For about 30 minutes during the summer of 1994, time was frozen for me in the churchyard of the Headington Quarry parish church as I knelt at the grave of C. S. Lewis. Never has the weight of our mortality bowed me down more severely than at that moment. For I had been hanging on every published word of this man for over twenty-five years. He had saved me from apostasy when I was a doubting and questioning high school student; he had taught me how to think like a Christian. I literally owed this man my life, and had come to feel I knew him and loved him as a friend. And here he was only six feet away. But the barrier of Death was a more solid wall between us than the stone slab of his tomb or the steel walls of his casket; had I broken through those barriers the distance would still have been infinite and unbridgeable. I had been closer to him with my nose in one of his books on the other side of the Atlantic. I was looking for a closer connection, but I was absolutely stymied. That is what Death has done to us! And so the truth of the words carved on the stone was carved also into my soul: "Men must endure their going hence."