After
the Chronicles of Narnia came out, Lewis was a household name
in Europe and America. Through answering fan mail, Lewis met
and married Joy Gresham - a loud, American, communist, Jewish
divorcee who liked to shock.
During their honeymoon, Lewis and Joy toured Northern Ireland.
They visited the Crawfordsburn Inn, to see the green hills
and misty mountains of Ireland and to meet his friend Arthur
Greeves. However, Joy was already suffering from the bone
cancer that would eventually kill her.
For years Lewis had believed emotion to be something uncomfortable
and embarrassing. In the sixty years following his mother's
death, he had avoided it believing it would bring him pain.
Joy had changed all this, so her death in 1960 brought him
extreme pain and suffering.
Joy
had now found her way to the land where she belonged, but
Lewis was still in the shadowlands. 'No one every told me
that grief felt so like fear... the same fluttering in the
stomach, the same restlessness.'
To cope with his grief, he wrote a moving argument with God
about death in his book 'A Grief Observed.' And he eventually
made his peace with God.
Lewis died on November the 22nd 1963, on the day that John
F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
Introduction
