Dedicated to God (26 page)

My sister’s the oldest, five years older than me. My brother was two and a half years older. The older two would talk for me; I didn’t have to say much. I had to have speech therapy because others couldn’t understand me. I had a tutor, and I learned the vowels and to pronounce better so they could understand me.

There was a gas station across a big street, but I was kind of little so I took my brother and sister with me. The Overhands owned the gas station—just a little gas station—and they had caramels and things. They would give me penny candy, and so I went there as often as I could. My brother and sister liked to come, too, because they got to share. I used to keep a jar of money—pennies and things I got. Anyway, I would shake that jar, and when it shook like there was enough, I would take them over; they would go with me—my brother and sister and cousin, too. I treated them. I wanted their company because I wanted to go over there, and I couldn’t go alone! I was only five or six. The Overhands took the money and said it was enough, and they asked each of us what we wanted; they got Pepsi-Colas and stuff.

The Overhands were wonderful people. They took an interest in me. One Easter, the bell rang and I went to the door. Mother went to the door and I went along. They had a clothesbasket and inside were two bunnies—white bunnies—and they were so cute. They were for me. That’s what I mean; they just took an interest in me because I was the baby, I guess, the youngest. That was really something. We kept those bunnies. There was one that lived longer. Mother said when he got to be the size of a milk bottle, we had to get him out of the house. She thought he would give me pink eye, or maybe he did give me pink eye. I don’t remember. Anyway, we would have to get him out of the house then, so I would measure him. The bunny would come to the breakfast table and it was so funny. Finally, my father said he would make a fence so we could still keep him outdoors. He made him a fence, but the next morning, the bunny had dug under the fence. We never got him back. I guess they never looked for him.

What really got me as a child was Christmas. I didn’t know what Easter was because I didn’t know anybody that died, but I knew what Christmas was and I knew that God became a child like me. That just went over and over in my head—that God would become a child. Because what was I? Insignificant as a child.

My mother and father never went to church, but my mother always had good books. I remember this one book she had—the Old Testament story about the little girl that was sold into slavery. They had a picture of the little girl and I always wanted to be that little girl who said, “There is a prophet in Israel!” That influenced me a lot, that book about the leprosy and the girl. She was a slave girl from Israel. It’s an interesting story, in Nehemiah or something, I forget where it is in the Bible. We hear it in Mass sometimes. I’ve read it since, many times. I remember the pictures, too. It’s a child’s book and the picture of the little girl looked like she was my age.

It always did impact me—that story—that the slave’s master would get cured, and the way he got cured. The slave girl said, “There is a prophet in Israel that will cure you.” He was her master and she wanted him to go to Israel. He did. He got cured, but it was a roundabout way. The prophet said, “Go plunge in the Jordan seven times.” And he said, “What, are not the rivers in Egypt good enough?” He didn’t like that. He was mad. He said, “I thought he would come out and lay his hand on me.” But the prophet didn’t; he just said, “Go.” The slaves tried to argue with him, “Now, if he
had said something great big, you would have done it. So why not this?” So he plunged seven times in the Jordan and came out clean like a baby’s skin.

Ma had a lot of good books she used to read to us because my brother couldn’t read. She would read not religious books, but books that boys would like—
The Count of Monte Cristo.
I liked them, too—books about Doctor Dolittle and by Frank Buck, things like that. Because my brother had trouble reading, my parents were supposed to let him stay back; the teacher wanted to keep him back in first grade or kindergarten, but my father wouldn’t let him; he wouldn’t hear of it. My sister was so smart and he thought that the next one should be that smart, too, so he wouldn’t let them. So my brother moved on, but he couldn’t pick up the reading; he had trouble with the reading.

I remember staying home from school when I got sick. I mean, I pretended I was sick in order to stay home. A big tree was cut down in our yard and we wanted to have fun in that tree. Mother knew I was just pretending, but she let me stay, so all day we played on that tree. That was fun.

We had to rent a house so we could go to school, but I don’t remember school much. I didn’t like it. My sister liked school and she was an “A-plus” student in everything. She had to be top in everything, and she was. She studied. She studied hard to get those grades. It wasn’t like it came easy, although she was like a genius, I guess. My father was a genius because he could take any job. He could seem to.

My sister had a boy that would come over; he liked her. She played the teacher; she liked to teach, and she would keep him in the corner. He was always in the corner. My mother didn’t like that. She didn’t think that was right. I don’t remember standing in the corner, just him. But he would come back for more. He liked it. Mother thought that was awful. Isn’t that funny?

They always expected me to be like my sister. I couldn’t match that. I was lucky if I made a “C.” My mother always said, “Well, don’t worry if you don’t get better grades. You can understand others better when you’re just normal, average.” She tried to console me. But anyway, I guess I just wanted to play all the time.

6
The Suffering Servants

In a sense, I think that’s what God asks of us—it’s that trust element. He’s saying, “Are you willing to risk everything for me? Do you really love me? Do you really love me enough to risk everything for me and trust that I will take care of you?” And it has to come out of a personal relationship, and a deep personal relationship with our Lord, knowing that, yes, I can trust Him and He will take care of me and He won’t let me down. He won’t just drop me, leave me in the lurch, or just dump me. But we can really, really trust that He loves us and wants to give us the best.

Sister Mary Nicolette of the Father of Mercies

When Sister Mary Gemma entered the Corpus Christi Monastery, she left behind a younger sister poor in health. When her family visited, Mary was wheeled into the parlor. Sister Mary Gemma says her mother “kept her father real” and both parents helped Mary learn to contend with her disease: colitis, an ulcerated colon. “She was only in seventh grade when she started to suffer,” Sister Mary Gemma says.

Since the onset of Mary’s disease, their father had scoured health journals and medical books on Mary’s behalf, always hopeful of finding new treatments. The pattern continued through Sister Mary Gemma’s tenure in the Corpus Christi Monastery. Her family still lives near the monastery, and so together they would drive there to see Sister Mary Gemma for each of her four allotted family visits each year. “I still remember Mary sitting in the wheelchair and Dad all excited because he was giving her
this
now, and Mom sitting in the back now going like
this
,” Sister Mary Gemma says, shaking her head.

Mary prayed for her own healing; she wanted to be made well. Still, she ended each prayer asking that God’s will be done in her life. Sister Mary
Gemma says, “Because of the guidance she received from my parents, she learned how to use the suffering, how to offer it to God, how to accept it, and how to unite her suffering with the suffering of Christ. She grew in love with God through all that.”

Over the years, Mary’s condition changed as the disease advanced, led to joint and spine problems, to open-heart surgery and a full colostomy, but not before an infection poisoned her colon and breached other organs. Mary was an avid needleworker until a rheumatic disease ate away the bones in her hands. Sister Mary Gemma says children gravitated to Mary; she allowed them to play with her deformed fingers, to push them backward and watch the fingers twist and flatten. This did not hurt Mary because her joints and cartilage had completely deteriorated, Sister Mary Gemma says.

As her body self-destructed, Mary appeared to grow lovelier in spirit. “She was one of the happiest persons I ever met,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “She always had a smile on her face. She was always joking.”

Mother Miryam witnessed the same transformation in Mary—a “lovely little thing” who initially grappled with her “crippled” state until doctors said they had done everything possible and Mary understood she would not recover. Eventually, she believed it was her vocation in life to suffer.

Self-deprecating, Mary joked that a cousin selected her as a wedding attendant, along with two friends who were seven months pregnant, because there was “nothing like two pregnant women and a cripple in a wheelchair to make you look tall and thin.” Referring to her electric wheelchair, she called herself the “remote-control cousin.”

Mary survived and suffered until a medication thinned her blood, and she had a stroke. She died within twenty-four hours. “I think she was ready for heaven,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “I was so happy for her to be with God, where she wanted to be, that I couldn’t even cry for her after she died. I think it was harder for my family who were with her all the time, but I only saw her four times a year. And we were very close but I just felt nothing but joy for her. Not that I don’t miss her, but I just still feel real happy for her. That’s what my parents always taught us—we’re living for heaven. We’re here on earth to get ready for heaven and that’s what we all want, for us all to be together in heaven someday.”

After Mary died, Sister Mary Gemma learned about Mary’s brush with death a year earlier. Mary told a cousin about the experience and asked her not to share the story with anyone yet. After Mary died, the family read
Mary’s own account of the events in an essay she titled “My Journey toward Heaven.” “I have had a lot of pain in my life, but this was the worst,” Mary wrote at the age of forty-two. “How could a bladder infection cause so much pain?” A tentative diagnosis of a tumor, abscess, or a blood clot was followed by hallucinations—a side effect of the medications and the barium tests. Told she would need to undergo an operation, Mary scheduled a confession with her priest. “I have felt for a long time now that I would never survive another major surgery,” she wrote. “My feeling was that I would not be coming back.” Friends visited Mary in her hospital room; she told them that if she died she “wouldn’t mind.” “I felt my life fading away,” she wrote.

Four days after she was admitted to the hospital, doctors scheduled a CT scan of her lungs and abdomen to determine the cause of her breathing difficulties. “Before I was taken away for the scan I had an urgency to tell Mom and Dad where my will was. I felt death was very near, but I didn’t want to alarm them,” she wrote. She told her mom, “I don’t want to be kept alive by extraordinary means.”

During a CT scan that should have been somewhat routine, Mary could not catch her breath. The technician thought she was hyperventilating and advised slower, deeper breaths, before she realized Mary’s system was shutting down. Mary remembered her pushing emergency buttons, remembered the technician screaming for help. “It became extremely painful. With every gasp after gasp I could only think, ‘God how long can this go on? God, please take me now, this is torture!’ Then it was over. I must have finally passed out.”

Later, when Mary described what happened next, she said the pain left her body at that instant. She felt surrounded by a “golden kaleidoscope of a yellow bright light.” She believed she had started her journey to heaven. She was ready. But then she heard voices of confusion and panic. A doctor repeated her wishes: She did not want extraordinary measures taken to save her life. She heard a men’s choir and she felt soothed. She thought she was about to end her journey. Then Mary saw “black and gray.” Her throat hurt. She realized she was alive but worried that the nurses would not know she was. An emergency tracheotomy revived her. “I was not able to finish my journey to heaven,” she wrote. “I knew my trials and struggles were not over after all.”

“They worked on her for quite a long time and she came back to life again,” Sister Mary Gemma says.

After Mary died, her cousin e-mailed family, writing that Mary told her she heard, “not through her ears, just in her heart,” a voice asking, “Will you still suffer for the poor souls that have no one to pray for them?” Her cousin replied, “Yes, if you want me to.” The emergency tracheotomy that saved Mary was a “cruel twist,” the cousin wrote, because it stole her ability to sing—her only remaining creative outlet.

Her family believes that her spiritual encounter consoled Mary for her decades of chronic debilitating diseases. Mary died at forty-three years old. Looking back now, Sister Mary Gemma says of her younger sister’s descriptions of approaching heaven, “I honestly can’t say what she experienced. Certainly, it was a mystical gift that she received, to hear the angels singing. And you could tell—she always already was a beautiful person to me—but after that, there was so much peace in her. Before that, she always had a certain fear of dying, I think. And that’s natural to the human condition—to fear death. In God’s original plan, the soul was not meant to be separated from the body.”