The Long Twilight

“And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.”

— Isaiah 46:4, KJV

The Failing of Words

Elisabeth Elliot had lived by words. She had gone to Wheaton to study Greek so that she could translate the Scriptures. She had gone to Ecuador to reduce unwritten languages to writing, and she had worked in Spanish, in the Colorado language, in Quichua and in the language of the Waorani. She had written more than twenty books, thousands of pages of letters and newsletters, and the scripts of hundreds upon hundreds of radio talks, and she had spoken to audiences on several continents. Clarity of language was, for her, almost a moral matter. She disliked vagueness, jargon and sentiment because she thought they were ways of avoiding the truth.

It was her words that began to go first. In the late 1990s she and those closest to her began to notice lapses of memory and moments of confusion that could no longer be put down to tiredness or age, and by about 2000 she had been diagnosed with dementia; accounts differ by a year or two over the date. It progressed slowly at first. For a while she was able to continue some of her work, with help. Gateway to Joy ended in 2001, after thirteen years. The newsletter that had run for more than two decades ended in 2003, and in 2004 she gave up public speaking. After that she withdrew from public life altogether. The decision was made for her by the illness, but it was also, in its way, characteristic. She had always been a private person, and she did not become a spectacle in her decline. The public simply stopped hearing from her, and most of her readers learned only gradually, and at second hand, why.

There is a particular sorrow in the decline of a mind that has served God and others so well. Many who had been helped by her books felt it as a personal loss, and some wondered aloud how it could be that a woman who had taught so many people to trust God in suffering should herself be brought to a place where she could no longer speak of him. She had no answer to give them now. But she had given her answer long before. She had always insisted that God does not owe us an explanation, and that the suffering he permits is never for nothing, whether or not we are able to see its purpose. In her last years she was no longer able to say those things. She was left simply to live them.

At Home in Magnolia

Lars decided that she would stay at home. Rather than place her in a nursing home, he looked after her himself in the house at Magnolia for the rest of her life. It was a long and wearing task. Dementia lasted in her case for the better part of fifteen years, and in its later stages she needed care at every hour of the day. Whatever else is to be said about their marriage, and the previous chapters have tried to say it fairly, this was faithful service, and it deserves to be recorded. Lars was himself in his early sixties when the illness was diagnosed and nearly seventy-nine when it ended. Caring for someone with dementia at home is among the hardest kinds of love: unrelenting, largely unseen and usually unthanked by the very person for whom it is done, who often no longer knows who is caring for them. Families who have done it will recognise the cost.

Valerie and her family visited, and old friends came when they could. The illness took its usual slow course, and in time the woman whose words had reached millions could say very little. This book does not try to say more than that about her inward life in these years. No one can know it, and those who loved her have been rightly reticent about it.

15 June 2015

Elisabeth Elliot died at home in Magnolia on the morning of Monday 15 June 2015. She was eighty-eight. It was fifty-nine years since the deaths on the Curaray, nearly forty-two since the death of Addison Leitch, and more than a decade since she had last spoken in public.

Her funeral was held on Tuesday 23 June at the A. J. Gordon Memorial Chapel of Gordon College, in Wenham, not far from the places where she had spent the second half of her life. A month later, on 26 July, a memorial service was held at her old college, in the Edman Memorial Chapel at Wheaton, where she had studied Greek seventy years before. Tributes came from across the evangelical world and far beyond it, from people who had read her books in their youth, listened to her on the radio in their kitchens, or been sustained by her in times of grief. Many of them, inevitably, spoke of 1956, and of the young widow who had gone to live with the men who had killed her husband. That was the story the world remembered. Some of the more perceptive spoke instead of the long years afterwards, which had been, in their way, a harder test.

Lars Gren outlived her by nearly ten years. He died in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 2 April 2025, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

Carried

The verse at the head of this chapter was spoken by God through Isaiah to a people who had grown old under his care. He contrasts himself with the idols of Babylon, which have to be lifted onto the backs of beasts and carried. The true God does the opposite. He carries his people. He made them, he has borne them since they were born, and he will carry them even to their grey hairs.

Elisabeth Elliot had spent much of her life carrying others: a baby in the jungle, a grieving household, a dying husband, a public that wanted her to bear the weight of a story, and countless readers and listeners who brought their sorrows to her. In her last years she could carry nothing, not even her own memories. Someone else had to carry her, and, behind every human hand that did it, the One she had trusted since childhood carried her too. There is a lesson in that for a culture that measures the worth of a life by what a person can still do. For more than ten years Elisabeth Elliot could do almost nothing, and her life was no less precious to God, and no less a life of faith, than it had been when she stood before thousands. She had written for decades about the everlasting arms. In the long twilight of her life she had nothing left to rest on but those arms, and they held.