Joy Gresham

Helen Joy Gresham (November 1915 - 1960) was a poet, a politically radical Jewish convert to orthodox Christianity, mother of David Gresham and Douglas Gresham, and wife of C. S. Lewis. She moved from her native New York to England in 1953, where she met and married Lewis, her second husband, having been inspired by his books on Christianity. (Her first husband William drank heavily and eventually left her for another woman.) A former communist and atheistic Jew, Gresham was brought to examine and subsequently convert to the Christian faith, largely through Lewis' writings. His intellectual equal, she captivated Lewis. When she moved to the UK, he married her so that she would not have to return to America. In time, and especially after she fell ill with cancer, he realized how much he loved her and proposed to marry her properly, "before God." She recovered briefly, but eventually succumbed to cancer. It claimed her life in 1960 at the age of forty-five; Lewis died one week shy of his sixty-fifth birthday three years later on November 22, 1963.

Headstone Epitaph

Here the whole world

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       (stars, water, air,

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And field, and forest, as they were

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Reflected in a single mind)

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Like cast off clothes was left behind

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In ashes, yet with hopes that she,

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Re-born from holy poverty,

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In lenten lands, hereafter may

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Resume them on her Easter Day.

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