by Ira Wagler
And that period of my father’s life is about as blank to me as any. His young childhood. There were stories, I’m sure, that he told when I was growing up. I just don’t remember many of them. Maybe I wasn’t listening all that close. Still, in later years, I asked about that world. And Dad told me a little bit about it.
He saw the Great Depression before he was ten years old. I find that fact just astonishing today. That my parents both saw and lived through a window of history such as that. They saw the dust of the dirt roads in summer, and they saw the ragged tramps with knapsacks walking those roads to nowhere. They saw the peddlers traveling door to door in rickety vans, selling what they had to offer. The market came to the poor country folks back in those days. A sparse market, compared to what we now take for granted, but a market nonetheless. Dad spoke of the dry-goods man selling bolts of cloth for dresses and denim for Amish barn-door pants. Three yards of this, five yards of that. The man kept a running tally in his head, and when it came time to settle up, he had the total price all ready. He never made a mistake in figuring, Dad claimed. He was a real math whiz.
It’s all a little foggy, those years in his life. And when he was a young man, those years are foggy, too. It’s kind of funny. Dad wrote a lot in his lifetime. But he never spoke much about his childhood and young-adult years. Back in 2011, one of his sons got a memoir published. That son was me. Growing Up Amish. I told my story. And soon after that, Dad announced to his family that he had some notes he’d been keeping. He was fixing to come out with his own memoirs now, too. I chuckled when I heard it. That was great news. I’d love to read Dad’s memories from when he was young. If that was what it took to get him going, his son getting a memoir published, then that was just fine. Dad envisioned a five-volume set of small books. He actually came out with four of those five volumes. The first two volumes were a gold mine to me. Most of the stories in them, I had never heard before. I’m glad he got them told.
Moving on, then, into his teenage years. That’s when he met Mom. At least that was what he remembered. Her father, John Yoder, had some livestock for sale. Some heifers. Dad was sent over to check the heifers out. I don’t remember if he rode a horse or drove a buggy that day. He arrived at the farm. The sun was shining. Whistling a merry little tune, he walked up to the house and knocked on the door to see if any of the menfolk were around. The door opened. And there stood the most beautiful young woman Dad had ever seen. Ida Mae, it turned out her name was. Mom. She smiled at him, shyly and sweetly. Dad was tall and handsome enough, I suppose. He reflected his mother’s blood and bone. Waglers are generally short. He was tall, with dark, curly hair. That morning, standing in the midday sun in front of that lovely young woman, Dad stammered and stuttered a little but got the words out. He had come to check out the heifers that were for sale.
Mom smiled at him again. He felt light-headed. She was so beautiful. And she told him the menfolk were all gone this morning. She was home with her Mom and sisters. The heifers were out behind the barn, if he wanted to check them out. Dad thanked her. He turned and walked out to the barn. The lovely young woman disappeared into the house. He checked out the heifers and reported back to his father, who later bought them.
That would have been in the late 1930s, probably. And Dad somehow found reasons to keep lurking around Mom’s homeplace. They connected and started dating. And things moved right along. They were married in February 1942. They were very young when they started their journey through life together. And there was no way they could have known where the tides of life would sweep them as the years and then the decades rolled on like a flood.
And now Dad had been alone for a few years. After Mom passed away in early 2014, Dad spoke it. He’d never expected to last this long. His father, Joseph K., had passed away from heatstroke back in 1940. He was fifty-nine years old. Dad was nineteen. He didn’t figure to reach the old age he got to. The Waglers just weren’t known for their longevity that way. Maybe Dad got it from his Mom’s side, from her Lengacher blood. I don’t know.
Today, I look at who my father was in his lifetime. And I feel a tremendous sense of respect and pride. And yes, I know. He was a flawed man, of course. As we all are. I’ve gone there many times in my writings in the past. He was a hard, driven man. He was prone to extremes of rage and passion and desire. The road he chose to walk was his own. And no, he didn’t treat Mom the best on that road. He treated her pretty bad a lot. She endured a lot of senseless suffering. Until she was approaching the end of her own road. Then he cared for her with gentle tenderness, desperately, eagerly, like a child trying to make up for past wrongs. He was such a man. I look unflinchingly and acknowledge his failures. Yes. He sure could have done a lot better. But still. He was so much more than the sum of his flaws.
He was a man. A giant of a man, whose footsteps will remain imprinted in the earth long after his passing. He was all the maddening things a man can be. Stubborn. Focused. Bullheaded. Flawed. Unyielding. Cold. And kind. Distant, yet he cared deeply for his family. He wanted what was best for his children, his sons and daughters. He walked the path that he believed was the right one. He wanted his children to walk that path, too. And he sacrificed his own desires to do what he felt was best for his family. Most notably, he moved from Aylmer to Bloomfield, way back in my youth. He did that so his remaining sons would stay with the Amish Church. It didn’t work, of course. But he was willing to uproot all that he cherished and take the risk. And he did it.
He was adventurous. I don’t know where my father, born of good solid Daviess blood, got his wanderlust. There was never any chance that Daviess would hold him. And once he forsook the land of his fathers, it was ever easier to leave the land he had fled to. I know his time as a conscientious objector in service camps during World War II vastly broadened his world. Later, it was a comparatively simple thing to move to Piketon, Ohio, then to Aylmer, then to Bloomfield. It’s OK. He wasn’t a nomad, but he didn’t hesitate to travel to a new setting, a new world. There was always a place out there where things might go better. That’s what my father believed, from what I can tell from his decisions.
He was a pioneer. My father will go down in history as one of the most visionary Amish intellectuals of all time. And yeah, I know. Some would claim that the term Amish intellectual is an oxymoron. I’ll stand with those who say it’s not. As I mentioned, Dad was a writer, which is a little bit rare in the Amish culture. And writing was the true passion and purpose of his life. In defense of the Amish way of life, he cranked out voluminous amounts of words, starting all the way back in his youth. He wrote because he had to, I suppose. I understand that. Compared to him, I got a real late start. And I’ll never match his volume. Never. It wasn’t until he followed his passion and his dream to launch Family Life that his name became legend among his people. I look at that one single accomplishment as the major defining event in his long and productive life.
Such a thing had never been done before, at least not with any measurable success. Sure, there were wild-eyed Amish guys here and there over the years, guys who cranked out a little rag of some kind. They were never successful. The Budget would be an exception, but that was a newsletter that depended on its readers to provide the letters to print. Family Life was a monthly magazine. With an editor and columnists and stories and serious historical research and such. And Dad threw all he had, all his energy and drive and talent, into making the venture work. It succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I have always admired him tremendously for pursuing his vision. That took guts, it took courage, and it took a bucketload of faith.
He walked alone a lot. I can’t say this for sure, but I’ve often thought it. Dad was a lonely man. He didn’t connect easily or deeply with a lot of people. Oh, sure, he did on a surface level. He was a superb salesman. He could laugh and bow and scrape for a sale right with the best of them. But at a heart level, I think it was hard for him to connect with people. He had very few truly close friends, at least that I remember. I could be off a bit on this pa
rticular observation, but I don’t think so. He was alone a lot, because you have to be in your head to really write.
I know this because that’s how it goes for me. Writing is a lonely world.
And I thought about things as Dad got old. He went striding into his nineties like it was nothing. In the end, I guess, my father was a man as he walked through life. Dad. A figure so vast in my world that it seems futile to try to express it. But still. You do what you can. You speak as you are able to. You just keep walking.
“And you, my father, there on the sad height,” Dylan Thomas wrote. “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.” Those words have always spoken to me. I know that in his last years, Dad saw the sad height of a lonely world. A world where others took him by the hand to lead him to a place where he may or may not have wanted to go. A world of loss and pain, where all but one or two of his peers were gone. I know he remembered life from long ago and looked back fondly on the days of his youth. I know he missed Mom. I know the road was long, and rough in places. And I know my father was weary and simply wanted to rest.
Tomorrow is promised no one. It will bring what it may. Today is today. We are here, and this is now. Today, we celebrate life and all that life is.
Dad’s Funeral and Final Thoughts
My father was dead. It takes a while to grasp such a thing when it happens. We stood there around the bed. Waves of relief swept through me. Dad was released. Right that second, Ida Mae, standing at the far end of the room, asked sharply, “What time is it?” She stepped out of the room to look at the clock. I pulled out my phone and turned it on. Precisely six thirty. That was when Dad passed on. I had been here for less than three hours.
I kept sagging with relief. Dad’s suffering was finally over, after all this time. But I was suspicious, too. Paranoid, almost. I kept asking, “Do you think he’ll start breathing again? You said before that he’d stop breathing for a long time, then start up.” Lord, I thought. Don’t let him come back to this life of pain. That’s how intensely I wanted Dad to be released.
Rosemary reassured me. “No. It never was like this before.” After five minutes or so, I stepped outside to make some calls. It was a good thing that my phone plan had been upgraded to international before I came over the border. I was sure gonna need this thing.
The first person I called was my sister Magdalena. She was the next in line in age after Rosemary. The phone rang and rang. Maddeningly, there was no answer. I tried Janice. She was probably with her mom. Again, no answer. I called my sister Rachel then. She was waiting. And I told her, “Dad passed away at six thirty.”
“I’m so glad you were there,” she said. And we talked. “You call Jesse and Rhoda. I’ll call Stephen and leave a message for Titus and Joseph. You can post it on the family site,” I said. She said she would, and we hung up. And we both made more calls to share the news. Our father had died. He no longer had any cares here on this earth. Finally, the time had come that he could leave.
I wasn’t sure what the protocol was up there in Aylmer. The Canadian system. My nephew Simon dashed off somewhere to a phone to call the nurse and the undertaker. A few neighboring Amish people came and went. We sat around in the tiny house. Now and then I stepped outside to make a call or answer my phone. I had tried to call Alvin and Naomi, too. They couldn’t be far away. The first time, there was no answer on Alvin’s end. Ten minutes later, I called again. This time, there was a click, and he answered. And I didn’t mess around. I told him, “This is Ira. Dad died.”
There was a pause. “We’re at the motel, getting a room,” Alvin said. “We will be right out.”
And that was the randomness of it all, and it just didn’t seem right. Not that anyone could do anything about it. Here my sister Naomi had come days before to help care for Dad. She had no wheels, the Amish trundled her around in a buggy. Those things aren’t safe, in my opinion. She stayed out at Rosemary’s house. Then she stepped away for a few minutes with her husband to go to Saint Thomas and get a room at the Comfort Inn. And right then, Dad died. Meanwhile, I had waltzed in for a little over two hours. And there I stood, closer to the man’s head than anyone else when he passed away. I told Naomi, “I feel bad. I’m sorry you weren’t here. There’s nothing really that I can do about it.” She was most gracious. No one can blame anyone for being where they were. It all just happened as it happened.
At some point, I left for Saint Thomas to book my room at the Comfort Inn. An hour or so later, I returned. Dad’s body was still there. And around nine thirty or so, the lights of the hearse came bumping up the long lane. Joe Gascho stepped outside the house with a lamp to signal the hearse in. The big black vehicle backed up close to the front door, just off the deck. Two men dressed in long black coats got out and extracted a gurney from the hearse. They came clanking in and introduced themselves.
Joe showed them into the back room. They pulled the gurney in and set it beside the bed. Dad’s body had stiffened some, you could tell. Joe stood at the doorway, holding the lamp high for light in the little bedroom. I peeked over his shoulder. The men lowered the gurney beside the bed, lifted Dad’s body over, placed it in a large bag, and zipped it shut. Then they covered everything with a blanket. Rosemary handed them a bag as they clumped out through the kitchen. “Here are his clothes,” she said. The clothes Dad would be buried in, all packed and ready to go. Joe stepped outside with his lamp. I followed him and watched as the gurney came out, pushed by one black-coated man and pulled by the other. They rolled it right up to the open door of the hearse, folded up the front wheels, and pushed it in. Then they shut the door. And out the long lane they drove into the darkness. I sure wouldn’t want a job like that.
I remember, growing up, the words the Amish preachers often said at the beginning of a long service. Like Big Church or Ordnung’s Church. Both went late into the afternoon. And I remember hearing the preacher hem and haw, getting started. Or the bishop, in Big Church. He would get up, clear his throat, and make a few noises about how humble he feels, standing up there, talking. Others could do it so much better. And then he would speak those fateful words. “We have a big field to cross today.” Which basically meant that no one in that house was going anywhere soon. We were all trapped until the last second of the last minute of the last hour of the service. “We have a big field to cross.” It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any Amish child. And that’s what I feel like saying right here about the next few days leading up to and through to the other side of my father’s funeral. We have a big field to cross. Maybe there are a few shortcuts. We’ll see, I guess.
Thursday. First, there was a meeting with the undertakers at eight thirty. I’d never had much to do with funeral homes or undertakers. I drove Amish Black east on Route 3 to Aylmer, followed by Alvin and Naomi in Alvin’s big red Dodge truck. I pulled in at the Tim Hortons there on the west edge of town. The drive-up window was deserted, oddly, so I pulled through and ordered a large coffee, black. It was thin and weak. I was disappointed in Tim Hortons. I thought you guys had decent brew. Naomi got out of the truck, and I cleaned off the passenger seat in my Jeep. We drove through town, to the east side of the main traffic light. And there, on the left, right at the end of the row of storefronts, it stood. H. A. Kebbel Funeral Home. It was kind of tight, getting in and out of the place. I pulled in, drove around the back, and parked on the east side, right up front outside the doors. “We won’t be long,” I told Naomi. We walked in. The large front room was empty. A bell must have rung in the back. The son of the father-son team stepped out and walked over to greet us. Bob, he’d told me the night before, when he was picking up Dad’s body. He was very calm and smooth and efficient.
He led us to a back room, and we sat at a conference table. I handed him the envelope Rosemary had given me the night before. The obituary for our father. Rosemary and Naomi had written a rough draft in the past few days. I handed it to Bob, and we went over it. He took it to his office for his secretary to type
up. And then we discussed the details of Dad’s funeral. It would be on Sunday morning at nine a.m. I know it’s a little horrifying to Lancaster County Amish, the thought of a funeral on a Sunday. But in most midwestern communities, it’s not a big deal. For a funeral, Sunday works just as good as any other day. The funeral home would print up little folded paper obituaries to give to people who came to the viewing and the service.
Naomi and I checked out the potential covers for the notice. I liked the Dove of Peace. She liked a sunset scene. “Why don’t we use both?” I asked. “Half of one, and half of the other.” Bob the undertaker was most accommodating. He handed us draft copies of each. “We need to take this out to our sister’s place,” I told him. “We need approval. I’ll be back later today to give you the go-ahead.”
Bob’s elderly father, Herb, came in to meet us, too. He was in his eighties, and he remembered when the Amish first settled in the Aylmer community in 1951. He remembered Dad from back then, he claimed. I know Dad’s mom died in Aylmer. They took her body to Daviess by train. Herb was probably involved with all that. We chatted about his memories. And I pulled out a copy of my book then and signed it, to father and son. “This is about my experience growing up,” I said. “Dad is a big character in the book, as you might imagine.” They thanked me for my gift. An undertaker works with death every day, he sees it, lives it, and deals with it intimately. I wonder if they see and hear things that would freak out the rest of us. I wouldn’t be surprised. But they are always so smooth and polished, at least the ones I’ve been around. Herb and Bob were no different.
Later that day, Naomi and I drove out to Joe and Rosemary’s house. Everything is a bit of a jumble in my mind, as far as what happened exactly when. The details. We went over the little obituary notices, and I ran back to town with the final corrections. The funeral home people told me the copies would be ready to pick up at the printer’s at four that afternoon. I rested at the motel and drove around a bit. Just before four, I stopped at the Aylmer Express offices. The printer’s. They had two little boxes ready to go. I trundled on out to my sister’s place. Somebody had dropped off food for supper, a large casserole. We would be eating around six, Rosemary said. After sipping black coffee all day, I was hungry for my meal. Around five, my brother Stephen and his wife, Wilma, came around. They had already checked in at the motel. The extended family was gathering. Most would arrive on Friday. I told Stephen, “Tomorrow morning at nine thirty, they are bringing Dad out to where the service will be. We might as well be waiting on him.” Stephen agreed. We ate then. Later, I headed to my motel room. The first full day on-site was done. I slept fitfully that night.