FORT SMITH - The joy of the Easter season was shattered for the nuns of St. Scholastica Monastery as three of their fellow sisters died during a three-day period early last month.
As the religious community has aged, the sisters have had to say goodbye to many of their friends in recent years. The Benedictine monastery, located on 66 sheltered acres in the middle of Fort Smith, is home to 52 nuns. Eighteen of the sisters are over the age of 80 and 13 are 90 or older. Some, hampered by illness or the debilities of advanced age, live in the third-floor infirmary, while others tend to the daily ministry and mission of the monastery.
The deaths of sisters Frances Anne, Gabriel and Irma, so close together, were devastating to the close-knit community. But as they have in the past, the sisters relied on their Catholic faith and rituals for the dead to cope with the loss.
Sister Frances Anne Braddock, 94, died April 3. She was a latecomer to the monastery, joining at the age of 66 as a widow. She had been ailing and her five daughters knew she was fading. They had visited the day before she died. Her close friend, Sister Gabriel Brandt, 84, was with her when she passed away.
Sister Gabriel’s unexpected death the next day was a blow to the community.
Unlike Sister Frances Ann, who was in the infirmary, Sister Gabriel was very active. She helped out in the infirmary and also with the monastery’s mail. She had been at the monastery since 1958.
“It’s different when they are getting older and ailing … you expect them to be going to God soon,” said Sister Rachel Dietz. “But when someone like Gabriel goes it’s so shocking. I still expect to see her around.”
Dietz, a licensed social worker and counselor, said that when she went to drop off an item for the mail, Sister Gabriel’s empty desk brought home the stark reality.
“It was like a cold chill,” she said.
Sister Irma Twenter, who had recently celebrated her 101st birthday and visited with family, died April 5.
As Benedictines, the sisters follow the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth-century monk who advised religious sisters and brothers to “keep death daily before your eyes.”
“I think a sudden death brings us back to that quote,” said Sister Macrina Wiederkehr. “That doesn’t mean in a morbid way, just the whole fragility of life, which certainly shows its face when we have a sudden death.”
Sister Elise Forst said one of the ways the sisters deal with death is through ritual. It begins with saying prayers for the dying like they did with Frances Anne as her body began to fail.
“We gather as many sisters as we can and we come in the room and say prayers and sing the Suscipe [a prayer either sung or chanted, often in Latin],” Forst said.
KEEPING VIGIL
If the sister is close to death, one or two of the nuns will stay with her and others will stop in to speak to her. It’s a vigil, of sorts.
After the death, two sisters go to the funeral home to dress the deceased. Forst said most of the sisters in the infirmary have already set aside their funeral clothes.
Next comes the “Meeting of the Body,” usually the night before the funeral. The casket is taken to the second floor rotunda on the south entrance of the monastery - the same doors new members enter when joining the community. It’s a place of welcome and farewell.
“We gather there and we have a ritual we’ve been using for a long time,” Forst said.
The sisters place a pall or funeral cloth over the casket, as well as a green wreath symbolizing eternal life and a copy of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict. A prayer is said as each item is placed on the casket. They then light the paschal candle before processing to the chapel for the vespers for the dead. The vespers service is a bit different at the monastery because it includes a “litany of thanksgiving,” in which the sisters, as well as family and friends, are welcome to tell why they were grateful for the life of departed.
Also during the service, the profession of faith the sister made when entering the community is placed upon the altar.
Following vespers the group gathers in the dining room for refreshments and to share memories of the deceased. Sister Maria DeAngeli, prioress of the community, starts by giving an overview of the sister’s life and then anyone who wishes to share a memory can do so. Those who speak are recorded and a copy of the recording is given to the family.
“It’s always a really touching time,” Forst said. “And we all learn something, especially the impact the person had on different people’s lives.”
That was particularly true when memories were shared about Sister Gabriel, Dietz said. She didn’t have any immediate family and those still living were not able to attend the funeral. But at least half the chapel, and the dining room, were filled with friends and acquaintances.
“People from all over town that we had no idea she knew were there,” Dietz said.
Forst said Sister Gabriel had a knack for making friends everywhere she went, even during her trips to the post office.
“There’s a note on the bulletin board now from someone who said how much they missed seeing her there,” Forst said. “It was like that was her family - the family she had always longed for.”
The morning after the sharing of memories, the community gathers for the funeral and the Mass of Resurrection. A priest leads the service. Despite the loss, Forst said, funerals at the monastery aren’t sad occasions. They are a time of remembrance touched with joy in knowing their friend is with God, she said.
The sisters, family and friends join in procession out the south entrance through the rotunda and down the walkway to the monastery’s cemetery.
The cemetery has graves dating to about 1940, Forst said. Until that time the sisters would be buried on the original site of the monastery at Shoal Creek. When the sisters started burying their dead at the Fort Smith monastery they included a plaque bearing the names of all those buried at the old site. The only gravestone not engraved with the name of one of the monastery’s nuns is that of the Rev. Joseph Milan, a priest who served as the monastery’s chaplain for 47 years.
SAYING FAREWELL
As they walk to the cemetery on a grassy slope on the monastery grounds the nuns sing “In Paradisum,” - “To Paradise now may the angels bring you, and may the martyrs now come to meet you on your way, and may you be led into the holy city Jerusalem. All the choirs of angels make you welcome there, and with Lazarus once so ill and poor, may peaceful joy be now forever yours.”
At the end of the service, DeAngeli, as prioress leads the rite of committal, the prayers said before burial. The crowd then gathers for a meal in the dining hall.
The sisters said these rituals help them cope with grief.
“Our society doesn’t provide many rituals for grieving,” Dietz said. “They expect you to get it done and get back to work. Grieving is something you don’t want to do because you don’t want to admit they are gone or you don’t want to make other people feel sad, when actually that’s what they need to feel.
“They need to feel all the feelings - probably a little anger.”
Wiederkehr said it’s easy to get lost in daily life and not take the time to really grieve, to push the feelings to the back of the mind to deal with in the future. As an author, she said she tried to deal with her grief at the loss of the three sisters by writing on her blog.
“I did that for all the grieving I haven’t done for other people,” she said. “No matter who it is, I think death calls significant questions out of us if we can take the time.”
With a busy April schedule, Forst said, the sisters had little time to grieve in the days following the deaths.
“We were just meeting the next deadline,” she said. “I know that first day or two after Sister Gabriel died I just couldn’t focus on anything. I couldn’t get my mind wrapped around it. I probably would have been better off sitting down and reflecting instead.”
Dietz said not taking time to grieve can have consequences later.
“It haunts us if we don’t take the time,” she said. “Then you pick it up again later in another situation and realize the grieving is disproportionate to the relationship, when you are really grieving for someone else.”
As Wiederkehr worked through her grief in writing, she recalled memories of Sister Gabriel and lamented they had never shared tea at a local restaurant as they planned.
“We were always going to get together for tea,” Wiederkehr said. “Before she died she said to me, ‘You know, I guess we’re going to have to wait for this tea until the kingdom,’ so I resolved that one of these days I’m going to be down there in the cemetery with a quilt on her grave and there’s going to be two cups of tea.”
The lesson, she said, is to set aside the busyness of every day life and live in the present and not put work first. The same is true for grieving.
“We can be good with community rituals but the busyness is what keeps us sometimes from grieving personally,” Wiederkehr said.
Even as the community grieves for the loss of sisters Frances Anne, Gabriel and Irma, they are welcoming newcomers to the monastery. Two postulants will be joining the community as novices next month, said Maryanne Meyerriecks, communications director.
“We do have some new life,” she said.
Religion, Pages 14 on 05/25/2013