by Jonas Beiler
“Well,” the grandfather said slowly from his hospital bed, his long beard reaching down to his chest, “I’d much rather have it be you than a complete stranger.”
It is almost as if the Amish revere the passing from this world to the next so much that they would prefer to have friends involved in the process. In this case the grandfather felt some sort of comfort that the momentous transition of his granddaughter from earth to heaven had been initiated by someone that they knew, and not some random stranger.
A few months after the accident, Amos still struggled with his part in the small Amish girl’s passing. The days seemed to drag on and on, and the nights felt dark and heavy with grief. Then a package arrived. The first time Amos looked through it, he couldn’t quite comprehend what it was: a book with page after page of letters, all addressed to him. Then he looked closer.
It was a scrapbook—a pink cloth album with green leaves, filled with letters written to him from every family in the church district the little girl’s family belonged to. The book was eightyfive pages in length, nearly two inches thick. Every single family wrote a note to him full of encouragement and decorated the page with stickers and hand-drawn pictures. Some of the typed pages were held in the album with flower stickers. Some of the pages had short sayings of encouragement or poems.
The letters told him he was not a bad person. They told him the little girl was in heaven with Jesus—what better place could she be? They told him that it must have been her time to leave this earth. And, most of all, they encouraged him to persevere through his time of pain.
Amos’s eyes filled with tears until he could barely read the letters. Nearly every page was signed “From Friends,” and then the names of each individual in that particular family were listed. One of the poems written by a family went like this:
Our thoughts so often go your way
Since May 17th, that tragic day
When God saw fit for you to be there
As Ruthie left this earth for Heaven so fair.
We do not understand why God planned it this way
That you were the appointed one to drive in that day
Just as God was softly calling, “Ruthie come with me.”
He let you focus elsewhere, that’s why you didn’t see.
She was such a precious Lil girl
Oh, much too special for this world
Her parting has caused a great deal of pain.
But her loved ones all know their loss is “Her Gain.”
So now with God’s help you will all try to move on
And leave this all with God, He will help you along
But in our weakness we sometimes forget to Trust.
And to stand strong in the Faith is also a must.
If we want to join Ruthie someday in Heaven above
Where all is Peace, Joy, Contentment and Love.
Imagine her Life as a precious angel now
Playing on the banks of Jordan smiling all the while.
Or singing there, now singing in the angel band
Her voice so sweetly ringing out o’er the Heavenly Land,
And running through the fields of flowers that cannot be compared
The beauty and the smell, oh so fragrant there.
I did not know what I could write to bring you peace of mind
Sleep wouldn’t come for me tonight so I took this time
In quietness and in Prayer for you that all might turn out right
Just live your life for God and be a shining Light.
Till some day when we can leave this world behind
To walk hand-in-hand into that Home Sublime ...
On reflection, Amos still finds the Amish commitment to forgiveness difficult to understand.
“I can’t imagine how someone can get through something like I’ve been through if they’re not able to talk to the victim’s family, or if they are being prosecuted,” Amos said. “Because, as difficult as it has been, it just made it easier, being able to talk to the family and knowing they didn’t hate me.
“I come from an Amish background and I still cannot comprehend this forgiveness.”
There was no court appearance or drawn-out legal battle. There was no questioning the competency or responsibility of the driver—was he looking where he was going? Did he take sufficient care when pulling into the driveway? The Amish recognize an accident when they see one and treat it as such. The parents still grieve the loss of their child. But they made a decision not to pursue some sort of legal justice or balance for their loss—what equitable balance could a parent possibly receive for losing a child?
Instead they chose to forgive. And for Amos it meant he could escape the prison of guilt and move on with his life.
Buggy funeral procession passing the home of the shooter
CHAPTER TEN
“Maybe I Should Forgive, Too”
IN ALL THE chaos of trying to get the girls into the helicopters and ambulances, no one back in Nickel Mines knew for sure where each girl had been taken. Even when descriptions of the girls started coming in from the various trauma centers there was still a lot of uncertainty. Soon, though, the parents began heading for the various hospitals where their girls were being treated.
The parents of Anna Mae Stoltzfus were taken by police cruiser to the Christiana Hospital in Delaware, where they expected to find their daughter being treated. But when they arrived and saw the girl, they knew immediately that it wasn’t Anna Mae. Instead, they learned that Anna Mae had died at the school.
Just as the full weight of this realization began to sink in, the parents of Mary Liz and Lena Miller were escorted to that very same hospital. The girl that had at first been identified as Anna Mae in the hospital was in fact Mary Liz. The four parents wept together, caught up in a storm of emotions and grief. Mary Liz’s parents, whose other daughter Lena was also in critical condition at another hospital, then rushed inside to see their daughter.
They walked quickly through the hospital’s halls, passing room after room, perhaps still not quite believing that they would find their daughter there. Life-support machines beeped and hummed and set off occasional alarms. The seriousness that always abounds in such places weighed heavily on their shoulders.
As they approached the critical care unit, where they had learned Mary Liz was being treated, a doctor told them their daughter was on life support. The doctor told them that Mary Liz “was in grave condition and brain dead ... and isn’t going to get any better.”
As they struggled with what to do, they received a call from the Hershey Medical Center, located about seventy-five miles away, regarding Lena—she too was on life support, with a prognosis similar to her sister’s. It was now 10:00 p.m. The parents asked the doctors in Hershey to wait until they got there before doing anything.
They made their final decision regarding Mary Liz and sat by her bed until a little after midnight, when she was taken off life support. Her parents kissed her good-bye and told her that they were going to go to take her sister off life support so that “you can go ahead into heaven together.”
I cannot imagine that seventy-five-mile trip from Newark, Delaware, to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Those parents had just said good-bye to one daughter and were on their way to another sad farewell. The car’s wheels must have hummed incessantly in the silence created by their grief. They arrived in Hershey around 2:00 a.m. After they saw Lena one final time, she was soon disconnected from life support. She passed quickly as they held her.
Lena was the last of the five girls to go. The other five girls, in various conditions at hospitals throughout the area, would miraculously survive the close-range shooting.
Meanwhile, at home I slept a fitful sleep. Thoughts of Angie and Sonny plagued my mind, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all of those Amish parents and the incredibly difficult path ahead of them. I also couldn’t help being amazed at their strength and how their stories of forgiveness were already spreading.
MY WIFE an
d I drove through the autumn dusk to the Millers’ house. It was only a few days after they lost Mary Liz and Lena. We knew the mother’s brother—these were the only parents who had lost children to which we had a connection—and we wanted to offer our condolences, so we got in our car and headed to their farm in Georgetown for the viewing. Georgetown is just about a mile south of Nickel Mines, on Mine Road.
There were a number of cars there, which was slightly unusual, but there were also some plain vans, which usually indicates that some Amish had come from farther away—they hire drivers to take them from here to there if the distance is too far for their horse and buggies to travel. A lot of people made their way toward the house, and many were also mingling outside, talking to one another, coming and going.
We walked into the house, and I immediately felt the tradition and culture in the atmosphere. The proper thing to do when you arrive at a gathering like this is to walk around the circle of family, shaking everyone’s hand and introducing yourself. Their interest always seems peaked when a non-Amish person arrives. Most of them knew who I was when I told them I was a Beiler and gave them my father’s and grandfather’s first names. They would nod and smile, immediately making the connection as to why we were there. This sense of community can be uncanny, the way they can keep track of generations in their head. It is an interconnectedness I have not encountered anywhere else in the world.
The women sat in a line on one side of the room, the men on the other, and where their lines met sat the mother and father. My wife and I spotted the mother immediately—she looked so sad, gaunt from lack of sleep and loss of appetite, and she was holding a younger child in her lap. The father sat beside her, looking very somber and worn. They would occasionally turn to the family members beside them and say a few words or would address those making their way through the line, but it was easy to see that grief had struck them to the core.
We shook everyone’s hand, drawing closer to the parents through the crowd of sixty or seventy people present in the house. The gas lanterns were lit, casting a subdued glow on the gathering and humming their usual smallest of sounds, like what you hear when you put your ear in a large seashell. As we came to the parents I felt a large lump in my throat. I remembered sitting in their spot, seeing new people come through the door, shaking their hands as they offered their condolences regarding Angie’s passing. I remembered sometimes thinking that those people had no idea how I felt.
I reached down to shake their hands and nodded to them respectfully.
Anne spoke first.
“I’m Anne Beiler,” she said quietly, speaking in Pennsylvania Dutch. “I know you don’t know who I am, but we wanted to come because we lost a little girl many years ago. We understand how you feel. I didn’t lose my little girl like you did, that part I don’t understand, but I understand the loss that you are feeling right now.”
We went around the other side of the half-circle shaking the men’s hands. When we finished, Anne turned to the side and wept. It was too much for her, these memories of losing Angie and the sight of this poor mother in such pain, having lost two girls. I hugged her for a moment, and then we mingled with the crowd for a little while.
One of the family members we knew pulled us aside and asked if we would like to see the girls, so we followed him into a sort of receiving room, like a parlor. Normally you do not go in to view the body unless you are taken in by a relative. The room they were in would normally be the room the family used to entertain guests. But the space had been cleared for the funeral, and the only things left in the room were a very small side table holding a lamp, and the two coffins. There was no other furniture and no pictures on the walls.
One other Amish couple was in the room, and they stood silent beside us. The atmosphere felt overwhelmingly peaceful and quiet. You could just barely hear the hum of conversation through the doorway, but it seemed a million miles away. The comforting hum of the lantern was louder in this room, where no one was speaking.
The girls’ coffins were arranged in a sort of narrow V, with their heads facing toward the windows and their feet toward the entrance we came through. The coffins were relatively simple wooden boxes. The girls’ faces looked so young and peaceful. They wore white dresses made for them by family members. We stayed in the room for a few minutes, then left, taking our own memories with us.
We did not attend any of the girls’ funerals. They are held very strictly by invitation only—and if you are invited you do not think about doing anything but attending. Since I have Amish family we have been to quite a few Amish funerals, and I am always amazed at how these services are designed to pass their culture on to future generations.
The first thing you would notice at an Amish funeral is how orderly everything proceeds, yet no one is giving orders or directing the service. There is no single master of ceremonies. Everything is done traditionally and peacefully. The entire service is conducted in German, not in their usual Pennsylvania-Dutch dialect, but if there are a number of “English” (non-Amish) in attendance the bishops will sometimes deliver part of the sermon in English.
The funerals are normally held in a barn, a garage, or a shed; wherever they can have the most people sit together. The benches are lined up in long rows so close together that when everyone is seated their knees will most likely be right up against the bench in front of them. The men all sit on one side and the women sit on the other. The body is in the coffin, placed between the men and women, in the center aisle and about one third of the way back from the front of the room. The young people always sit just behind the coffin so that they are the closest to it. The preachers and elders are seated first and up front, then the young people, and finally the younger married couples in the back.
Everything the Amish do, at funerals but also during any other cultural ceremony, is carried out in a way that shows the young people how it’s done. Year after year after year, none of it changes: from how you sit to how you bring the body in to who sits where. The babies sit on their mothers’ laps, and there isn’t this rushing in and out with children that you sometimes get in our churches. Even the babies seem to understand that it is a time for quiet.
The funeral service lasts about two hours.
My sister-in-law, who also used to be Amish when she was a young girl, still remembers sitting on her father’s lap during funeral services. Space was so tight that she and her father could barely move, but he secretly kept little pieces of candy in his shirt pockets for her, and he held her tight during those services. I am sure this is one of the reasons that Amish children are often so close to their parents, because of the repetitive physical closeness they experience during these rich ceremonies.
When I go to an Amish funeral, I still feel that it is such a part of who I am. It doesn’t surprise me that so many of the young people choose to become Amish—only about 5 percent choose to leave. The traditions and structure provide a security and comfort that’s almost irresistible.
When the service is over everyone files out of the building past the coffin, opened at the very end of the service for the final viewing. Interestingly enough, while the service is going on, the young men (who do not have to be told, but just know it is their job) number the buggies with chalk so that the family members can leave first. They take care of all the horses, unhitching them during the service, and somehow know which horse goes with which buggy goes with which family, hitching the horses back to the buggies after the service. Someone organizes that, but it doesn’t seem to be talked about—it all goes like clockwork.
After the service there is a funeral procession, thirty or forty buggies somberly treading their way to the graveyard with a special carriage carrying the coffin. The graves are hand dug before the service. A normal grave that you or I might see in a nonAmish cemetery is dug with a backhoe, and the sides are covered with a drape so you don’t see the rough edges. But when the Amish dig their graves they use a spade, and the sides are as flat as a board, with only the o
ccasional crater from where a large rock may have been knocked loose. A wooden box goes down first as a liner, and then the wooden coffin fits inside that.
The coffin is lowered with straps by four people, two on each side. I remember at my mother’s funeral how slowly her casket floated down into the ground. The grave is covered completely before you leave—for my mother’s grave, my nieces and nephews were allowed to throw a few shovelfuls of dirt down. The remaining dirt is piled up in a perfect mound on top of the site. At the very end they put a stake at each end of the grave, and one of the stakes is marked with the date of birth and the date of death.
After the funeral, the crowd often will mingle around the graveyard, looking at other tombstones and remembering family members who had passed on before. Remembering is so important to the Amish. Sometimes they will visit these graves for quite a while, and there is a solemn air to the gathering as the living drift around those reminders of the dead. There is an immense peace in knowing they will someday be buried there with their families, but even more so in knowing they will join them in heaven. The Amish live very much in the present, working the land with their hands and enjoying good times with family and friends. But they seem to know more than most Christians that “this world is not my home.”
