A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

Chapter 7 revolves around the care Davy receives at home and in the hospital and is colored by Van and Davy’s mutual submission to an unstoppable force that now threatens to overwhelm them with Davy’s illness. The severe mercy of the disease, as Lewis would later call it, forced them to confront their mortality and the depths to which they were willing to offer themselves on the altar of self-sacrifice. As Van struggled with delivering the news to Davy (which the doctor had shared with him first), he prayed and offered up his life and death for the good of Davy’s life and soul. This was a genuine breakthrough moment for the author, realizing in almost an instant that his life seemed like nothing compared to the value he placed on Davy as his wife.

For her part, Davy ends up making a similar, perhaps even more radical, prayer, offering up her life for the salvation of her husband’s soul and his ultimate good. As the author would relate later in the book, this prayer would come true, as would every other prayer they offered during her illness. As their final act of sharing—even if they could not share in a mutual death—Van and Davy spent her final days together as much as possible, Van even being fortunate enough to be holding Davy in his arms as she drew her final breaths. The experience of Davy’s last days as a good and holy death not only transformed Davy in her final moments but allowed the author to see beyond the veil of this life and into the next, finally coming to see the importance of a life well-lived in balance with a conviction to always order the current life to the ultimate destiny of communion with God in the life to come.

Chapter 8 focuses on the author’s continued sense of Davy’s presence in his life in the immediate aftermath of her death. This chapter serves as a brilliant illumination of the psychological effects of death on loved ones left behind and illustrates the phenomenological experiences that are often experienced when someone tries to move through the various stages of grief and process death. Even without Davy being physically and materially present in the body, his initial foray into the Illumination of the Past—the name that he gives his attempt to catalog his life with Davy via memories, letters, written compositions, and important paintings Davy had worked on—is a unique way of processing. The struggle of feeling lost without the presence of a loved one shines through as the author attempts to make sense of his grief at this profound loss that is simultaneously experienced as a constant sense that his wife is still living in a way that is more than life.

The paradox of the Christian faith lies in the fact that death is a great evil—being the unnatural severing of body and soul—and yet is not the greatest of evils since the life into which the soul enters is life in communion with God. This paradox is manifest in Van’s experience of grief, feeling the absence of Davy’s body and yet the presence of her spirit. This sense of her living presence lasted for some time, in particular moments, in dreams, and in his act of remembering her. This act of remembering comes to a head in the ultimate act of remembrance: the Illumination of the Past. As a way of honoring Davy’s memory, Van gathers as much literature as he can that relates to, or was penned by, Davy to plot out and record their life together. His grief, combined with this encomium of her life in records, is a profound act of love, just as the sensation of grief is itself an act of love, as it is the desire for the presence of the beloved whose presence is no longer available.