“What is it?” Peter placed the tray on the bedside table.
Jack cast his eyes to Warnie and then to Peter. “I know you don’t like to make much of it, but I do know that when you prayed over that young boy dying of meningitis, he recovered. I don’t believe it is in you that healing is given, but if you would pray over Joy right now as my wife . . .” Jack’s voice broke. “Please.”
My wife.
Peter didn’t answer with words, but instead placed both his hands on my head, the warmth of them comforting me. He closed his eyes. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known . . .”
I closed my eyes to his prayer, his voice mingling with the cleansing power of a holy marriage and Holy Communion. The space around us shimmered, as sacred as if we knelt at a candle-festooned altar on red velvet cushions in the grandest cathedral on earth. If there was a time heaven might hear our pleas, this consecrated moment swelled around us, this boundless mystical silence beneath Peter’s voice as he uttered the prayers of the Church of England and then those of his own, pleading for healing and restoration, but in the end, for God’s will to be done.
After Peter finished, the silence extended, enveloping us all. The hospital and the world paused with us; time was suspended. It lasted for only seconds but felt an eternity in my soul. Outside, a songbird sang a single note. A tray banged across the hallway. A child called out below my window. A doctor called for a nurse, and the world began again.
It all began again.
CHAPTER 54
Under the quiet passion of the spring;
I would leave you the trouble of my heart
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
They sent me to the Kilns to die in April of 1957.
Helpless to assist, I closed my eyes and allowed the crew of many medical personnel to pack me: my medicines and wheelchair （for the possible day when I might use it）; the bedpan and trays. Two nurses had been hired—day and night. This business of dying wasn’t as simple as surrender to the great light. It was real and dirty and untidy. As Jack said, “A walk through the Garden of Gethsemane.”
My emotions clashed brutally—everything one can feel I felt and usually all at once.
When I’d prayed to one day live at the Kilns as Mrs. Lewis, maybe I should have been more specific. Because that prayer was answered as they rolled in a hospital bed and settled me into the common room with the familiar egg yolk– yellow walls and blackout curtains, the well-worn chairs and leaning bookcases. The fireplace with the perpetual aroma of slag, and the faded carpet embedded with cigarette ash. It was my house now as Mrs. Lewis, and yet I might as well have been strapped to the floor to observe a life I’d never live, a happiness tasted and snatched away.
The bed had already been set up when the ambulance crew wheeled me in on a stretcher to gently lift me onto the sheets. But with a sudden shift of their arms a swift pain sliced through my leg, and I cried out.
“Joy!”
“Joy!”
Jack’s and Warnie’s voices comingled as they came running to the side of the bed from the far wall, where they’d been observing and allowing the attendants to do their work.
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth and tears. I settled back onto the hard mattress and tears ran down my cheeks, unbidden. I wanted to be courageous for them, for me, for the memory of me. But the pain and the lost happiness and the fear held sway.
It took some time for the hospital staff to unload and settle me and then to finally leave me alone with Jack, who sat next to my bed and rested his head on the pillow next to me in an awkward bent fashion.
“I want to take your pain away, Joy. I want to heal you.”
I turned my face and kissed him. “And I want you to take me upstairs to your room and make love to me. For as long as you can. We can finally be together, and it’s only my cancer that keeps us apart.” A sob broke loose. There was no more courage remaining at that moment, only despair. And if God couldn’t bear my despair, then he couldn’t bear me.
“My love, the minute you are able, I will take you in my arms and to my bed.” His voice was heavy beneath the burden, and he bowed his head.
Jack’s and Warnie’s voices were murmurs much like background music in a pub or a radio playing in another room. The cadence and accents, the elongated Rs and brief but lovely laughter carried me like waves. I was awake, but not in any real way that they would know I was. It was more like a dreamy consciousness of my surroundings while my eyes stayed closed and I floated in and out of knowing. Much like a dream where one was in one situation and then another without the synapse connection carrying them forward—nothing was in between.