Mom's Life Sketch

August 14, 2018

Mom's Life Sketch

Photo by Larry Bartel

It has been a busy time.

Mom's life here has ended, and we have celebrated it.

It was a good celebration.

Grandchildren played in the prelude and did the special music, which was wonderful since one thing she loved during her life was enjoying the music talents of the grandchildren. The rest of the music was played by a friend of Mom's who also played at Dad's funeral. Mom has loved her music since the first time she heard her play.

Grandchildren also read the scripture, and the sermon was given by our pastor, who also happens to be our distant cousin.

Many relatives and friends attended and stayed for the meal afterwards, greeting us with hugs and stories.

We are grateful to have spent that time with so many of you who loved her well.

Thank you.

Photo by Larry Bartel

For those of you who knew her and were not able to attend, I wanted to add here the things we read at the memorial.

Of course, you can't describe a person adequately with words, and every day I think of more things that could have been added. But she is more than words, and so, this is what we have.

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Mom was born on June 10, 1935, the day after her mother’s twenty-fourth birthday. Her parents, Adolf and Elizabeth Schmidt lived near Hillsboro, Kansas. They already had one son, Marvin, before Elizabeth Fern was born. Elizabeth was named for her mother and grandmothers, and promptly called Betty, so as not to be confused with her mother. LaWanda, Lola, Dorothy, and Bob joined the family before it was complete.

Mom grew up attending the Brudertal Mennonite Church near Hillsboro and was baptized there upon her confession of faith. She graduated from Hillsboro High School, but before that, she attended a wedding in Canada where she met a young man named Laurence Bartel. Mom, who was shy, and Dad, who was not, noticed each other and spent some time together during the days surrounding that wedding. They left with enough of a relationship to warrant letter writing and visits. By the time Mom graduated from high school, she and Dad were engaged.

During the summer before their wedding at the Brudertal church, Betty chose to do service at the Mennonite Youth Farm in Rosthern, Saskatchewan. This gave her a chance to combine service with getting to know this family she would be marrying into.

November 7, 1953, was Mom and Dad’s wedding day. On that morning there was snow on the ground. Grandma Schmidt woke to find the frosting on her daughter’s wedding cake had melted a bit and slid off the cake. Grandpa was dispatched to town to buy more ingredients for another batch of frosting, which Grandma promptly made. The cake was saved, the snow was enjoyed, and the wedding came off without any other hitches.

Mom's family at the wedding

Dad's family at the wedding

After their wedding, Mom and Dad moved to the Drake, Saskatchewan area in hopes of becoming farmers. Mom was eighteen and Dad was twenty-two. Their first home was a one room house with no insulation and no indoor plumbing. There was a small wood stove in the middle of the house, but it was too small for a fire that would last all night. By morning, the water in the kettle on the stove would be frozen. Items that needed to remain cold were placed on the stairway to the cellar, and sometimes rats ate their leftovers. It is hard for us to imagine Mom being able to tolerate this living situation, but she was made of strong stuff.

Due to a misunderstanding in the farming agreement between Laurence and the farmer he worked for, Dad and Mom realized that their hope of farming would not work out. They moved into Drake for a short while before moving back to Kansas because Mom was so homesick. Even though their time living in Canada was short, Mom had formed strong and lasting relationships, with handwritten Christmas letters still arriving from Drake this last Christmas.

First Mennonite Church became their church home, initially because it was the closest Mennonite church to their apartment across from Bethel Deaconess Hospital. They grew to love this church and its people, and formed strong relationships, particularly with their Sunday School class, the Christian Co-workers, and with the families of the men’s quartet Dad sang with, which later also became a mixed octet, adding the women’s voices, and singing in church and at other events. Mom filled many roles at the church over the years, preferring to be in the background rather than up front.

Several traits mark our mother’s life. She had a commitment to tending relationships, and though she wasn’t a social butterfly, she loved people deeply and well. She worked hard with high standards at whatever she did. She loved being of service to others, especially if she could be out of the limelight while she served. She was committed to her faith and her church. And she shared those priorities with Dad, so that their lives together were marked by both work together and separately to care for their family and to offer service to others wherever they could.

Mom was a very hard worker. One of the most difficult things for her about the years after Dad’s death was her loss of abilities to do the kind of work that made her feel good. During her years of raising a family she worked full time and still found time to sew her own clothing as well as the clothes for Annette and Bev. She ran an organized and clean household, made delicious meals, and with Dad raised a garden that provided most of the vegetables the family ate. Together they also picked and processed those vegetables. Most years there were enough green beans that it made sense to wash them in the washing machine, and some years we froze more than one hundred pounds of sweet corn. We kids joined in as we got old enough. Sitting around the table cutting green beans or corn was an every summer event.

She and Dad expected us to learn to work as well. Annette and Bev were told long before their junior high years that Saturday morning cartoons were fine for little kids, but they were old enough to help with the Saturday work. Mom was good at making clear expectations, lining out for us what the kitchen would look like when the dishes were done, and how we would know when we were finished dusting the living room. We rotated our lists of Saturday chores, so no one would have to fold the underwear two weeks in a row.

Larry and Randy remember, though not always fondly, getting up on wintery Saturday mornings to cut wood with Dad and occasionally Grandpa Schmidt. The boys had an easier road when it came to housework, but pitched in with yard work, especially mowing and gardening, but also planting and watering trees with water pumped from the creek that ran through the yard.

From the time Annette was six months old, Mom worked at Hesston Corporation, now Agco, as an administrative assistant. This suited her personality well, being able to make a real contribution while staying in the background. At one point in her working life, Hesston experimented with having a secretarial pool, and Mom was asked to supervise. She agreed to do that, even though she was nervous about whether she could do it well. That was a growing and stretching experience for her. Being a supervisor was outside her comfort zone, and it did not become easier as she learned her responsibilities. During that era she spent hours after supper every night working with record keeping and job assignments for the coming day. She was grateful when the experiment was abandoned.

It is challenging to work that hard and still prioritize relationships, but Mom managed to figure it out. Two intentional family practices were her strategy.

The first was family meal time. The evening meal, as much as possible, was when we sat down all at the same time to eat together. Mom was a good listener and we would naturally talk about our day’s events during that meal. Dishes were rarely cleared until the conversation had dried up, allowing us to discuss our lives, and to hear and be heard. As we grew up and left home, that practice continued with the table being the place where we shared our lives most deeply. We’d come together for holidays or other family events and sit and talk around the table for hours, clearing only after conversation waned and games or other activities commenced.

Gathered around the table at a weekend retreat to celebrate Mom and Dad's anniversary

another pic from the same retreat

The second practice was less obvious but equally effective. Mom had enough work to do that she had to work into the evenings most days. But she instinctively knew that by being in the same room, she would be able to be present with us. She would set up her sewing or ironing or whatever task she had so that it happened where we were, usually in the family room. This practice extended to the times when one of us was went out for the evening. Mom wanted to be awake when we returned home, just in case we wanted to talk about the evening, so she would often find tasks to do to keep her busy until we returned. She didn’t pry, but she did listen well if we felt like talking. And whatever we told her stayed with her.

Mom and Dad did not do a lot of date nights, but their relationship included many forms of working together with a common goal. In addition to gardening, they built their home in rural Hesston, doing as much of the labor as possible themselves. Bev and Annette remember helping care for Larry, who was still quite small, while Mom and Dad worked late into the evening. We would make pallets out of blankets and fall asleep to the sounds of their hammers.

They also loved working together at church, as well as other volunteer opportunities. They never missed a church work day. In 1975, when Dad received a three month sabbatical from his job, they spent half of that time taking the whole family to work together doing housing repair with the Voluntary Service unit in Wichita. Bev and Annette helped with the scraping and painting and clean up and Larry and Randy played in shady spots in the yards of the homes where we worked.

They did MDS service trips as well. They were gone at the time their first grandchild was born and shared their excitement with their coworkers in tornado clean-up about Laura Elizabeth’s birth, and about her name being a combination of their names. They joined an intergenerational work trip along with their grandchildren when the youth group invited adults from the church to join them on their mission trip. Both of them were quick to help with clean up from the Hesston tornado.

In later life, after both of them had retired, they continuously did service together locally, making regular and frequent visits to the Salvation Army to organize pantry shelves, pick up donated day old foods from the grocery stores, and do whatever needed to be done. Mom also picked up work from MCC, helping with taping pencils for school kits or picking up stacks of school kit bags so she could work with her good friend, Eva Mae Andres, lacing the drawstrings through the casings at the top of each bag. When Mom had to stop driving, Annette picked up fabric from MCC for Mom to iron in preparation for cutting squares for comforter tops.

All her grandchildren know of her warm and loving care. In addition, we all have memories of delicious meals with multiple side dishes. We frequently had to remind her to please sit down, stop serving, and enjoy eating with us. We had verenike with ham gravy, sausage, fried potatoes, cherry moos, zweibach, salads and sweet corn at Christmas. Anytime she babysat the grandchildren, the menu was mac’n’cheese, hot dogs, and peas. Other favorite foods Mom made are ham and green bean soup, borscht, shepherd’s pie, salmon patties, roast beef sandwich spread for roadside meals on vacation, rice pudding, and impromptu hot dog roasts with homemade ice cream for dessert. Mom and Dad’s tastes ran toward the traditional types of foods, but they were open to new flavors as we kids brought home new ideas. Tacos and pizza are two of the menus that worked their way into the rotation.

As our Grandma Schmidt aged, especially after the death of Grandpa, Mom’s commitment to relationship, to presence, and to service moved her toward increasingly intensive care of her mother in the years of her failing health and escalating need for help.

Four generations: Mom, Becca and I in the back; Grandma Schmidt, Luke, and Laura in front

After Dad’s death in 2014, Mom’s loneliness was intense. She has good friends and family members who have walked with her during that time. For quite a while there were Monday mornings with her sisters, and there have consistently been once a month sibling breakfasts. There were also the Sunday noon restaurant dates with her friends from church, and once a month Friday meals with a group of good friends. Mom so enjoyed those times with her peers, where she could be herself, and we are grateful for your care for her. She was welcomed at the Villa also by very good lifelong friends, and we are grateful for their love, and sorry for their loss as her stay there was so brief. Mom continued her attention to relationship and to service even into her last days.

When serving others tangibly became less and less possible, that spirit of caring for others was still there, even in her last days. As nurses and aides would come tend to her needs in the middle of the night, she would worry about whether they were getting enough rest, and ask them when they would be able to sleep.

During her final 2 weeks, with Fritz

She always told us she was not a social person. Maybe she wasn’t. But she was definitely a people person, desiring real connection with others on a one-to-one level. This loving care and gentle presence in our lives is part of what we will miss deeply. Mom loved well, and was well loved.

A couple of months ago, our family was told that Mom was likely in her final months. The time has gone more quickly than we thought it would. We were able to be nearly continuously with her during the last week and a half of her life, when it had become clear that she would leave us sooner, rather than later. She was able to talk with us and enjoy us until the last two days. She passed away quietly in the morning on Wednesday, August 8. We are grateful for her life.

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I'm adding a few more pics, just because I want to. These are in mostly chronological order.