Chapter Text
Susan remained. Susan, with her lipsticks and nylons and gilt-lettered invitations: she never left England again. Our intrepid—or insipid—Mr. Lewis frolicked with her siblings in God’s own Heaven with nary a mention of Susan’s absence.
What indignity that must have been! Even if she had no love for that old tomcat—and it's hard to say she had none—to be left, bereft of her siblings, of her fellow sovereigns, for the rest of your life: it could only hurt.
And what did Susan think of Aslan? He wasn’t the sort of creature that one would find in the grand old C of E, but that’s where Peter and Edmund and Lucy, and their dear parents, had their funeral. Afterwards, Susan went with the other mourners—neighbors and friends of her parents, mostly—to the little graveyard out behind the church. One by one, the two coffins were lowered into the family plot, and each urn placed into its niche.
(Remember: the Pevensies had reserved the plot at the neighborhood church in the reasonable expectation that their children would, one day, with families of their own, buy their own plots for themselves. When it happened—when Narnia fell—the graveyard was full up of the bodies broken in the bombings, so Susan’s siblings went instead to the columbarium, which had just been consecrated six years prior for the war dead. Like her siblings, many of those boys returning from the Continent were hardly fit for a coffin.)
So maybe the Pevensie children didn’t "come back". Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that their return was the temporary jaunt in a newly unfamiliar land. They left something behind on those distant battlefields, something that mattered; and something that they couldn’t live long without.
And Susan—what did she leave? Or rather, why could she stay? Did she regain that missing piece, or did she paper it over with lipsticks and nylons and invitations? Did she Believe, did she return to Faith? To God? We hear, from the most unreliable of narrators, that to Susan, Narnia turned to childhood fantasy. Those fifteen years, her adventures, her loves, her rule, all retreated like mist in the noonday sun. To be left behind was punishment for her poor memory.
Hardly not! To be sure, it was meant as a punishment—a punishment for turning fully and running headlong into life as it was; not wasting away over what was entirely inaccessible. Susan came back, and just like her siblings, was missing something. It took indomitable strength to realize what was missing, and more importantly, choose to remain. Susan chose, day after never-ending day, to keep living. She lost her family, and her kingdom, but here she was, and here she would remain.
Her life was given as a punishment—but Susan chose to make it a gift. This matters— this is special. It’s not easy to live while they are gone, but Susan did. She packed her siblings, her parents, her memories, into a compartment in her vanity, right next to her fine jewelry. Beautiful, treasured, and rarely worn.
And her friends, and colleagues, and lovers, they looked at her and saw … a woman. Dedicated to her work, to helping those around her, to living her life exactly as she pleased. She had joys, sorrows, and her own private losses. If at times there was a melancholy about her, well, it was no different than Miriam one desk over, who held tightly to the cameo of her young beau. Or Wilfred, the postman, whose eyes were still mired in the horrors of the trenches three decades later. Or Mary, her landlord, who lost all four of her children in the span of a year. Susan was no different from them all—for they all chose to remain.
We like to think that our heroes have something unique about them—that there is a light behind their eyes, a wistfulness for times gone by, an internal fire that drives them further up and further in; that they have a special hurt that was the price of their victory. And that’s true.
But there are far more heroes than we know.