Shadowlands

What are the sources of the pain and suffering depicted?
- His mothers death at a young age
- Joy's sickness and death

What are the sources of the joy depicted?
- Meeting and getting to know Joy
- Joy's son becoming a part of his life
- God's presence in his life

How are suffering and joy related in the video and in the broader sense for everybody?
- Joy the woman causes him suffering
- When he marries Joy, it makes him very happy, but her inevitable death make him very sad.

How can people ‘grow’ through suffering?
- In a tragic event like loosing ones mother, a person needs to grow up and become more responsible and in the process grow as a person.
- People can find God through suffering and therefore improve their life exponentially.

Perhaps the crucial period in Jack and Warnie’s early life - that bound them so closely as
brothers - was the death in 1908 of their mother. C. S. Lewis later cited this trauma in explaining
his own emotional reticence; the person he loved most in the world was taken from him.
How does Jack describe this time in the film ‘Shadowlands’?
- A time of incredible sadness and also discovery, finding God amongst all the sadness.

How is the pain of losing a parent “re-lived” for C. S. Lewis in ‘Shadowlands’?
- The death of Joy is alike the death of his mother.

How does he say he copes differently with the death of Joy than the death of his mother?
- He relies on God to give him strength.
- He understands what is happening with Joy and he didn't with his mum.

What are the responsibilities of a parent to the children he or she is leaving? What does Joy mean by “old enough to hurt”?
- Her child has lived a life where Joy was in it, and he is going to have to face the rest of his without her, he know's what is going on and will miss his mother.
- A parent will have to prepare the child for a life without them, have to show them how to survive in the world.

In the film, what key lines from the C. S. Lewis speech below are used repeatedly to express his attitude to God’s plan in allowing suffering?
“When a loved one dies we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career
or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off - something truncated and therefore lacking its
due shape, whereas it is really a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It
follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship, or as autumn follows summer. It
is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance but
the next figure.”