C.S. Lewis's wife Joy Davidman died in 1960.
Joy Davidman died of cancer on 13 July 1960. She and Lewis had married in a civil ceremony in 1956, and their relationship was later given a Christian marriage ceremony in 1957 at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Lewis became her widower after four years of marriage.
Lewis wrote about the shock and spiritual struggle that followed in A Grief Observed. The book was first published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. It examines grief, anger, doubt and the difficulty of reconciling suffering with religious belief.
Davidman was an American writer and poet who had converted to Christianity before meeting Lewis. Her death is sometimes confused with Lewis’s own death in 1963, but the two events were separated by more than three years.