MAY 22, 2019

Happy Times

On May 22^nd my beloved wife, Linda Joyce Beck, will have been gone for eight years, taken away by one of the most terrible disease a woman can face – ovarian cancer.  As you almost certainly know, the general purpose of this blog is to help combat that dreadful disease.  I will be away from my computer on May 22, so I will post my usual blog on that anniversary a few days early.

What I want to do is to share with you something written by C.S. Lewis shortly after his young wife died.  Lewis, as you may know, was an important Oxford intellectual about the middle of the last century. Among other things, he was recognized as an expert on theological subjects.   I have been reading Lewis a bit lately, trying to get squared away about what you might call “last and final things.”  He hasn’t been of much use, partly, I am afraid, because I am badly put off by his writing style.  Lewis is famous for having created the Narnia saga.  He wrote a good many other books, very serious books, for which (in my opinion) he is justly not famous.

But, anyway, shortly after his wife, the writer Joy Davidman, died, Lewis undertook an analysis of grief.  To paraphrase, he decided that his grief was selfish: he grieved, not because of what had happened to Joy, but because he didn’t have her any more.

Well, that does not apply to me.  Certainly part of my grief is selfish; I want Linda here, with me, now.  But by far the greater part of my grief concerns the pain I feel at having witnessed her suffering, physical and emotional – and having been totally unable to save her. And I am bitter because she was denied the last few decades of life.   I stand in awe of her courage.  Often I have a hard time not being angry with God for what He put her through; to the extent that I sometime  hope He really  doesn’t exist.  And out of my grief has grown a compulsion to fight back against whatever it was that took Linda away – I hope it was just a bit of very bad luck, only a biological process gone badly astray.  I do not want to regard it as part of any Plan.

But, anyway, Lewis wrote something about his bereavement which I would like to pass on.  He likened his marriage to a ship driven by two engines.  He writes “…. The storms were over, but they had taken their toll.  The starboard engine was gone …. And the port engine had to toil on alone to bring the ship to safe harbor.”  That’s a paraphrase on my part, and not a skillful one, but it is how I feel.

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