Dedicated to God (20 page)

I cleaned everything up and left it in the closet. Later on, Mom said, “If I had known all that you left in that closet, I never would have let you out of the house!” I left some artwork, some sketches, and I had some of Mary’s artwork and letters and drawing pictures. She was a better artist than I was. She was very talented, very gifted, both in looks and otherwise. I left some of those in the closet. Mom appreciated those, I think. She didn’t appreciate all of the other stuff I left—the
Better Homes and Gardens
. I was interested in architecture and building my dream home. I just didn’t know what to do with all of my stuff. It was too good to throw away! And clothes I left because I thought Mary would have needed them sooner or later. But she didn’t.

I remember my junior year, I went to a lay apostolate women’s group over on the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin for a summer course. They had a lot of good courses for women. I got sick with a gall bladder infection and had to come home. I went to the hospital because our doctor was gone at the time and our substitute would only see me in the hospital. Usually, it was Mary that was in the hospital; she came to see me. She was too young to come in. They didn’t allow children to visit in the bedroom, but they allowed her to come in. They were so used to seeing her.

My sister contracted leukemia when she was in sixth grade after she had her tonsils out. Mom thought that somehow her bone marrow had been poisoned by the ether when she had her tonsils out. That was Mom’s guess. The type of leukemia she had was pernicious. She shouldn’t have lived more than six months or a year at the most, but she did. She lived. Mom and Dad had her go to school, and they kept on her to go to school because they wanted her to have as much of a normal life as possible.

So she went to school and her teacher knew. They let the teacher know because she missed so much school. When she was sick, she was sick and she couldn’t go to school. They never told Mary then what she had. We knew; the family knew. But they told Mary she had anemia so if anyone asked her, she said she had anemia. Otherwise, people would have always been asking how she was doing, like people do. But my parents wanted her to have as much of a normal life as possible.

When Mary was feeling well, she’d want to do anything she usually did and the doctor told her she could do whatever she wanted. Of course, he didn’t realize she was like me—a tomboy—always wanting to do what my brothers did. She was like that, too, maybe not as much as I was. He didn’t know what she was used to doing. She went out and played on the trapeze
and when she came in, Mom looked at her—because the blood vessels began bursting—and she knew Mary couldn’t do that again.

The thing was, sometimes in the end the disease didn’t act like acute leukemia. Sometimes the red blood cells were produced correctly. Mom watched very carefully the medicines the doctors gave her; if she saw any bad reaction, she told Mary not to take it. Mom said the doctor said that, too. She said, “He gives the medicines to others and they take them like candy but they’re dead.” She’d go back and see that other patients wouldn’t be there anymore because the medicines they were experimenting with were poisonous in the end. They had to be very careful. Mom watched very carefully, and so Mary lived. After a while, Mary knew the things she couldn’t do because of the reactions. After a while, when we would go out to the cottage she couldn’t even go wading because of the difference of the pressure of the water.

Mom and Dad didn’t tell her the name of the disease but she understood she was very sick. The bone biopsies she had to have were painful. They weren’t anything that you wanted to go through. She had long hair—long beautiful hair from the time she was little. When I was born I didn’t have any hair. When I was one year old, they put a ribbon around my head so that people would know I was a girl, not a boy. But Mary had hair when she was born, and by the time she was one or two, she had long hair. She had braids when she was little—just two or three—long blonde braids. She was beautiful. She had pigtails when she started high school. I always had short hair. I never had curly hair. Mom didn’t believe in trying to curl your hair if it wasn’t curly so I just had a bob. They did give me a permanent once and when I came home, it was curly so my brother, Father Tom, who was in the seminary, told Mary, “You should cut your hair like Josephine.” She had long hair and because of the medicine, she was losing it. But because of the braids, you didn’t notice. I told her, “Don’t pay any attention to him. You’re fine.” If she cut her hair, it would have been noticeable that she was losing it.

Mary knew she was very sick. And when she was real sick, she knew; she knew she was deathly sick. She knew how she was feeling. At times, when she was very sick she would wake up and say “mercy killing” because she was in so much pain. She was tempted, because of the pain, to want to be killed.

Mom, Dad, and Mary came with me when I entered here, and I remember seeing her in the parlor. I came in and I was dressed as a postulant and I was thinking, “This might be the last time I see her.” And it was. I remember the
sisters asking her if she wanted to enter the monastery. She, like myself, from the time she received First Holy Communion, went to daily Mass. In fact, I think she might have wanted to be a religious. I can’t remember what she said to the nuns, but I knew she wouldn’t live that long. I was sort of resentful that they kept asking her because I knew she wasn’t going to live long enough to be a religious.

When they went home on Saturday, Mary felt awful sick. She went to school that Monday because she knew she was going to see the doctor that afternoon and she knew he was probably going to put her in the hospital for more transfusions. He put her in the hospital and she never went home after that. Mom was with her in the hospital; she always stayed with her. The day before she died—she died on November 26—Mom said the doctor came, and Mary told him she didn’t want any more transfusions. And then she thanked the doctor and she thanked the nurses that had been caring for her because she knew she was going to die.

One of my friends was a nurse’s aide in the hospital, and she said to Mom, “What’s happening? Everyone’s coming out of the room crying.” It was because Mary was thanking them all for their help and what they had done. Mom said she didn’t want any more transfusions, and so they all came out crying. Mary must have known that she was getting near death. And, no, she didn’t resent that. In fact, in the end, she really was longing for it, to go and be with God. In the end, she wanted to die.

Usually, November is our time of Lent of Saint Martin and we don’t have family visits or letters from November 2 until Christmas. I entered during that time and so I wasn’t expecting any correspondence until after Christmas. But I was told that Mary had died. My family sent word and they told me. I knew she was ready, and I knew she wanted it because she had been so sick. But for Mom and Dad, it was terribly hard for them because I had come here, and then ten days later, Mary died.

I didn’t know if I could go home for the funeral. I didn’t ask. Usually, once you enter you don’t go home for a funeral. I hadn’t made a vow of enclosure then, but when you enter you observe it. I think they told me when the funeral would be, and I prayed during the time when she was at the funeral. My parents told me afterwards that Mary’s entire class went to the funeral because she was in school until nine days before she died. She was a freshman.

I realized later that it was a good thing that I entered and didn’t go home for the funeral because the public opinion would have been very hard. To
come back here would have been very difficult; it would have gone against the public pressure. People would have said, “How can you leave when … ? How can you leave now that your sister’s … ?” I think the Lord worked it that way. I asked Him for a sister, He gave me a sister. I came here, and she died right after. He gave me a sister for as long as …

I prayed for a cure. Really, I did. I wasn’t looking forward to entering. I thought it was what He wanted. And I tried to bargain with God: “Well, I’ll answer if you make Mary well.” But I knew I couldn’t bargain.

That Christmas, when my parents came to visit, it was hard for them. It was even harder for them than it was for me. There were very few times I’ve seen Dad cry. Once was when they came back from the doctor and he knew what Mary had. I saw him reading
The Merck Manual
, and he was crying. And it was hard that Christmas when they came. Dad asked Mother Petra to pray for them because it was like the bottom had dropped out of the family. And it’s true. It was like that. The two youngest were gone. But they got through it and so did I. Just remembering, though, it’s hard.

But that’s the way life is. And, you know, God’s ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. And you see that, too, with the crucifix: God’s ways are not our ways. That’s what His son had to do for love of Him, for love of us, to show His love of us.

I think in every Christian’s life, for everyone who’s trying to follow Christ, they’re going to experience it. It will be according to their vocation, according to whatever state of life they are in—they will all experience it in some way. It’s a sacrifice He asks. It’s the sharing in His suffering. And it’s the share He gives to all of us, to all His followers. You can refuse, but then you’re not being like His son, and He sent His son and His son gave us the power to become sons of God, to become God’s children through baptism. He makes us like His son and if we’re like His son, we’ll be like Him in the different experiences of life.

You ask me, “Why the contemplative life?” I felt I could be anything I wanted to be. Really, if I wanted to be a doctor, I had the intelligence; I could have if I wanted—or anything else I wanted to be. Here, I thought, I could help more by praying, I could help people in every walk of life; it wouldn’t just be one walk of life. Here, it’s helping in all the professions. That’s why I chose this.

4
Little House, Big Heart

It’s a whole different world that we’re living in.

Mother Miryam of Jesus

There is a scene that Sister Mary Gemma conjures easily. She has slipped back to this visual memory many times. When she was nineteen years old, she flew to California to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins; it was her first—and second to last—trip by airplane. She hoped the vacation might save her from what she believed to be her calling to cloistered monastic life. She had pictured a “romantic encounter” during her trip to the West Coast. Raised in the country, she reveled in her relatives’ sophisticated and uninhibited lifestyle; they partied with friends and drank alcohol. The trip ended early, with tears.

It is not this memory that Sister Mary Gemma recalls so vividly, though. Finding language for her experience in California takes time; in her recounting, she stops and starts, she pauses, and then she revises the timeline and events. She has not rehearsed the story with multiple retellings.

The series of images she knows so well, and the feelings resurrected by the visual memory, took place before she visited her relatives in California. The scene is not from her own childhood in northern Illinois, near her monastic home of almost four decades. The memory is her own. The experience is not.

Sister Mary Gemma describes what she sees: An open prairie and a family fighting to survive, uncertain if they will outlast the winter. It is the late nineteenth century. Sister Mary Gemma remembers that the family is waiting out a blizzard in the hope the rails will clear so a train can deliver necessities in time. They grind wheat in a coffee mill all day in order to make bread, which suffices until dinner the next night. The family labors for their daily bread; each day, they grind more wheat and then bake more bread to last one more
day. At night, the mother sits with her baby on a rocking chair, unable to fall asleep because of the cries of “natives.” Sister Mary Gemma sees the children sweeping the dirt floors of their cabin; because they cannot afford shoes, the children go barefoot from first thaw to first frost.

Sister Mary Gemma loves the dramas of the Ingalls family. She loves reading about Ma and Pa and Laura—the simplicity of their lives, the hard manual labor required to pioneer unsettled territory, the constant threats to their existence, the characters’ faith in powers outside themselves, and their closeness and dependence on one another.

As a child, Sister Mary Gemma’s family drove west through South Dakota, and so she can imagine the lake the Ingalls lived near, the birds that slept on the lake when it froze, the noises they made in morning. “I can picture it,” she says. “I don’t know why. It seems I must have seen it or heard it before, heard these birds. It’s so real to me.” When Sister Mary Gemma first read
Little House on the Prairie
as a child with an active imagination, the books gave shape to her fantasies. They carried her away from sometimes trying family dynamics. In grade school in the late 1960s, her father moved the family from Rockford to a rural village in the next county over. “He thought it would be a healthier bringing up for us if we lived out in the country and had animals to take care of,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “He got us into a farming community where the kids were all farming kids and town kids. It was a completely different atmosphere.” They had pet cats and dogs. They raised ducks and chickens. They hiked and camped. With this move, Sister Mary Gemma felt more connected to the Ingalls family.