Let me tell you of a good woman, my mother-in-law: Eva Ellen Evangeline
Smila as she was born in 1905, Mrs. John Francis Klein as marriage made her in 1928. Having suffered a stroke three weeks earlier, she died in Detroit on Friday October 9, 1998.  By the next afternoon my wife Mary and I had joined her two sisters and other relatives gathering in the eastern Detroit suburbs where she lived for over 60 years.

For six hours last Sunday people came to Verheyden's Funeral Home to pay their respects. The Daughters of the American Revolution provided flags. Mrs. Klein‚s students of silver smithing were there, as were family, friends and her associates in numerous charities and volunteer activities. After Monday's requiem mass, a houseful came to a reception by her three daughters at her beautiful home a short walk from Lake St. Clair. A gentleman representing the Michigan Mayflower Society told me how Eva had encouraged both himself and her investment advisor to take up serious genealogy and how much this had meant.

On Tuesday October 13th my mother-in-law was laid to rest beside her husband in Detroit's venerable Mt. Elliott Cemetery. The sprawling plots of the Kleins are across the street from one of Eva Klein‚s favorite charities: the Capuchin (Franciscan) Soup Kitchen. The Vatican has recently officially
acknowledged the heroic sanctity one of that monastery‚s humblest priests,
Father Solanus Casey. Only one grandchild could not be with us: Miss Kim
Varzi, who had just begun her second year as a Peace Corps Volunteer deep in the bush of West Africa. Eva had asked to be cremated and her ashes now await the resurrection enclosed by a softly rounded blue ceramic vase crafted by Kim's hands.

As I write, the three sisters are near at hand inventorying possessions and
carrying out their mother‚s will. Charlotte, Johanna and Mary, are close,
fast friends. They work well together. Their mother invited me to choose
what I wanted from her library. In particular I have received all her
writings and voluminous, precisely prepared records about the history of her
family. This represents 70 years of intermittent research of a high
scholarly order. I have also been sorting albums and enjoying photos and
journals of my future father-in-law, the young, dashing Lieutenant John
Francis Klein, who, in France during World War I, led even younger men of
the Yankee Division up out of the trenches to victory in three major battles.

What providence, I ask myself, moved those two lovers, John Klein and Eva
Smila, to find each other and make together a happy, creative future? Born
in Northern Ohio in 1905, Eva Smila grew up in the small town of Clyde, made famous in the novel WINESBURG, OHIO. Young Eva once walked over to the Clyde train station to hear an address by President William Howard Taft. He handed the wide-eyed little girl a letter to post for him and 25 cents for her trouble. After years of training, she came to Detroit to live with her brother to pursue a professional career as a cellist. But romance intervened and her civil engineer husband did not permit her to work for gain. So Eva Smila Klein threw herself into charities, genealogy, silver smithing, collecting beautiful objects, canny investing and raising her daughters.

In August 1998 Mary and I drove Eva for her last visit to our home east of
Asheville. Her health had declined but she was receiving good medical
attention and her doctor was not alarmed. She enjoyed the view of the Great Craggy Mountains to the north, our drives in the countryside and visits with friends.

Among the books which my mother-in-law left me is an old favorite, Thornton Wilder's 1928 short novel, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. I have just reread this probing of the question: why does God bring certain people together at a certain time and for a certain event? In the novel the event is death. 

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.

In the novel, a Franciscan monk from Northern Italy, Brother Juniper, did a five year study  to understand why God allowed precisely those five to fall
together from that woven suspension bridge high in the Andes. They were the Marquesa de Montemayor, the Marquesa's orphaned serving girl, being groomed to succeed the no nonsense abbess of a Lima convent and Esteban, a young scribe, grieving for his recently dead twin. Also travelling down to Lima on the bridge that day were the young bastard son of the Viceroy and of the Spanish New World's greatest actress. Uncle Pio, her mentor, was on the bridge that day escorting her son from the high mountains to Lima.

Father Juniper published his findings. He and his book were then judged
heretical and both were burned. Author Thornton Wilder sketches unexpected good things which sprang up after the deaths of the five who fell from the Bridge of San Luis Rey. At the end of his tale Wilder presents the formidable Abbess Dona Clara musing as follows:
 

Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.

Eva Ellen Evangeline Smila Klein: 1905 - 1998, may she rest in peace. She
loved and was loved. It is enough. I imagine Eva and her handsome husband now young again and golfing together after 24 years apart. May friendly angels invite Eva to bring along her cello to their concerts. By now she might even have made a call on Heaven's Genealogist-in-Chief to clarify certain fine points of the Messiah's lineage.

The bridge is love. Love is the bridge.

-OOO-

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