It was an ordinary day; no premonition of danger, no sense of something wrong. I came home from teaching around ten at night and the phone rang. My aunt was calling: your cousin has been murdered. My cousin, Joanne, an Ursuline sister, had been reported dead, an apparent homicide. There were no details. How had it happened, where? Nothing. By the time I received word, it was over. There was nothing to be done.
My cousin, Joanne Marie Mascha, two years older than I, had been a member of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland for nearly 40 years. For many of these years she taught in elementary schools around Cleveland, and for the last 15 years she lived at the Motherhouse in Pepper Pike, performing various jobs: working at the college library, performing pastoral work in neighborhood parishes, and coordinating the Motherhouse switchboard. It was this job that she had on the day of her dying, answering calls, receiving and rerouting messages at the Motherhouse.
The Ursuline Motherhouse is an institutional building, home to about 140 sisters, many of them elderly and infirm. Sisters live there who care for these sisters, or who teach at the college on the campus, or who work at neighboring parishes and schools. The Motherhouse and college are located outside of Cleveland on what 35 years ago was farmland. The sisters moved there in the mid-sixties from their old center on the site of an academy for girls in the middle of the changing city. What was then farmland gradually gave way to the expanding edge of the city, and the Motherhouse and college in the past 10 years have been surrounded by a very genteel suburb, well-to-do, spacious, expensive, safe. Very safe.
My cousin, for her years, was an innocent in the sense of being unsophisticated, guileless, trusting, uncomplicated, maybe naive. She loved nature, went bird watching, she was trusting and talked easily to people. She loved the country area where she made her home. The last time I saw her, which was at the funeral of my sister only seven months before, she invited me to come and visit: "You would love our grounds; they are so beautiful." She repeated her invitation when she wrote later at my birthday:
"This morning I delighted in the lavender colored New England asters as the sunshine magically dazzled their petals. Wildflowers and birds really turn me on! You must come to see our ground, Barb. You, too, would delight in their beauty."
It was into this area, her woods, that Joanne went to walk on March 27, 1995. She had worked all day on the switchboard; as she left she signed her name on the paper at the front desk, indicating where she would be in case she was needed. She left to go for a walk with another sister, who only accompanied her part of the way, who turned back because the early spring path was so muddy. Joanne continued alone. During her walk she met Daniel Pitcher, a 21-year-old man who rented a flat in a nearby house and did odd jobs for the elderly owners of the house. Pitcher was in a tree with a bow and arrow, stalking birds. There are no details of the encounter. Joanne never came back, never returned. She was left strangled, raped; she was left dead or dying.
In the large Motherhouse no one noticed that she had not returned. The sister who had gone out with her had left on another errand. People who thought to look for her assumed that she was visiting her sister or out for the evening. Not until the next day, when she failed to report for her job at the switchboard, was she missed.
Then people noticed that she had not signed in after her walk, that her bed had not been slept in, that no one had seen her. Her sister Margie called, and people realized she was not visiting there. After searching the large building, still unable to find her, at one o'clock they reported her missing to police. When they searched the woods, they found her there, nearly 24 hours later.
Her violent death stunned us all. Incomprehensible, like a fact too large or misshaped to fit into our minds. I felt numb, empty, as though I had entered an airless room where all movement was slowed and deliberate. I couldn't feel anything and did things by rote, with numbed hands and numbed emotion.
The hardest part was imagining: the unwitnessed death with its fear, its terror, the violation of a trusting spirit. The hardest part was knowing that she died alone, no one to be with her. When my own sister had died seven months before, we were with her. She was surrounded by friends; her best friend and I held her hands until she slipped past us, until we could hold her no longer. But Joanne was alone, for whatever length of time, she was alone and this was a deep sadness. Joanne died as one of her sisters had died, 15 years earlier and half a world away. Dorothy Kazel, also an Ursuline Sister from Cleveland, was one of the four churchwomen raped and murdered by the military in El Salvador. But Joanne was in Pepper Pike, on the grounds of the Motherhouse. Joanne had been on switchboard earlier that day.
I do not think my thoughts were coherent, or that I thought at all. I was stumbling still from my own sister's all-too-recent death. And when Joanne's funeral was held on April first, the day on which the year before we had discovered the return of my sister's cancer, I felt incapable of assisting at a public ceremony. So I stayed at home and took refuge in the quiet of my basement studio. That day and most of the next I started a little group of paintings, one after another: I painted the woods, the trees that had welcomed her, that were the only witnesses to her death. The place she loved that had been charged with danger; the woods that flattened to become a barrier that held her fast in death. The paintings were small pieces, like the small and ordinary events of that day. The sequence felt simple, one step after the next, no plan, like the walk itself. Nothing to overtly signal the dark edge, the danger, the unpredictable that lay so close to the surface of that ordinary afternoon.
For me the purposefulness was in doing them, a way of staying with Joanne. The paintings were small gestures, like the lighting of a candle at the graveside, of bringing flowers to a wake. They were a gesture of paying attention. I didn't think of showing them or sharing them; only of a seeming rightness of doing them.
The police quickly followed the tracks in the soft earth from Joanne's body to the basement apartment of Daniel Pitcher. They arrested the young man, who confessed to the slaying. Later, he plead innocent; all through the time the Ursuline community asked that he not receive the death penalty. In August he was tried and convicted and was sentenced to life in prison. The sisters held a ceremony to reconsecrate the woods, to bless and heal the place where this terrible event had taken place.
Joanne's death was a tragedy, and brought us close to the senselessness and loss of violence. Her death was small, it was near us. It took place in her own back yard, in a quiet suburb. The terrible irony of Joanne's death on the grounds of the Motherhouse, a symbol of serenity and peace, which parallels so closely the death of Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel in El Salvador, underscores our inability to predict, protect or be "safe." Her death did not assume the gaping proportions of Rwanda, or Bosnia, or Haiti, or El Salvador or any of a hundred places where violence, sanctioned or not, rips apart the fabric of life. And thus we learned again how every act of violence puts some part of the human community to death.
We stand in the end before the mystery of this violence, this death, and we are invited to look at it, to hold it. How do we stay here, a witness to the violence of our world, when we only want to turn away? How do we address this, so that people are not left to suffer alone? Perhaps art is one small way not to avert our gaze, to stand next to those affected with our small candle acknowledging and illuminating the truth of their pain and their loss, and ours. Perhaps finally all we can do is to remember and not let each other die alone.
Sister Barbara Cervenka, O.P., is a lecturer in the School of Art. [Editor's note: Since the publication of this article the School of Art has become the School of Art and Design.] Her series of paintings "The Night Joanne Died" will be on exhibit through May at the U-M Institute for the Humanities in U-M's Horace A. Rackham Building at 915 E. Washington.
. . . March 1996