A Love Too Much

Alyce Klimek, 18 years old

Before the mother is a mother she is the one her child will never know. Here she is before Mary Jane existed, in 1929, before the tuberculosis, before marriage, before even falling in love. How completely happy she looks, leaning against that paper birch on the river's edge in front of her parents' resort, Klimek's Lodge. Where did she get those pants she's wearing? I'll bet they belonged to her brother, Peter. How daring of her in that "flapper" era. Shouldn't she be wearing long beads and dancing the Charleston? This could be today if the pants weren't cut all wrong. This was early summer of the year she graduated high school in Baudette, Minnesota. She told Mary Jane the story of two girl friends and herself, all of them in those daring pants, celebrating what still was quite extraordinary for girls in little towns back then. Her sister, Eva, only four years older, didn't have that chance. School ended for her after sixth grade when she began to work alongside her mother running hotels, first in Osakis and then in Baudette, and finally the resort on Four Mile Bay where the Rainy River flows into Lake of the Woods.

I just can't help it: I love that girl. There's something in her here I can't remember being there forever afterwards. In two years she will have coughed up blood and written in her small brown leather diary, Please God, don't let it be TB. But it was TB. By then she loved George Lore. She could have lost him. He wrote to her every single day for the nine months she fought the disease. The day she said goodbye, though, she had to let him go because, clearly, she could die.

George and Alyce 1931

Mary Jane grew up with the stories of that hospital stay: the younger woman in the next bed who died one night while Alyce listened to her gasps for breath, the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux who battled the same disease, not with the "rest cure" but with her faith in God, the weekly pneumothorax treatment which utilized a gigantic needle for the collapsing of her lung, the time George and her brother Peter buzzed the hospital in Pete's Travel Air plane, and she broke all the rules about lying flat in bed to stand in the big window--a red-pajama-wearing girl waving and wanting to be seen.

Alyce at the Sanatorium 1932

Daring turned
into courage early in her life.

If not for this courage, Mary Jane might never have been born at all. She wasn't strong, this mother of hers. She went through life with one lobe of her lungs permanently collapsed. And Dr. Mary at the "San" strictly forbade the bearing of children.

Years later she would write, in what could only be called a prayer, about that daughter who was born anyway, Mary Jane, the forbidden one. It was the eve of the day I believed I would cease being Mary Jane forever and became Sister Mary Christopher of the Catholic religious congregation of St. Joseph:

Tomorrow, August, 1966, the eighth day, is to be her greatest -- the gift of herself--not to a mere man--but to God--the Supreme Ruler of all, of everything, everywhere. ... My Lord has done great things to me! (Now is the time I can tell her -- with tears of remembrance in my eyes -- she was conceived in a great love on Valentine's Day -- and little did I know then that it was really God's love and for this purpose I was made to live...On that day which glorifies LOVE, God created his child of love to be His Very Own and on this day, August 8th, 1966, I (we) give her back to him with all our heart and love.)

Cherish her, Dear Lord, and show her the way -- without doubts at any time -- but with a constantly growing love for You....but please share her on occasion with her Mother and Father.

The question never was of love, unless it was of a love too much--love that risked death and loss and hands still reaching out to touch even when the possibility of touch exists no more.