Growing Up Amish (16 page)

Mom stayed at the hospital, but Dad returned later that day, looking drained. He tried to put on a good face, but I could tell he was shaken. The doctors' diagnosis had been grim. Titus was paralyzed. They would do what they could. Some feeling might return. But they thought not. We listened in a haze of disbelief. The words were clear, but we could not grasp them. The first full day passed in slow motion.

When the second morning dawned, we got up and did the chores, then ate a somber breakfast. No one was really hungry. As was the custom in our home, after breakfast Dad took his German Bible and read a passage out loud. We then knelt for morning prayer, which was always recited from a little black prayer book. Dad didn't use the book because he knew the prayers by heart. He got through the five-minute prayer with no trouble until the end, which closes with the Lord's Prayer. With barely a pause, he began the familiar refrain, his rich, mellow voice rising and falling in the rhythmic, comforting flow we'd heard a thousand times before: “
Unser Vater in dem Himmel, geheiligt verde Dein Name. Zu uns komme Dein Reich
.”

“Our Father Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come—”

Abruptly his voice broke, and he faltered. He struggled silently for some moments. Through the vast gulf that separated me from him at the time, and in the grip of my own shock and grief, my heart cried out for him. A tough, stoic, hard-bitten old Amish man. Broken. Hurting. In anguish before God. For his son. Fighting emotions he could not show.

He wept silently and cleared his throat. Began speaking again, then stopped. Silence. Struggle. Cleared his throat again. But then he said the words, and I have always believed from the bottom of my heart that he meant them with all of his: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The tragedy invaded every breath and corner of our lives that summer, fall, and beyond. The weeks crawled by as we absorbed the heavy truth. Titus would never walk again. After some months at the hospital, he moved to the rehab center for many more months. And then, sometime that winter, he came home. In his wheelchair.

The Amish have one of the strongest and most efficient support structures in existence. When tragedy strikes, the community rallies around and provides whatever physical and financial support is needed, as it did for us. But the system is also lacking in at least one very important aspect. It offers no real way to cope with the emotional aftereffects of tragic events, especially unexpected ones. This is not a criticism, merely an observation. It's just the way it is. Communication is sparse or nonexistent. Feelings are quashed. One is expected to accept and bear one's burdens in silence. And one does.

This stoicism comes from a mixture of faith and tradition. Underlying everything, there rests a degree of faith. The actual degree of faith depends on the individual person, of course. But on the surface, often, the structured response to tragedy is a recitation of broad generalizations, like baptismal instructions. Traditions, going way back. Traditions that will endure as long as the Amish endure.

And that's what the public sees and hears. Both the English public and the Amish public.

After the accident, I pulled back from the brink of one more rebellious explosion and continued taking instructions for baptism. We were all in shock, and it was unthinkable now for me to even consider any alternatives. There was too much to do. I was needed to stay home and take care of the farm. I wasn't that willing, really. I didn't care for farming. But there was no alternative. Anything less on my part would have been considered hugely selfish. Especially since I was already joining church. So I stayed.

And the following month, on a Sunday morning in mid-September, the day of my baptism arrived. Bishop Henry Hochstedler would officiate. That morning, in the Obrote conference, we received our final instructions and then walked back to join the congregation for the final time as nonmembers. We sat on a bench specifically for us, directly in front of the preachers' bench. Soon the preachers returned as well, and the service proceeded. After the opening sermon and Scripture reading, Bishop Henry stood and preached the standard baptismal sermon, going on for well over an hour. And as the end approached, he paused. Then he turned and addressed us. If we still felt as we had earlier that morning, we should get down on our knees.

We had reached the ultimate moment. Too late now to turn back. Not that I would have considered it, even remotely. Not now. I had forced myself to trust all those vacant promises, the cultural clichés that told me if only I joined and settled down, everything would work out. That I would never regret this choice. Of this I was assured, countless times, over and over.

It was like swimming across a raging river, fighting the silent, hungry undertow of the waters. Fighting to stay afloat. And now I had crossed more than halfway. I was approaching the distant shore. It made no sense to turn back. There was only one path open, one way to swim—forward.

We slid from our bench and knelt. Chris—the bishop's son—and I. The deacon approached, hovering off to one side, holding a small pitcher of water. The bishop stood before us and paused. All was silent. It was a holy moment. All in the congregation strained to see, to witness this event.

And then the bishop spoke. “Do you believe and affirm your belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

We repeated the refrain as we had been told to do that morning in our final class. I spoke first. Then Chris.

“Yes, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

“Will you remain steadfast to the church, whether it leads to life or to death?”

“Yes.”

And then a few more rote questions. We answered in the affirmative. “Yes.”

Bishop Henry paused again. “Before we go further, these two applicants have requested our prayers. Everyone please stand.” The congregation stood as we remained on our knees. The bishop intoned the short prayer from a little black prayer book, his voice rising and falling in an almost hypnotic flow.

Then the prayer was finished, and the congregation was seated. The bishop stepped up and cupped his hands over my head, and the deacon stepped forward, ready with his pitcher.

The bishop proceeded with practiced ease, the words rolling from his tongue, “Upon your confession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father . . .” The deacon sprinkled a few drops of water on my head. “. . . in the name of the Son . . .” Another sprinkle. “. . . and in the name of the Holy Spirit.” Final sprinkle. “Amen.” The bishop then flattened his cupped hands and wiped the water drops into my hair.

Then he stepped before his son. Repeated the refrain, while the deacon sprinkled water during the proper pauses. We were now baptized. The bishop turned back to me and extended his hand. “In the name of the Lord and the church, arise,” he said. I grasped his hand and stood. We greeted each other with the holy kiss. He did the same to his son.

We stood there, Chris and I, full members of the Old Order Amish church. Bishop Henry officially welcomed us. We were now no longer pilgrims and strangers, he proclaimed, but brothers in Christ, in the church of God. I was twenty-one years old.

I looked at him as he spoke to us. He was smiling in genuine welcome. If fragmented memories of my rough and wicked past flashed through his mind at that moment, he didn't let on. The wild and wayward son, the wanderer, had taken the long road. But now, at long last, he was home. Safely in the fold. Safely inside the box.

I'm sure his joy was genuine and sincere. As it was for my parents. Dad would never have told me, but he was relieved and truly happy that I had actually joined the church. And Mom's joy shone from her face as she smiled and smiled. I had put them through so much. But they gladly forgot the past, gladly forgave all I had done, and simply rejoiced in this moment.

I had done it. Gone all the way this time. But even as I stood and joined my brethren after the service, even then, a strange emptiness lingered inside me.

There had been no epiphany, no sudden explosion of light and awareness. Or joy. Actually, other than the stress of the ceremony, there wasn't a whole lot of anything, except a nagging feeling that somehow I had just walked through a doorway into another place, a place from which it would be impossible to return.

I felt pretty much the same as I always had these past five years. Confused. Half-scared. Trapped. Resigned. And, deep down, desperately lost.

21

After Titus's accident, he remained in critical condition at the Iowa City Hospital for several weeks. He had faced death back in that farm pond and had barely escaped. It was a close thing. Very close. Had the wind been blowing away from shore, the waters would have swept him out toward the center of the pond as he hovered, powerless to move, just below the surface. He would have died. As it was, the wind was blowing toward the shore and, thus, drifting him in. He had been under the water for close to two minutes.

After moving out of intensive care, he remained hospitalized for several months before being transferred to a rehab center in Waterloo, Iowa. And there he began the long, arduous process of learning how to live as a quadriplegic. Most quads are paralyzed from the neck down and don't even have the use of their arms. But a tiny bit of fortune smiled on Titus that terrible night. Although technically a quad, he could freely move his arms. Not his fingers—they were curled and lifeless. But he had his arms. And his brain.

Still reeling from the shock of this harsh new reality, we slogged on with our lives week to week. Dad and Mom spent a lot of days with Titus. Especially Mom. She stayed at his bedside for days on end, both at the hospital and later in rehab. Once or twice I stayed with him for a couple of days. We struggled as we spoke. It was beyond strange to see my brother, chopped at the core, felled like a maturing oak before its time, and forced to enter a new existence, a new world. It was one I could observe but never, never comprehend. We talked of life as it had been, from our memories. We flinched and hedged from speaking of life as it was and as it was to be. But ultimately, we did even that. Awkwardly, almost lightheartedly, because that was the mask Titus wore.

Although well meaning and certainly helpful, many of the Bloomfield Amish people turned into annoying pests. Eager, hungry they were, for all the latest tidbits. So they could send them on down the gossip pipeline, as interpreted by themselves. They launched an incessant barrage of simple questions, with one repeated a thousand times: “Does he have a lot of pain?”

What does one say to that? “Well, let me think. He's lying there with a metal frame screwed to his head. He can move his arms. And his head. Nothing else. What do you think? Would that be painful?” It got so we'd just mumble incoherently and turn away.

We had no medical insurance. Most Amish people don't. Titus was twenty-three and technically on his own, so Dad wouldn't have been responsible for the bills. He could have shrugged his shoulders, bemoaned his son's plight, and feigned helplessness.

But he took it upon himself to look after the bills. To accept them as his own. The decision created a lot of problems. The bills continued to mount, and there was no way Dad could pay them all. He conferred with the Bloomfield church fathers. They counseled him to accept the bills. Somehow, the church would help get them paid. The church fathers also appealed to other Amish churches in surrounding communities. But it seemed hopeless. The bills were mounting inexorably, tens of thousands of dollars.

And then a strange and wonderful thing happened. It came out of Aylmer. Old Aylmer, the place where I had been born and raised. Aylmer, still the shining city on a hill. At least publicly.

The Aylmer people were quite shocked by the news of the accident, and they were sympathetic. In the next issue of
Family Life
, preacher Elmo Stoll, Aylmer's powerful undisputed leader, wrote poignantly of our plight in his lead editorial. Briefly he wrote of Titus and of the tragedy that had struck that August night.

Titus, he concluded, would never walk again. And then Elmo smoothly switched into fund-raising mode, imploring those who had read Dad's stuff for all those years, who appreciated his efforts and his work, to send what money they could spare to help with the mounting hospital and rehab bills. It would be a chance for them to express appreciation to my father for his years of tireless labor as a defender of the Amish faith.

We read Elmo's words in that issue and marveled. The man could tug at the heartstrings, that's for sure. But would his efforts produce any assistance for us?

We didn't have to wonder long. Within days the letters started arriving and continued for days and weeks after that. And weeks after that. Stacks and stacks, as many as fifty to one hundred letters and cards in a single day. Short scrawled notes, expressing sympathy and support. Little cheerful homemade cards, sometimes roughly colored by a child's hands. And always, a bit of money. In some, as little as a dollar bill. Most others held more. Checks of fifty, a hundred dollars. A few for as much as a thousand or more.

We were astounded and grateful. Traumatized by all that had just happened, we marveled at the blessings that literally poured in. And that's how the eighty thousand dollars was paid.
Eighty thousand dollars
, the total for Titus's hospital and rehab bills.

It was remarkable, the way it all worked out. An incident like that is probably almost unique to the Amish culture. Not exclusively, but almost.

* * *

Before the accident, Titus and Ruth Yutzy, Marvin's older sister, had been planning to get married. To settle in as a Bloomfield family. And as the reality sank in for us, it sank in for Ruth, too. The man she loved, the man she planned to marry, would never walk again. Not only that, he would require a lot of care. Every day. For the rest of his life. For her, it was a brutal time, a time of testing the true measure of her love for Titus.