I feel like I shouldn’t be writing this yet, or that I should let Lloyd write this, since he would do it justice. But, I’m just going to forge ahead.
Last week we lost a great lady. Our choir director’s wife, Ruth Martens, passed away. We (Deborah, Lloyd and I) had just gone to see them last Saturday. (Thank you, Deborah.) ‘Mom’ Martens, as we called her, had been battling Alzheimer’s for quite a while, but she looked beautiful and it was a wonderful visit.
That Thursday she suddenly passed away at home.
We called the Martens ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ because they were like parents to a bunch of knuckleheaded college students that didn’t know their heads from their arses, but yet somehow sounded nice when they sang together. A Capella alumns have said it so well.
From Todd:
They opened their home to all these crazy college students. They dared to get mad at us, force us to think about the consequences of our actions, and to actually care about what we proclaimed through word and song. In many respects, there is a generation of church leaders who were shaped by them, both in the states and in Europe.
Today we had her funeral. Lloyd was a pallbearer. Several A Capella alumns had notified each other through Facebook they they would be attending, and wondered if we could sing, but Dad Martens had already told the pastor “There will be no choir”. The congregation sang four hymns during the service and we (I) managed to make it through without collapsing into tears.
At the luncheon, it was great to see faces from all over the country – so many people who wanted to say farewell to this woman they loved and show support to Dad. Many of us wore our A Capella crosses. (You can see mine on the far right, tangled in that mess of jewelry I don’t wear. Thank you, Deborah, for reminding me to get it out the night before.) We asked the family if we could approach Dad and ask him if we could sing. Thankfully he said he had hoped we would ask.
So, 30-ish adults who had all been out of college for multiple decades gathered at one end of the fellowship hall and – cold – belted out ‘Despair Not, My Soul’ from memory, all trying to make Dad proud by not crying. It was a glorious, sad and powerful moment. All of us, joined by the music that lives in our bones all these years later, by the faith we share, and by the love we have for these people. It wasn’t our best singing, but it was our best singing.