieving, you can be honest with God, even angry; the psalms do it, and Jesus did it on the cross. And if grief or darkness ever feels like more than you can carry, tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live.

One thing to do this week: write a short, honest letter to God about the hardest thing you are carrying. Don't tidy it up. Keep it, and read it again in a month to see what has changed.