He was C.S. Lewis. Oxford don. Christian apologist. Author of Narnia. A man who could explain love with surgical precision but had never truly felt it tear him apart.
For decades, he lived in his head. Books and debates. Pipes and lectures. He had friendships—kept polite, intellectually stimulating, emotionally distant. He believed himself too old, too settled, too armored for the chaos of romantic love.
Then Joy Davidman wrote him a letter.
She was everything that should have repelled him. American. Divorced. A former atheist who’d converted—not through philosophy, but through raw spiritual crisis. A poet. A mother of two boys. Sharp. Fearless. The kind of woman who didn’t soften her opinions for men’s comfort.
He replied out of courtesy.
Courtesy became correspondence. Correspondence became friendship. And friendship became something that terrified the man who’d spent his life analyzing the human soul without ever fully exposing his own.
When her visa expired and Britain prepared to deport her, he offered marriage. But only on paper. A legal convenience. Nothing more. He told himself it was charity. An act of Christian duty.
Then the doctors gave her months to live.
Cancer. Bone. Spreading fast.
And facing her death, this man who’d lectured thousands about divine love finally understood what it meant to be shattered by human love.
He married her again—this time before God. Not for paperwork. Not for companionship. For love. The love he’d locked away since childhood. The vulnerability he’d spent sixty years avoiding.
They were granted a miracle: three years of remission. Three years of walking together. Laughing. Debating. Simply being alive in each other’s presence. He later called it “a feast after years of famine.”
She made him more human than he’d ever allowed himself to be.
Then the cancer returned.
On her final night, she whispered: “You made me happy.”
And to the chaplain: “I am at peace with God.”
She was gone by evening.
The grief nearly killed him. The scholar who’d written confidently about suffering now found himself drowning in it. So he did the only thing he knew how to do.
He wrote.
Not theology this time. Not apologetics. But raw, unfiltered anguish—questioning everything, clawing through darkness, searching for meaning in the wreckage of the greatest love he’d ever known.
That book became A Grief Observed—one of the most honest meditations on loss ever written.
C.S. Lewis spent six decades protecting himself from pain.
Joy Davidman taught him that some things are worth the breaking.
And sometimes, the most profound transformation comes from finally letting down the walls we’ve spent a lifetime building.
YES. . .YES. . .Valentine’s Day is over and most if not all of its goods have been sold for 50-75% off already
P R O V I N G
that
G R I E F
doesn’t exist without
L
O
V
E
which is always priceless
and never ON SALE
but always FREE
(if freely given)
