A Song I Can’t Sing

The other evening I was on the phone with my brother’s wife and she said, “Oh, Debra. The children and I have been working on a piece we can play together – let me see if you can hear it if we lay the phone down and play it for you.” There was the usual scratching and tuning and giggling and then the song began.

I strained to hear and then I recognized it: Number 7 in the Church Hymnal, the song I can never sing, can barely stand to hear – “I’ll Praise My Maker.” I sobbed during the telephone performance and then told LuAnn, my baby brother’s wife, a story she had never heard, a story that happened before my brother was born. It's the story I call "The Year of Funerals" and it happened during the 11th year of my life. My baby sister, Holly Ann, died in December, 1959; my Grandpa Bender in June, 1960; my cousin, Sherrill, in October, 1960 and my Grandma Bender in February, 1961. But it’s Sherrill’s funeral that I’ll never forget. That’s when The Song was sung.

In the early 1950’s my two oldest cousins, Sandra and Sherrill, daughters of my mother’s two older sisters, were both stricken with polio. I don’t know how severely Sandra was affected, although I remember her walking with a limp. Sherrill spent several months in an iron lung in the hospital, but she survived and came home and made her way around in a wheel chair. Anyone who experienced that period of time will never forget the fear. No one knew what caused polio or what should be done to protect children. I remember summers when even drinking water was suspect and swimming was out of the question. Although I was only 5 or 6, I remember. I remember the relief everyone felt when we lined up to get those sugar cubes with the magic vaccine.

Our family never forgot, because we were reminded every time we saw Sherrill in her wheelchair or watched Sandra limping toward us. But, life went on. We lived closer to Sherrill’s family – my Aunt Opal, Uncle Wilbur and Sherrill’s sister, Joyce – so I knew her story better. Sherrill graduated from the high school in Kalona, I believe, unable to attend IMS because of stairs which she could not navigate. I remember her being very bright, hardworking and determined to succeed despite her handicaps. She decided she wanted to go to Hesston College, a Mennonite junior college in Kansas, several hundred miles from her Iowa home. I remember my Aunt Opal saying, “Absolutely not. You cannot go to Kansas, so far from home.” But Sherrill begged and pleaded and got herself admitted. Aunt Opal finally caved and Sherrill went to Hesston, in August, 1960.

I’ll never forget the awful telephone call two months later. I can see Mom, to this day, clutching the phone and screaming, “Oh, no! What happened?” Sherrill had only been in Hesston a short time, had become exhausted and died, apparently from heart failure, just days short of her 18th birthday.

The funeral was at a large Mennonite church in Iowa on a hot Indian summer October afternoon. I remember hundreds of people, no air conditioning, sobbing relatives, my devastated grandparents, my cousin, Joyce, trying hard to hold up her 12-year-old chin, and a church so hot and packed and stifling I thought I’d die. I remember an octet singing “I’ll Praise My Maker,” a song picked by Aunt Opal because of its references to breath and Sherrill’s polio experience. It’s a beautiful song, but I can’t stand to hear it and I have never been able to sing it. And almost 50 years later, it still makes me cry.