Saratoga News

Columns

Trying to find the meaning in the life of a special woman who died young

By Carl Heintze

This is a story with a message, even though I don't yet understand what the message is.

It concerns a young woman whom I shall call Megan. That's not her name, but then her name, real or imagined, is not important.

I first met Megan on church business because she was an associate pastor at a San Jose church. Megan was of moderate height, with dark hair and eyes, a pleasant smile, not beautiful--at least in the conventional sense. Yet she had a kind of aura, a luminosity which was hard to describe. It had to be experienced.

It seemed to flow from her without effort and to be directed at no one in particular, but to be absorbed by almost everyone with whom she came in contact.

Just how she accomplished this also is hard to describe. Some of it was in what she said. More of it was in what she did.

It's a primary mission of the Protestant ministry to preach. Megan could do that. She was, in fact, an excellent preacher. Her voice was pleasant, her sermons were short and to the point and they usually had a point. One came away from hearing them with the sense of having acquired some knowledge in how to be a better person.

Megan also did well in that other part of the Protestant ministry that is so important, counseling those in need. By the time I came to know her, she had become beloved by many in her parish. She did not do this overtly, but rather through her actions.

Now and then I would hear about her from those she served. I did not belong to her church, but I knew enough people in her church to know they admired and loved her.

They did have one reservation about Megan. She was not married, even though she was of marriageable age. Her parishioners saw her as someone who would make an excellent wife and mother, and since marriage also is a part of the Protestant ministry, they saw no reason why this should not happen.

But although she did well in the congregation she served, Megan wanted something else. She apparently was not quite sure what.

I am not sure if it was marriage or children. Whatever it was, she resigned after a few years and became a hospital chaplain. Now and then, she still preached. Because it is traditional after leaving a church to stay away from it for a few years, she did not often visit her old parish.

She also now took steps to fill a part of her life which was empty. At the hospital Megan met and counseled a man whose wife had just died. The man had two children, both small, and they immediately took to her.

After a year or so the man suggested they marry, and Megan accepted. Her world at last seemed completely filled.

To celebrate their engagement the soon-to-be-married couple took his Jeep and drove to a national forest near Mt. Lassen on a camping expedition. Somewhere in the back country on a dirt road the Jeep overturned. The man was flung free, but the jeep rolled on Megan and killed her.

I have been haunted by this story for a long time. Megan now has been dead for at least 10 years. But she still returns to haunt me now and then. And yet after thinking about her and her life all that time, I still have no real insight into what Megan's life means. But I think it must mean something and I think there are three possibilities:

* First, her life could be meaningless. If one believes only in random, in a universe governed by nothing by chance, then Megan died simply because of a freak accident. That's one possibility.

* Second, her life could have been filled with meaning. It could be that the intensity of her love for others and her service to them had been expended and she had nothing left to give. If this is true, is there no reward for such service? Was she allowed to live for only a certain time, the time of her service to others, and then recalled for a new assignment in some other time and place?

* Third, her life was fulfilled. She had served others, she had been rewarded with as much happiness as most of us receive--the love of another, the joy of children--and there was no need for more.

She had been returned to God.

Perhaps there are other interpretations to be drawn from Megan's life. But these three seem to me to be the three principal ones. I have thought about them for the 10 or more years that have followed her death. When I do, I am always impressed with my remembrance of her person, of the luminosity she seemed to bear, that almost of a saint, though she did nothing miraculous that I could see except to live.

Perhaps my remembrance is tinged with jealousy, with the knowledge that although I have lived longer, I certainly have not lived better. I have not touched others' lives as she did. Though I may have wished I could bring solace and understanding to others, I have never done it as directly and with as little apparent effort as she did.

Not many of us are destined to be saint-like, for not many of us can or want to live, lives like Megan's: short, focused, feeling, fueled by some inner light that seems to just appear unbidden to direct such people to their goal.

Though we would like to be like Megan, instead we are something less--vain, selfish, sarcastic, even cruel--even though through people like her, we know we could be better.

And this latter, I suppose, is why Megan has remained in my memory for all these years, urging me to be more than I am, asking me to help others and to expect no reward in return.

And to write this memoir of her in an attempt to make her as imperishable.