We placed a call, and very shortly afterward, the operator said: “Here is your party; go ahead.”
And a voice at the other end sobbed into the telephone, “Mother — Martina is dead.”
This is one of those moments where the heart actually seems to stop, and everything around one disappears in darkness.
The connection was not good, and all we could understand was that the baby had started to come four weeks too early, but the doctor was glad, because it was large. Martina was in the hospital. Everything went fine at the beginning until complications arose which made it necessary for the doctor to suggest an operation. The baby died right after it was baptized. Martina seemed all right. The operation was over, the doctors were gone. Martina was just beginning to wake up from the anaesthetic, when all of a sudden, her heart stopped. And could we come home now, please?
Meanwhile, the family had gotten settled in their different cottages, getting ready for a quiet Sunday evening. Now I had to tell them. I sent little Johannes around with the message that everybody should come immediately to cabin #6.
We knelt down and prayed, all of us numb and still without understanding what that meant: Martina is dead.
Now we had to attend to practical matters: airplane tickets to Burlington. Dave, who was deeply shocked, went to the telephone and returned soon with the unexpected news: “Every space is taken. They can put you on the waiting list. The earliest chance will be in three days.” That meant we had to give up the idea of all of us going home.
But I implored Dave, “Please try to get at least one seat for me.” After hours of anxious waiting, one seat was secured, leaving Los Angeles at eight o’clock the next morning. But we were far from Los Angeles. I had to drive 50 miles to the next airport, from where a plane would take me at two o’clock in the morning down south. When I was getting ready to leave, the family gathered around me handing me letters “for Martina,” as tears streamed down their faces. Father Wasner and Dave went along to the airport. Then — a last goodbye, a last blessing, and I was alone. There was a long night and a long day until the plane got into LaGuardia Field. One of our close priest friends was waiting for me.
“The connecting plane to Burlington has left already, and you have to stay overnight in New York. But tomorrow we shall come with you.” I was deeply touched and very grateful in Martina’s name when I learned that six priests would attend her funeral.
The closer the moment came when I should meet Jean and Pierre and Therese (Jean’s brother and his wife) and Martina, the more I dreaded it. But when I finally stood at her side, looking down on her beautiful face, I felt a strange peace coming over me, which seemed to emanate from Martina. There she was lying where her father had lain before in our big living room in her wedding dress with an imperceptible, tiny smile around her lips. At her feet in a small white coffin slept little Notburga, her child.
And then we sat together, Jean and I, holding each other’s hands. There was not very much to tell. The doctors didn’t know themselves. Martina, who had never been sick in all her life, had been well to the very last moment. The doctors didn’t even think that it was an embolism. They just frankly didn’t know. A caesarian operation is usually nothing to worry about nowadays. It is being done successfully all the time.
“God wanted her,” Jean said quietly. After a long silence he added, “She was too good to live very much longer. I had had that feeling often lately. She is in heaven.” Poor Jean. He had been so happy, and now, in an instant, he had lost wife and child.
Then we had to attend to practical matters. Jean said, “Mother, let’s do everything ourselves. I know Martina would want it that way.” His two brothers, Pierre and Jacques, went out to the graveyard to dig the grave. First they had to clear away six feet of snow, which was lucky in a way, because the soil under so much snow was not frozen very deep. The end of February is still deepest winter and very cold in Vermont.
Jean and Martina had been helping Wayne, the carpenter, during the last weeks, finishing the new wing, and Wayne, like everybody else, had grown very fond of Martina and was, like everybody else, also deeply shocked. Jean asked Wayne now to make a coffin for Martina in old-world style out of white pine boards with a big cross on the lid, the cross stained dark. The funeral was set for Thursday at ten o’clock. I sent a telegram to the West Coast, where I knew that ten anxious hearts were waiting for news: “OUR DEAR MARTINA AND HER LITTLE NOTBURGA WILL BE BURIED THURSDAY TEN O’CLOCK.” I knew they would sing a requiem at the same time in California as we would in Stowe.
Telegrams and letters came, and flowers started pouring in, and friends arrived. There was always someone with Martina. Prayers were said in French, in German, in English. In spite of the bad road on our hill and of the bitter cold, people came from all around. The telephone rang constantly with people from the village offering their cars, their help. It was a great comfort in such bottomlessly sad hours to feel such compassion. In the evenings the living room was filled. During the day we gathered a couple of times in the bay window, looking over at Martina, rehearsing the Requiem High Mass. From a nearby college the choir had offered to sing it but — “Let’s do everything ourselves,” we had said. “Martina would like it better that way.” With the singing family way out in California, I was a little bit worried as to how it would go, but when Father McDonnell arrived, who is choir director in his seminary, all was well, and I was sure Martina would like it.
On Wednesday Rupert came with Rosmarie, who had stayed with him, helping him around the house and with the children. Now there was at least one brother and one sister with Martina. With Rupert also came Anne Marie, one of his sisters-in-law.
In the evenings Father McDonough, our pastor, came over and gave a little talk on the liturgy of a Christian burial, which is so very consoling, and how the first Christians had looked at death. Instead of mourning, they celebrated a feast, the birthday of their beloved one in heaven. Instead of expressing their sympathy, they congratulated the bereaved. Some of this spirit we could feel descending upon us more and more.
On Wednesday the coffin arrived. We put it on the table in the music room and lined it with fresh balsam twigs and flowers. In the evening after the last prayer was said, we all went in and, standing around the coffin, we said the Lord’s Prayer for the next one in our midst to die. This is an old Tyrolean custom, and it is a real momento mori. It makes one realize in a very straight-to-the-point way that one day it will be for us.
Friends kept coming until past midnight. This is the mercy of these days. There are so many arrangements to be made, so many things to be thought about, and that, too, is a great help. Pierre and Therese, who had been married with Martina and Jean on the same day, really outdid themselves in arranging everything “as Martina would like it.”
Jean dreaded the black hearse and was sure Martina would not like to be put in there, so Rupert and the others decorated our Jeep truck with carpets and evergreens. After a last prayer at Martina’s side, all the friends went to get their coats, while we placed Martina on her last bed of flowers and fragrant balsam, placing little Notburga in the arm of her mother, covering them both with the rich folds of her bridal veil. Then we went down the hill to the little wooden church, at the threshold of which Father McDonough awaited Martina. As we entered the church, we sang: “Subvenite sancti Dei, occurrite angeli Domini….” (Come, ye saints of God, meet us, oh angels of the Lord, take her soul and offer her to the presence of the Highest.) And now with the words and music of the Requiem we understood again what is meant by the words “Holy Mother Church.” No one can console like a mother, and no one can console and help better than this great mother of us all, the church. “Eternal rest grant to her, Oh Lord,” she says, “and may perpetual light shine upon her.”
When we left the church, it was snowing in big white flakes, and when we came to the cemetery, the little mound of fresh dirt next to the grave was covered with a white blanket.
At the same time, the r
est of the family went into the Catholic church in Coalinga, California, thinking they would quietly, all by themselves, sing a requiem; but when they arrived, the church was filled. Word had gotten around. All the school children had come, and many other people. And so it turned out to be a manifold “Requiem eternam dona eis Domine” which went up to the throne of God. At such moments one feels suddenly that this is what we meant when we say in the creed, we believe in the communion of saints; when all these perfect strangers turn into sisters and brothers, co-members of the church militant, uniting in prayer.
After we had all filed past the open grave, we went back to the house. Everybody was half-frozen. A roaring fire was kindled in the fireplace, and hot lunch was served.
In the morning mail was a letter from a very dear friend, Reverend Father Abbot of the Trappists. It said, “We envy you your sorrow and Martina her heaven.”
As the snowstorm increased, many of the guests wanted to leave before it should be too difficult to get down the hill. I had to fly back the same night to San Francisco. Before leaving for the airport, I wanted to sit once more with Jean. He had been really wonderful all these days, so truly resigned to the will of God. Now he told me how Martina had used all the money I had sent her for her birthday two weeks before for Austrian relief packages. Jean said he would send all the baby things Martina had so lovingly prepared for little Notburga to Austria to be given to a very poor mother with the request to call the child Martin or Martina. That had been very hard to see — the nursery all prepared, the room next to their bedroom, with all those sweet little things lying around, waiting. I had been worried whether it wouldn’t be too much for Jean to look at it from now on, so I asked him with a heavy heart what he planned to do next. He said he would go home to Montreal with his mother for a few days, and then he wanted to work hard and long hours, and so he intended to help that famous garden architect who had made that beautiful rock garden in front of our house. Working with rocks for the whole day, he thought he might be able to sleep. I felt greatly relieved. I knew how terribly quiet our big house could be when everybody is gone. That matters very little as long as there are two of you, but when the beloved is gone, never to return, then one discovers what “alone” means. For this there is no real remedy, but prayer and work help us to carry this cross.
And then I was on my way back to California in the airplane, alone with my thoughts. When Martina had been a little girl, she had said time and again, “I don’t want to be grown-up ever. I always want to be little.” God had really granted her that wish — outwardly and inwardly. That showed most in her uncomplicated, childlike piety. “We should be so continuously grateful for what God has done for us that the least we can give Him in return is all,” she wrote once to Jean.
During the last years when I was quite sick, she had always taken care of me, spent weeks with me in the hospital and nursed me back to health, always patient, always cheerful, full of little surprises. A little bouquet of wild flowers, still wet with dew, picked at sunrise, or a handpainted little card, in which art she was a master. Once in those days she had confided to me that she was afraid to die. Now I had to think that God in His love and mercy had spared His child this last fright. He called her at the moment of her greatest happiness, when she expected to wake up and find her child in her arms. Now I tried to picture Martina’s real awakening, being greeted by her child, her mother and father and little sisters and brothers. In my prayer book is a card with the words of St. Jerome from a letter of consolation addressed to his friend, St. Paula, representing her dead daughter Blesilla as saying, “Dear Mother, if you desire my welfare, trouble not my peace and joy by your tears. You fancy perhaps that I am lonely, but I live in such good company. I am with Mary the mother of our Lord and the holy women mentioned in the Gospel. You pity me for leaving the world, but now it is I rather who feel sorry for you and all your family because you still linger in the prison of the flesh and daily have to contend with the host of enemies who are seeking to destroy you.”
And on another one are the words of St. John Chrysostom: “You complain that you suffer, having lost her who was the joy of your life. Listen, my good friend. Suppose you had given your daughter in marriage to some good and honorable man who went with her to a distant country and made her rich and happy. Would not her happiness soothe the grief you feel at the separation? How can you dare to weep and refuse to be comforted, since your child has been taken to Himself by God our Lord and King, and not by any earthly friend or relative?”
It was Friday late in the afternoon when I arrived in San Francisco. When we approached the airport and I could discover the people waiting for the airplane down there, I looked for red stockings in the crowd, but there were none. Then I looked for a Roman collar or a driver’s cap, thinking that Father Wasner or Dave might have come, but there was no collar and no cap to be seen. How would I get the 50 miles to Los Gatos, where we had the concert that night? What a happy surprise it was then when an officer approached me with outstretched arms and a warm smile, and I recognized Father Saunders, the army chaplain who had for years helped us most generously in our Austrian relief work when he was stationed in Salzburg. While he was driving me to Los Gatos, I told him all about Martina, and then we talked about heaven.
I had just an hour to tell the family all about the last days, and then it was time for the concert. Afterward, Father Saunders joined us, and then at midnight, with the beginning of Saturday, we sang “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” congratulating Martina on her true birthday.
The weeks passed, and when the concert tour was over, we returned home. There is an empty place at the family table now, and an empty room, and there is a fresh grave in the cemetery, which we visit every day. The wound is wide open again.
When the cross gets very heavy, it is good to remember what St. Aloysius Gonzaga wrote to his mother 11 days before his death: “I beg you, my honored Mother, be careful and don’t withstand God’s infinite goodness by bewailing as dead one who will live in God’s presence…. Our separation will not last long. We shall see one another again in heaven and rejoice incessantly, being united with our Redeemer.”
And now, my dear friends, we want to thank you also in Martina’s name for all your prayers and words of comfort. Let us continue to pray for one another, especially for the one who will be next in our midst.
Yours gratefully,
The Trapp Family
It was about six weeks after Martina’s death. We were at home by ourselves. It was in the evening at what we call our “social hour.” We made up our family mind to spend the time between supper and evening prayer every night together around the fireplace, instead of vanishing into our different private quarters. We should really not have been in Stowe, but on the ship on the way to Australia. But the only one leaving from Vancouver was canceled, and for the second time, our tour to Australia and New Zealand was postponed. This unforeseen vacation we enjoy wholeheartedly. During the day we help finish the new wing, carpeting and painting, and in the evenings we spend a most comfortable hour together. Some are knitting or mending stockings, Verner is weaving belts on an ingenious handmade loom, which got him the nickname “Navajo Chief.” Johannes is either whittling or playing with Flockie, his Airedale terrier. Father Wasner is copying music, which doesn’t hinder him from listening to what is being talked about or read aloud, because he can do more than one thing at a time. I am either reading aloud from the day’s mail, or knitting on Maria’s sweater, a rather belated Christmas present.
On one of those evenings it was that Johannes suddenly asked, “Can Martina see us now?”
That started it.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure she can. Aren’t you?” And I looked questioningly from one to the other.
“Sure I am,” said Lorli. “But what I want to know is how that works. If the body is buried, how can the soul see and hear?”
“Does Martina remember everything from her life here on earth, or — does she care
to remember now?” asked Hedwig.
“And if she is in heaven now, exactly what might she be doing all the time?” inquired Johannes. “Can she play with her little baby, or does she have to stand before the throne of God all the time?”
“How would she recognize Father in heaven without a body?”
“What do children do in heaven — the same as the grownups?”
All of a sudden each single one of us discovered a great many burning questions inside, but just at this moment the bell rang for evening prayer in our chapel. Someone suggested looking into Holy Scriptures for whatever answers we could find. So we divided the different books of the New Testament among us, leaving the whole Old Testament to Father Wasner. Each one was to search his portion for whatever references he could find to life after death.
All of us say most earnestly every day when we recite the Apostle’s Creed that “we believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, amen.” But now we had seen how many “what,” “where,” “when,” and “how’s” there are still left to ask. Together we now looked for the answers.
Part Three
Forever
Chapter 21
Blessed Are the Dead
When we met again and each brought what he had found on “life everlasting” in the pages of Holy Scriptures, we were perfectly amazed at the amount to be found. If we only listed quotations, it would make many, many typewritten pages. Once the interest is aroused in “the last things” — death, judgment, heaven, and hell — one cannot stop pondering about it. We looked through our library. We found some highly interesting books: In Heaven We Know Our Own, by Blot; What Becomes of the Dead by Arendzen; and a little old-fashioned-looking book in German by Dr. Robert Klimsch: Leben die Toten (“Do the Dead Live” — a collection of sworn testimonies in beatification processes).1
Yesterday, Today, and Forever Page 14