On July 11, 1963 Lewis writes to his boyhood friend, Arthur
Greeves:
“Alas! I have had a collapse as
regards the heart trouble and the holiday has to be cancelled…I don’t mind – or
not much – missing the jaunt, but it is a blow missing you. Bless you. Jack”
On July 15 Lewis wrote to
Shelburne:
“I go into hospital this
afternoon. Think any sudden change in my state is v. improbable…I feel so
sleepy and tired that I fell v. little concerned. The loss of all mental concentration
is what I dislike most. I fell asleep 3 times during your letter and found it
v. hard to understand! Don’t expect to hear much from me. You might as well
expect a Lecture on Hegel from a drunk man.”
[All excerpts from letters taken from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Walter Hooper editor, Harper San Francisco.]
In The Collected Letters Walter Hooper adds this footnote to the
Shelburne letter:
“A 5 p.m. on Monday, 15 July, a
few hours after writing the above letter, Lewis arrived at the Acland Nursing
Home. Minutes afterwards he had a heart attack and went into a coma. The
doctors informed Austin and Katharine Farrer that he was dying, and they
contacted Douglas Gresham and Walter Hooper.”
Lewis came out of the coma the
following day. Concerned about his correspondence, and knowing that he’d be in
the nursing home for sometime, he retained Walter Hooper as his secretary. As
Lewis told George Sayer, “There will be hundreds of letters, I must have a
secretary.” (Warnie was in Ireland;
during this trip to Ireland Warnie and gone on one of his alcoholic binges and
was now a patient at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Sayer went to Ireland to find
Warnie).
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