Who was Lucy Barfield

Five Years

Will many think of Lucy on 3rd May 2008? The day she died five years ago? Most certainly her brothers, Alexander and, especially, Jeffrey who kept reading to her "The Chronicles of Narnia" during her last seven years in the hospital. Walter Hooper who wrote so beautifully about her in her obituary. A Catholic priest who said he will be offering his mass for her that day.

Her Godfather remembered her in his last will on 2 November 1961. He certainly did not know then what would happen to him in two years and to Lucy another three years later. That he would die in 1963 and that Lucy, after spending a year as a piano teacher in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 1966 would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

But he believed that: "We shall live forever. There will come a time when every culture, every institution, every nation, the human race, all biological life is extinct and every one of us still alive... We shall live to remember the galaxies as an old tale."

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p.172

Seven Years

The first and the last day of Lucy Barfield's life keeps returning again every year. Next Monday, 2010 May 3rd, it will be already seven years since she died. We are reminded again how little we know about her, keep wondering again who she really was. And what her Goodfather, Jack or C.S. Lewis, really knew and thought about her.

A question comes back again to my mind which I already tried to answer to myself many times. Would there be, would we still have The Chronicles of Narnia had there been no Lucy Barfield? Her Goodfather is saying to her: "I wrote this story for you". Could he also have written it for someone else? Could he have said this, may be in some other words, to anybody else?

Never was I able to come to a satisfactory and final conclusion. So this year I decided just simply to try to ask others. What do you think? And why?
.

I think there would have been a Chronicles even if there had been no Lucy Barfield, or if Lewis had never known her dad Owen. Lewis kept having these imaginative visions of things like a faun and a girl walking arm-in-arm through the snow, and a tall witch dressed in white standing on a sleigh. Lucy served to precipitate these pictures into a coherent narrative, but I think something else could have done so as well.

Simply put, I think God wanted the Chronicles written, so it would have happened.