Going Hence

“For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

— 2 Timothy 4:6-7, KJV

Failing Health

Lewis had always been physically strong. He had walked enormous distances, swum in all weathers and worked long hours for forty years. But after Joy’s death his health began to fail. In the summer of 1961 he was found to have an enlarged prostate, and an operation was planned. Before it could be carried out, it was discovered that his kidneys and heart were affected, and the doctors decided that he was not strong enough for surgery. He was put on a strict low-protein diet, given a catheter, and told to rest. He missed the whole of the autumn term at Cambridge in 1961. Friends who saw him were shocked at how old and tired he looked.

He bore it patiently, and with humour. His letters of these years are full of his ailments, described with resignation and a certain dry comedy. He went back to Cambridge in 1962, and taught for another year. He went on writing: a short book on literary criticism, An Experiment in Criticism, appeared in 1961, and he was working on a book about prayer, in the form of letters to an imaginary friend, and on a book about the medieval picture of the universe, drawn from his lectures. Both were published after his death.

Walter Hooper

In June 1963 a young American named Walter Hooper came to Oxford. He was a teacher from Kentucky, aged thirty-two, who had corresponded with Lewis for some years and was writing a study of his work. Lewis invited him to the Kilns and liked him at once. Warnie was away in Ireland, drinking again, and Lewis needed help with his letters. He asked Hooper to stay on as his secretary for a while, and Hooper agreed.

Hooper was with Lewis for only a few weeks, but they were crucial weeks, and they shaped the rest of Hooper’s life. After Lewis’s death he devoted himself for half a century to editing and publishing Lewis’s writings, including the three volumes of letters on which every later biographer has depended. Some scholars have questioned aspects of his account of how close he was to Lewis, and of some of the material he published. But his labour preserved a great deal that might otherwise have been lost.

15 July 1963

On Monday 15 July 1963, Lewis was due to go into the Acland nursing home in Oxford for tests. Soon after he arrived, he had a heart attack and fell into a coma. The doctors did not expect him to live. The next afternoon, 16 July, he was given the last rites of the Church. About an hour later, to everyone’s astonishment, he woke up and asked for a cup of tea.

For a week or two afterwards he was confused, suffering from hallucinations and lapses of memory, and he could not be left alone. Then he slowly recovered his mind. When he was well enough to speak of it, he said, half seriously, that he had found the experience of nearly dying very gentle, and that he was almost sorry to have been sent back. He compared himself to Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead only to have to die again later. He did not dread death. He was simply tired.

Resignation

It was clear that Lewis could not go back to work. In August 1963 he resigned his professorship at Cambridge. Friends cleared his rooms at Magdalene and brought his books and papers back to the Kilns. Magdalene College elected him an honorary fellow. Hooper went home to America in September, intending to come back in the new year. Warnie came home from Ireland, and the two brothers settled down together at the Kilns, as they had begun, in the last weeks of Jack’s life.

Those weeks were peaceful. Warnie later wrote of them with deep tenderness. The brothers read, talked, did crosswords, went for slow walks in the garden when Jack was strong enough, and remembered their childhood. Lewis answered his letters as long as he could. He knew that he was dying, and he was calm about it. He spoke of it to Warnie simply, without fear, and Warnie was struck by his brother’s peace.

22 November 1963

Friday 22 November 1963 began quietly. Lewis was tired and drowsy. In the afternoon Warnie brought him tea in his bedroom. At about half past five Warnie heard a crash from the bedroom and ran in. His brother had fallen at the foot of his bed and was unconscious. Within a few minutes he was dead. He was a week short of his sixty-fifth birthday. The cause of death was recorded as kidney failure and heart failure.

On the same day, about an hour later by English time, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. The English novelist Aldous Huxley died that day too, in California. The news from Dallas filled every newspaper in the world, and the death of an Oxford don in his bedroom was barely noticed.

The Funeral

Lewis was buried on the morning of Tuesday 26 November 1963 in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry. It was a cold, still, sunny day, and there was frost on the ground. The vicar, Ronald Head, took the service. The congregation was small: friends, colleagues and neighbours. Tolkien was there, and Barfield, and Havard, and others of the old circle. Those who were there remembered a candle carried before the coffin from the church to the grave, burning steadily in the still air.

Warnie was not there. The shock of his brother’s death had sent him back to drink, and he stayed in bed at the Kilns. It was a grief to him for the rest of his life that he had not stood at his brother’s grave.

The grave was later marked with a plain stone, which Warnie chose. On it, under his brother’s name and dates, he had cut the line from King Lear that had been on the calendar in their mother’s bedroom on the day she died in 1908: “Men must endure their going hence.”

The Good Fight

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s farewell, written in prison near the end of his life: I am ready to be offered, I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith. Lewis would not have claimed those words for himself. He was too aware of his failings, and he had too little patience with anyone who made him into a hero. But they are true of him, all the same. He had come to faith late and against his will, and once he had come, he had kept it, through fame and through humiliation, through a difficult household and a brief, bright marriage, through grief that almost broke him and illness that wore him out. When the time of his departure came, he was ready.