A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
Along with the emptiness, which is what I mean by loss, and along with the grief—loss and grief are not the same thing—I kept wanting to tell her about it. We always told each other— that was what sharing was—and now this huge thing was happening to me, and I couldn’t tell her. Someone speaking of the pain of stopping smoking remarked: If only I could have a cigarette while I suffer! I sometimes thought I could bear the loss and grief if only I could tell her about it. So I did. I wrote to her in the quiet evenings—I did not go out at all—and told her. Writing a letter is a real form of conversation in which the image of a distant person is held in one’s mind. I could not have spoken aloud to thin air with any sense of reality, nor could I now write to her, but then I could really speak to her in letters. I did not save them or reread them, those long letters of our companionship, but I could write them—to her. Whether she read them, over my shoulder perhaps, is of course a different matter.
I dreamt of her, not ever as much as I wished to do, but about once a month for over a year. The first dream was in the first fortnight. In it she was ill as she had been in hospital, but across the mountains there was a doctor who could heal her. And I was carrying her in my arms over mountain passes. It was dark and raining, but I did not mind. She was light in my arms and, beneath her hood, she was—we both were—merry. That was all. A purely happy dream. The warm reality of Davy. Of course I wept when I woke—and all but prayed to dream again. But three or four weeks—never more or less—must pass. All the dreams were joyous, or a mixture of joy and pain. Ordinary dreamlike dreams. Full of love and tenderness and comradeship but never sexual. In one dream she was well and we were going gaily off in the MG when, sickeningly, her illness returned; and we held each other in desperate love. Joy and pain. In another dream we were merely running hand in hand across the great sweep of the Glenmerle lawn.
In a letter to Davy I contemplated loss and grief. The death of any familiar person—the death, even, of a dog or cat—whether loved or not leaves an emptiness. The great tree goes down and leaves an empty place against the sky. If the person is deeply loved and deeply familiar the void seems greater than all the world remaining. Under the surface of the visible world, there is an echoing hollowness, an aching void—and it cuts one off from the beloved. She is as remote as the stars. But grief is a form of love— the longing for the dear face, the warm hand. It is the remembered reality of the beloved that calls it forth. For an instant she is there, and the void denied. It is not the grief, involving that momentary reality, that cuts one off from the beloved but the void that is loss. In the end one can no longer summon forth that reality, and then one’s tears dry up. But while it lasts, it is a shield against the void; and by the time the grief wanes, the terrible emptiness of loss has given way to a new world that does not contain the shape of the beloved figure.
But that waning was far into the future. In my first letter to Davy I wrote of the blanket of snow at St. Stephen’s and added, a bit sentimentally: ‘May it keep you warm, my darling.’ A fort-night after her death, I wrote, ‘It seems impossible that two weeks ago you were alive: it seems infinitely longer. It also seems impossible that you are dead. This is an act I am going through. Later we shall laugh about it, you and I.’ Although it brought tears to my eyes, I sometimes sang our Oxford song about the Lady sweet and kind and how ‘I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die.’ The tears came freely, and I did not attempt to refrain them when I was alone. Indeed, for over a year, there was no day I did not weep, and I did not find that tears cut me off from her. It was the tearless void that severed us at times.
Mostly, though, we were, in some way, together. She was not (to my knowledge or perception) with me in ghostly form, although I later came to think she had been perhaps. But in a not-at-all mystical sense she lived, she was vivid and alive, in me. Our love continued. The final severance was not yet.
One of the letters I wrote the day after her death was to C. S. Lewis. I told him how she died and how I meant to scatter her ashes at St. Stephen’s, as she and I had planned. But we had also thought it might be fitting for a handful of those ashes to be scattered at little Binsey church near Oxford. Would he—Lewis— do it? There was no reply to my letter, and I decided he must be away from Oxford.
I, therefore, entrusted the tiny packet to my friend, Edmund Dews, who, indeed, had first taken us to Binsey-by-the-well. Edmund had already written of Davy’s ‘valiant and painful struggle, too far away for her to comfort me’. And then of his grief at her death, ending his letter: ‘And I grip your hand.’ Now on a mild and misty winter day Edmund walked across the meadows to Binsey and scattered the ashes, saying ‘Under the Mercy’, as I had asked, and ‘watched by a dozen brown-and-white cows, waiting by the gate to be admitted into the farmyard.’
But Lewis was not away: he was waiting for the ashes. His letter had been lost in the post. Now he heard from Edmund. In my letter to Lewis I had spoken of my moment by Davy’s body of absolute knowing that she still was, and of my curiously consoling thought that nothing now could mar our love: the manuscript had now gone to the Printer.
Lewis replied to a further letter from me, replied from Magdalene, Cambridge:
I heard from your friend about 2 days ago, and today I have got yr. letter of Feb. 5. I am most distressed to find that my answer to your previous letter has never reached you; particularly since its miscarriage has left you in doubt whether I wd. have accepted the v. sacred office of scattering the ashes. I wd. have liked to do (if you can understand) for the v. reason that I wd. not have liked doing it, since a deep spiritual gaucherie makes [me] uneasy in any ceremonial act; and I wd. have wished in that way to be honoured with a share, however tiny, in this Cross. All you told me in your previous letter & all you tell me in this moves me deeply and it is a high privilege to be admitted to such a beautiful death, an act wh. consummates (not, as so often, an event wh. merely stops) the earthly life. And how you re-assure me when, to describe your own state, you use the simple, obvious, yet now so rare, word sad. Neither more nor less nor other than sad. It suggests a clean wound—much here for tears, but ‘nothing but good and fair.’ And I am sure it is never sadness—a proper, straight natural response to loss—that does people harm, but all the other things, all the resentment, dismay, doubt and self-pity with wh. it is usually complicated. I feel (indeed I tried to say something about it in that lost letter) v. strongly what you say about the ‘curious consolation’ that ‘nothing now can mar’ your joint lives. I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in wh. men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth. Your MS, as you well say, has now gone safe to the Printer.
It is remarkable (I have experienced it), that sense that the dead person is. And also, I have felt, is active: can sometimes do more for you now than before—as if God gave them, as a kind of birthday present on arrival, some great blessing to the beloved they have left behind.
Be careful of your own bodily health. You must be, physically, v. tired, much more tired than you know. Above all, don’t yield to the feeling that such things ‘don’t matter now? You must remain, as she wishes, a good instrument for all heavenly impulses to work on, and the body is part of the instrument.
I shall be nervous about all letters now that one (and at such a moment) has gone astray. If this reaches you, a line in answer will re-assure me.
You are always in my prayers, even whenever I wake in the night. Keep me in yours.
Under the Omnipotence
It had never occurred to me that I was having a right response to death by being merely, though of course immensely, sad. Grief unalloyed. But the radical proposition in that letter was that death might be the ‘easiest and least perilous of the ways’ to
C. S. Lewis was to be the friend in my loss and grief, the one hand in mine as I walked through a dark and desolate night. Other friends gave me love, and it was a fire to warm me. But Lewis was the friend I needed, the friend who would go with me down to the bedrock of meaning. I told him the insights that came to me through my grief observed—the title of the book he would write on his own future bereavement—and he gave me not only love but wisdom and understanding and, when necessary, severity.
One of the greatest occurrences of my own grief was the strange thing that began to happen within a day or two of her death. It was the flooding back to me of all the other Davys I had known. She had been in this year of her dying the Davy she had become —the Christian Davy of Oxford and since. Even when we had read about Glenmerle days under the oaks, she had been the Davy she had become. But now the young girl of Glenmerle, the blithe spirit of the Islands, the helmsman of the schooner—all were equally present. They had been gone—except perhaps for those fragile days of heartbreaking young love during the coma. Now they were all with me—for ever. The wholeness of Davy. That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I used the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids—small boy, youth, man—are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be. But if, as the result of death, I was now seeing the whole Davy at once, I was having a heavenly or eternal vision of her. Only, in heaven I would have not vision only but her—whole.
All this, which seemed to me a major insight into the nature of bereavement, I put to Lewis, along with some ironic comments on the change in my once-famous ‘luck’. Long before, friends had thought me lucky: my First Honours in college (because I had been lucky enough to get the right questions), my happy marriage (because I had been lucky enough to find the right girl). But, since Christianity, several things had not been so fortunate, culminating in Davy’s death. I sent him a photograph of Davy, perhaps in hospital; and asked him about Cambridge.
Lewis replied:
I was v. glad to get your letter of Feb. 14. And here ‘luck’worked the other way. It had come unstuck and the envelope was open, but the letter inside, intact.—Your real or supposed change of luck since your conversion (whatever it may really mean) is an old story: read Jeremiah XLIV 15-18. And I have seen it laid down by a modern spiritual author (whose name I forget) that the experience is to be expected. You remember the vision of Our Lord that said to St. Theresa on some frightful occasion ‘This is how I always treat my friends.’ (I must not conceal her answer, ‘Then, Lord, it is not surprising that You have so few.’)—What you say about the total Jean being apprehensible since the moment-by-moment Jean has been withdrawn (backed by the v. good analogy of the novel page-by-page and the novel after you’ve read it) is most true and important. I see no reason why we shd. not regard it as what St. Paul calls an arrabon or earnest of the mode in wh. all can reveal them-selves to all in heaven. — Oh, and thanks v. much for the photo, tho’ to me (you see it with other eyes) it appears not v. like, far from flattering.—Do you know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House and (still more, but the first is to be read as a prelude) Love’s Victory. They deal superbly with some of the experiences you are having.—About letters, someone told me that surface mail, tho’ slower, was safer than air & more reliable. Is this untrue? Yes, I have gone to a newly created Chair of Med. and Renaissance English at Cambridge. The atmosphere here is slightly more Christian and far more kindly and gentle & less hard boiled than at Oxford.—An R.C. tells me that they in general forbid cremation because, tho’ it by no means logically implies, yet in uneducated minds it tends to go with, disbelief in the resurrection of the body. But they allow it when there is any special reason -e.g. a plague. I don’t think, myself, it matters one way or the other. God bless you. Do drop the ‘Mr.’ before my name.
Accordingly, I called him Lewis thenceforth, until, later, he said to call him Jack.
The loss of Davy, after the intense sharing and closeness of the years, the loss and grief was, quite simply, the most immense thing I had ever known. Long before, when we were raising the Shining Barrier, we had been haunted by the thought of parting through death. If we became so close, how should one of us bear the death of the other? So we had planned the last long dive— going together—and thus completed the Barrier. But God had breached the Shining Barrier: and I was having to bear the un-bearable. If I must bear it, though, I would bear it—find the whole meaning of it, taste the whole of it. I was driven by an unswerving determination to plumb the depths as well as to know the Davy I loved: to understand why she had lived and died, to learn from sorrow whatever it had to teach. It was a kind of faithfulness to her. I would not run away from grief; I would not try to hold on to it when—if, unbelievably—it passed.
As a way of understanding, I planned a study of our years together, a study that I later came to call the Illumination of the Past. In preparation for it I wrote to many people asking to be given or lent Davy’s letters to them. Meanwhile, I was finishing up the notes in her old Bible—learning much about her in the process—and doing other tasks I had set myself, often working with tears blurring my eyes. I was also rereading the books that had meant the most to us. While I worked and wept, I thought about our life together and the meaning of it, the meaning in relation to God.
In March I was thinking a good deal about her offering-up her life for me, and then my offering-up as I drove to Charlottesville to tell her of her death—and the rainbow over towards the Blue Mountains just afterward. That offering-up, in its pure submission to God’s will and its selfless love for Davy, was perhaps my nearest approach to holiness—and then the rainbow. It’s hard, since Noah, not to see a rainbow as a sign of hope. And at such a moment. But she had died. Did it mean, then, that she was to have what would be her best good—her death? Or was it meaningless?
I wrote to Lewis about it. I also sent him a letter I’d found written by Davy to Lewis but never sent, presumably because I had written tp him about the same thing, the matter of homo-sexual students. I also spoke of perhaps publishing my thesis as by her as well as me, because Davy would have liked that.
Lewis replied in early April with a meaningful comment on the rainbow sign:
It was a strange experience to get a letter from Jean this morning. I return it. You will see that it deals with a problem on which you also wrote to me, probably at about the same time. Indeed her reason for not sending it might be the discovery that you had done, or were about to do, the same.
I can’t now remember what I said in my lost letter about the ‘Signs’. My general view is that, once we have accepted an omniscient & providential God, the distinction we used to draw between the significant and the fortuitous must either break down or be restated in some v. much subtler form. If an event coming about in the ordinary course of nature becomes to me the occasion of hope and faith and love or increased efforts after virt
I guess (I don’t know) that Trevelyan is a temperamentally pious Agnostic-with-hopes of the best, old liberal kind. He’s certainly not a churchman; I have heard him say so.
I give no advice about the thesis, and I think you ought to be guided by ordinary academic considerations. Forgive me for suggesting that the form ‘what Jean would have liked’ could come to have its dangers. The real question is what she wills now, and you may be sure her will is now one with God’s. A ‘sovereignty in the pluperfect subjunctive’ is often a snare. The danger is that of confusing your love for her (gradually— as the years pass) with your love for a period in your own past; and of trying to preserve the past in a way in wh. it can’t be preserved. Death—corruption—resurrection is the true rhythm: not the pathetic, horrible practice of mummification. Sad you must be at present. You can’t develop a false sense of a duty to cling to sadness if—and when, for nature will not preserve any psychological state forever—sadness begins to vanish? There is great good in bearing sorrow patiently: I don’t know that there is any virtue in sorrow just as such. It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can. But you know all this already.