Siblings at the end of days

A few weeks ago, something triggered a reading memory I could not place: two people at life's end -- siblings, I thought -- thrown together in an intimacy that recalled early childhood days. I thought it might be in a C.S. Lewis novel -- somewhere in Narnia, maybe -- but couldn't quite place it.  It hovered, as I lost an honored colleague who died last week at 82, and when I stopped in at my own sister's house, and when I visited my parents, where the books and pictures that have been staring back at me all my life remain in their same relative positions (on different walls).

Yesterday it came to me.  The source did involve C.S. Lewis, but it's a memoir by his brother, a preface to a volume of C.S.'s letters.  W.H's voice is uncannily like his brother's, with whom he was indeed tightly bound from birth until C.S.'s death at 63 in 1963, sharing a household through most of their adult lives. As children, they were both dreamy boys who lived almost entirely in worlds of their imagining, which they shared, drawing and writing together, in the precious hours when both were home. They shared intense traumas: yearly separations from the earliest age at separate boarding schools, which in Jack's case were barbaric bastions of sadism; and the death of their mother from cancer when Jack was 8.  Here's W.H. on Jack's last weeks: