C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, a few days short of his 65th birthday.
We tend to see Lewis’s death at a relatively young age as a tragedy, especially when considering the longer life of his older brother, Warren (Warnie), who survived him by another 10 years. But Lewis, fully aware of his failing health, didn’t see his demise in tragic terms. The last months of his life provide a model of Christian contentment in anticipation of eternal happiness.
Decline
Lewis faced challenges to his health throughout his life, but in June 1961, he experienced nephritis, which resulted in blood poisoning, and this setback kept him from teaching during the autumn term at Cambridge that year. Though he returned in the spring of 1962, he wasn’t well. To one of the students under his supervision, he wrote,
They can’t operate on my prostate till they’ve got my heart and kidneys right, and it begins to look as if they can’t get my heart & kidneys right till they operate on my prostate. So we’re in what an examinee, by a happy slip of the pen, called “a viscous circle.”
Biographer A. N. Wilson blamed Lewis’s friend, the doctor Robert Havard, for his early death, claiming he failed to treat his maladies properly. But other biographers disagree with that assessment. Aside from the dietary restrictions Havard recommended throughout the 1950s (which Lewis never followed for long), there wasn’t much else a doctor could’ve done at the time.
Lewis drank an inordinate amount of black tea, and the correlation between caffeine consumption and high blood pressure hadn’t yet been established. Now-typical treatments for an enlarged prostate weren’t developed until after his death. And though some reports were sounding the alarm about the deleterious health effects of tobacco, there was no consensus at the time.
Summer of 1963
It’s a mark of human beings, Lewis once wrote, that they’re “wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it.” By the summer of 1963, Lewis was wise enough to see he wouldn’t enjoy a long life. He wrote a letter to Mary Willis on June 17, appealing to the Christian’s hope. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?” he asked. “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” He signed the letter as “a tired traveller near the journey’s end.”
Later that month, Lewis wrote Mary again, painting a picture of one’s earthly time running out:
Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.
Lewis’s health worsened over the summer. His kidneys were no longer functioning properly. Blood transfusions helped, but dialysis treatment was still uncommon back then. Alarmed at his fatigue and loss of mental concentration, he went to the hospital for evaluation on July 15. As soon as he arrived, he suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma. The next morning, he was thought to be near death, and he received extreme unction.
But Lewis surprised everyone when he woke up at 2:00 that afternoon and asked for tea. In the following weeks, he slowly recovered, though he was sometimes confused.
Maureen Blake, the daughter of Mrs. Moore and the sister of his friend Paddy, visited Lewis in the hospital. The two had known each other ever since she was a little girl, and she had lived at the Kilns for a time. They’d not seen each other since Maureen had become an heiress—a surprising turn of events due to her unexpected inheritance of the estate of Sir George Cospatrick Duff-Sutherland-Dunbar, Baron Dunbar of Hempriggs, in Caithness, Scotland.
Lewis hadn’t recognized any visitors on the day she visited, so she entered quietly and said, “Jack, it’s Maureen,” to which he replied, “No. It’s Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.”
Stunned, Maureen said, “Oh Jack, how could you remember that?”
“On the contrary,” he said, grinning, “how could I forget a fairy tale?”
Back to the Kilns
Once discharged from the hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns. He was forbidden from using the stairs and was thus cut off from his bedroom and study. A bed was set up in the common room, and a male nurse stayed in the Kilns for six weeks as Lewis regained some of his strength.
Lewis was clearly too weak to continue teaching. He resigned his post at Cambridge with great sadness, and when he wrote his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves, in September, he expressed disappointment in his brother Warnie’s absence. He “has completely deserted me,” he wrote. “I suppose, drinking himself to death.” He described himself as “an invalid” but also as “quite comfortable and cheerful.” His last letter to Arthur concludes with a cry: “But oh Arthur, never to see you again! . . .”
As summer turned to fall, Lewis described himself in letters as “an extinct volcano, but quite cheerful.” He seemed surprised and perhaps a little sad to have been so close to death only to be pulled back from the brink. He connected his experience with that of Lazarus, whom he’d earlier described as the protomartyr, the man who had to die twice. Looking through Lewis’s correspondence, one finds candid acknowledgment of his pitiful health alongside continual declarations of his “cheery” and “contented” spirit.
In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis had imagined evil forces at work in keeping people from facing their frailty. “How much better for us,” writes one devil to another, “if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition.” There was no such deception with Lewis. He faced his frailty and death in a manner consistent with his principles.
Warnie returned in October, taking responsibility for his younger brother during the last weeks of his life. Friends would sometimes stop by and visit or take Lewis for a ride somewhere. On a cool and sunny day that month, his friend George Sayer drove him along the London Road, up Beacon Hill, to see the beech trees in full fall color. “I think I might have my last soak of the year,” Lewis said as he stepped out of the car. A “soak” was the term he used to describe the joy of stopping to rest and soak in the beauty of creation after walking the countryside.
The Kilns as a Waiting Room
In his last weeks of earthly life, Lewis puttered around the Kilns (“I rarely venture further afield than a stroll in the garden,” he wrote), answering letters and revisiting his personal library. “I doubt whether I can ever leave this house again,” he wrote on October 29. “What then? I’ve just re-read the Iliad and never enjoyed it more, and have enjoyed to the full some beautiful autumn weather.” The next week, he reread Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
The Kilns had turned into a waiting room, a quiet refuge of refreshment as Lewis prepared to make the journey from this life to the next. He penned his last letter of spiritual direction on October 31, answering questions about the virgin birth, the glorified body of the risen Christ, atonement theories, and the wrath of God. In the days that followed, he kept up his correspondence, writing a young Kathy Kristy (later the wife of Tim Keller) twice in the weeks leading up to his death.
Last Week
Lewis’s last week of life was one of quiet activity. He met friends on November 15 at the Lamb and Flag (the pub across the street from the Eagle and Child), and Roger Lancelyn Green came to the Kilns that evening in time for dinner. Lewis was busy correcting the proofs for what became his last essay, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” for the Saturday Evening Post, a remarkably prescient analysis of society’s turn toward privileging “sexual happiness” above all else.
Later that week, J. R. R. Tolkien and his son John came by for a visit, choosing not to dwell on Lewis’s failing health in favor of a conversation about Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and the lives of trees. Lewis went to the Lamb and Flag for the last time on November 18, where he visited with Colin Hardie. Mostly, he stayed at the Kilns, awaiting his earthly departure and enjoying the company of his brother.
“The wheel had come full circle,” wrote Warnie later, harking back to those early years in which the brothers as little boys had clung to each other in sorrow, having experienced the painful loss of their mother:
Once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both. Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. “I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,” he said to me one evening.
On November 21, he wrote a kind and warm letter to a child, praising him for his “remarkably good letter,” thanking him for saying how much he enjoyed the Narnia books and promising to pass along a correction in one of the reprints.
November 22
Friday, November 22, 1963, followed the now-established routine. Lewis and Warnie enjoyed breakfast, dashed off a few letters to well-wishers, and then did the daily crossword puzzle.
After lunch, when Lewis fell asleep in his chair, Warnie suggested he’d be more comfortable in bed. Across the hall, the “music room” had been turned into Lewis’s bedroom now that he was no longer allowed upstairs. Warnie took him some tea at 4:00, finding him drowsy but comfortable.
At 5:30, Warnie heard a crash. Arriving in the bedroom, he found Lewis lying unconscious at the foot of the bed. “He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later,” he wrote.
The news of Lewis’s death that afternoon was overshadowed by another event taking place at almost the same time—the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World also died that day. This strange confluence of deaths became the backdrop for Peter Kreeft’s magnificent Between Heaven and Hell, an imaginary conversation with all three men, standing in for three divergent worldviews, on the outskirts of heaven.
Legacy of Lewis in Dying
On November 26, 1963, a funeral for Lewis was held at Holy Trinity Church, where he attended most frequently. He was buried in the churchyard. A decade later, Warnie was buried with him.
The last months of C. S. Lewis, the renowned Christian apologist and storyteller, give us a poignant picture of the hope he championed with ardor: the promise of eternal life in the arms of God.
Lewis said goodbye to his closest friends, perhaps like Reepicheep as he headed over the wave in his coracle in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—“trying to be sad for their sakes” while “quivering with happiness.” The joy—the stab of inconsolable longing—that animated his poetry and prose was on display in how he died, in those weeks of quiet rest, as he endured his physical maladies with patience and good humor, in full faith that this earthly realm is just a prelude to the next chapter of a greater story, a new and wondrous reality suffused with the deep magic of divine love.
Further up, and further in!
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