Comfort to Spare (i)

When sorrow suddenly comes--and it usually does--Christians are divided into two groups. There are those who, temporarily at any rate, collapse. Their faith falters. And there are those who receive a new joy, hitherto unknown by them, the avowed and recognized work of the Holy Spirit, whose temple they are by the grace of their heavenly Father and as a result of the merits and the intercession of Jesus Christ their Saviour and Lord. 

There isn't much we know about Aunt Gertie's death. It happened on a foggy night in November of 1949, along the lakeshore in a mist that makes travel so difficult that her mom and dad--my grandparents--had warned their daughter it would be prudent to stay home rather than travel all the way to Milwaukee. But they didn't listen--the four of them. And there was an accident. And Aunt Gertie was killed. No one else was hurt.

Aunt Gertie wasn't a child. She was 24, a teacher at the brand new Christian school a block east from our house and a couple more blocks east of downtown, where the Dirkse family lived. 

These pages are written with the definite purpose of aiding in the transfer of Christians from the first group into the second. For that is possible, and the writer has been informed by more than one minister that far too many Christians are in the first named category. 

I'm quoting from a thin volume of meditations titled Comfort to Spare, and written by a preacher named Rev. J. K. Van Baalen, B. D. The book was published by Eerdmans, a house religiously trusted by members of the tribe of believers their grandson is still very much a part of, the Christian Reformed Church of North America. 

Somewhere along the line, the little book was a gift from my mother, Aunt Gertie's only sister. As likely as not, it came to me with other books when Mom was getting rid of things so she could be off to the Home after the death of her husband, my dad. I don't remember the gift, but it likely came in a box with other things, other books. About her intentions, she was clear; she left a sticky note in the inside cover.

She's been gone now for close to a decade, so I've lost any opportunity to try to decipher what she was saying here, but the handwriting--including the smiley face--is very much "Mom." I don't remember her mentioning the book or the note, but I have no doubt that what she was implying is that while she hadn't spent weeks and weeks with Comfort to Spare, what she had invested in its truth was significant.

Mom wasn't a reader. I honestly don't remember her with a book in her hand, and, because she so deeply valued spirituality, it would be like her to recommend the book. to say the comfort it brings the is immense, even if she hadn't read it herself.

Her note is stuck on a page which contains more inside information, in my grandma's handwriting.

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Dirkse are my grandparents, the parents who lost Aunt Gert on a misty night in November of 1949, a month before Christmas. Rev. John Piersma was their young, dynamic preacher. The date suggests that Van Baalen's book was a Christmas gift. It may well have been. However, Aunt Gertie died in that freakish accident only a month before, and Van Baalen's book has a very clear mission you've already seen: "These pages are written with the definite purpose of aiding in the transfer of Christians from the first group into the second," he says, from those "whose faith falters" to those "who receive a new joy."

In its pages there are more than a few references to a war that took the lives of just over 415 thousand American troops. Comfort to Spare could hardly have been a best-seller, but in the late 1940s hundreds of thousands of Harry and Mabel Dirkses were still suffering through horrible, tragic loss. Van Baalen could have had lots of potential readers.

Just a week or so ago, we'd finished up a study of the book of Luke for after-supper devotions, so I went to library to pick out something new and came back with a little study I don't believe I'd ever seen before. I toted it back to the kitchen and opened the cover to all of this.

Aunt Gertie's death wasn't spoken of much in our house when we were growing up. My sisters, three and five years older than I am, have only the slightest of memories of the days after the accident. My sister, who was five, remembers how Mom tied her daughter's shoestrings with a kind of intensity her daughter had never quite forgotten. I have none. I wasn't yet two years old. My oldest sister remembers the thin drapery over the coffin in the dining room of the house where Grandpa and Grandma lived.

My mother told me more than once how Aunt Gertie had stopped at our house on Superior Avenue after school one day to play with me, the baby of the family. What kind of mood I'd been in, I don't know, but it must have been contrary because Mom told me more than once that I'd told her in no uncertain homes, "Go home." 

I wasn't pilloried for unfeeling remark. Mom didn't cry when she remembered my unkind send-off. She couldn't help think it was cute, childish. She smiled when she remembered. 

But the book's twin inscriptions reminded me of the scarcity of memory surrounding a fatal accident and how it affected the family--and even us, the kids. That it wasn't talked about doesn't mean it didn't color our lives--my life. 

I'm going to try to understand what I can.