The magic of England never fades for the true Anglophile. I posted earlier this year on our trip to The Kilns: Where C. S. Lewis Lived and Wrote, but I didn’t include pictures of Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, where Lewis worshiped and is buried. At long last, here are those pictures.

Our tour guide was a good friend of Lewis’s back in the day. He was also a Royal Air Force Veteran of World War II, which gave us plenty to talk about. We thanked him for his bravery and service, but he said it was the United States’ entry into the war that saved the world from the evil Nazi delusion. He had wonderful “Jack” Lewis stories to share that don’t usually make their way into the biographies and textbooks.

Lewis died at the Kilns on November 22, 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley and President John F. Kennedy. Few people attended the Lewis funeral because they didn’t know he had passed. His brother Warnie went on a bender to soothe his depression, rendering him incapable of spreading the word. Moreover, the print and radio news cycles were dominated that week by the assassination of the American President. 

Lewis’ final years were happy ones. From charity and common literary interests grew a deep friendship with American poet and pen pal Joy Davidman. Her acquaintance with Lewis led to his underwriting the boarding school education of her sons David and Douglas. Eventually agape became eros for this charming if improbable couple, and they were married in 1956.

Joy was nearly 17 years Lewis’s junior, which only served to enrich the happiness of their marriage. Experience, enthusiasm, and an array of common interests combined to provide the needed chemistry. A savage case of cancer, however, cut short their life together. After several years of reprieve from an earlier and nearly fatal bout with cancer, Joy Lewis passed away on July 13, 1960.

Still, Joy’s entry into Jack’s life brought much happiness. As he wrote to one friend soon after their marriage, “It’s funny having at 59 the sort of happiness most men have in their twenties . . . ‘Thou hast kept the good wine till now.’ ” 

Lewis is buried beside his brother (who lived ten more years) in the cemetery of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. His letters and books, and the lives these writings touch, are his enduring legacy.

The gravestone for Lewis and his brother, Major Warren “Warnie” Lewis, reads, “Men must endure their going hence,” the Shakespeare quotation on their father’s calendar the day their mother died.