The Widow at Shandia

“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”

— Psalm 68:5, KJV

The Waiting

On the evening of Sunday 8 January 1956 the silence from Palm Beach could still be explained. Radios failed in the forest, batteries ran down, men forgot the time. By Monday morning it could not. Johnny Keenan, the other Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot in Ecuador, flew out over the Curaray and found the little yellow plane on the sandbar with its fabric stripped away. There was no sign of the men. The news went out on the missionary radio network, and the wives gathered at Shell Mera to wait.

The days that followed have been told many times, by Elisabeth among others, and the details need not be repeated at length here. A ground party set out overland towards the Curaray, led by Frank Drown, a missionary colleague of Roger Youderian’s, with other missionaries, Quichua men and Ecuadorian soldiers. The United States military sent aircraft and helicopters from the Panama Canal Zone to help. As the week went on, the bodies of four of the men were found in the river near the beach and identified, by their watches, wedding rings and other belongings. A fifth body, almost certainly Ed McCully’s, had been seen and examined earlier by a party of Quichua further downstream, but it could not afterwards be recovered. Late in the week the search party buried the four men together in a single grave at the edge of the beach, below the house in the tree, in the middle of a violent rainstorm, and then withdrew in haste, afraid of being attacked themselves.

The wives stayed at Shell Mera through it all. They cooked for the searchers, listened to the radio, looked after their children and waited for confirmation of what most of them already believed. When it came, the reports of those who were present agree that they received it with a composure that astonished the outsiders. Among those outsiders was the photographer Cornell Capa, who had flown in on assignment for Life magazine and who went out with the search party. His photographs, published later that month, showed the world the five widows and their children, and made their faces famous.

What Composure Meant

It is important to be careful here. The widows’ calm was real, and it came from a real faith. But it was later turned into something it was not: a picture of women who did not grieve, or who grieved less than others because they believed more. Elisabeth spent much of her later life correcting that impression. She did grieve, deeply and for a long time. She knew loneliness, exhaustion and fear. She had questions that were not answered. What she did not do was conclude that God had failed or abandoned her, and in that sense her calm was not an absence of grief but a decision about where to take it.

She was twenty-nine. Valerie was ten months old. Elisabeth had been married to Jim for a little over two years, and it was eight years since the winter at Wheaton when they had begun to study Greek together. She had no husband, no settled income beyond what friends and churches at home chose to send, and no obligation to stay in Ecuador. Most people expected her to go home.

Back to Shandia

She went back to Shandia. Before long she had returned, with Valerie, to the house Jim had built, and taken up the Quichua work that he had left. She did not see this as a heroic gesture. As she explained it, the work was there, the people were there, the language was one she could speak, and there was no one else to do it. The small church at Shandia, the schoolboys who had become young believers, the families in the surrounding settlements, all still needed teaching. It seemed to her simply the obvious next thing.

That phrase was to become her watchword. Years later she would often quote an anonymous old poem, its spelling as quaint as its date, whose refrain was “Doe the nexte thynge.” It counselled a troubled soul not to look too far ahead, but to take up the duty immediately in front of it and to leave the rest to God. Her return to Shandia was the thing it described. She did not have to solve the meaning of Jim’s death before going back to work. She had only to do what was in front of her.

The other widows made their own choices, and Elisabeth never suggested that hers was the only faithful one. Olive Fleming, who had been married less than two years and had no children, returned to the United States. Marilou McCully, who was expecting her third child, went home to the United States for the birth, and later returned to work in Quito. Marj Saint moved to Quito and stayed in Ecuador for some years. Barbara Youderian remained for a time among the Shuar in the south-east, carrying on the work she and Roger had shared. Each of them had to rebuild a life, and each did it differently.

A House With a Gap in It

Life at Shandia without Jim was harder than anything Elisabeth had known. She now carried the whole of the station’s work: the teaching, the medical care, the language, the correspondence, the household and a baby. She had the help of the Quichua believers, some of whom took on more responsibility in the church, and of colleagues on the other stations. Nate’s replacement pilots kept the supplies coming. But the house had a gap in it, and the evenings were long. Valerie gave her both a reason to keep going and a daily reminder of what had been lost. The child learned to walk and to talk in the house her father had built, watched over by a mother who now had to be everything to her, and surrounded by Quichua neighbours for whom a fatherless child was nothing unusual.

She also had something new to deal with. The story of the five men had gone round the world, and letters began to arrive at Shandia in great numbers from strangers who had been moved by it. Many of them wrote to say that they had given their lives to God, or to missionary work, because of what they had read. Others asked questions she could not answer. She replied to as many as she could. And she was asked, almost at once, to write the story herself.

The verse at the head of this chapter is from Psalm 68. God, says the psalmist, is a father to the fatherless and a judge, a defender, of widows. It is a promise she clung to in those months, and she would later say, often and plainly, that she had found it true. She was never sentimental about widowhood. She knew it was a loss and not a calling, and she would know it twice. But she found that God kept his word, not by removing the loss, but by being present in it, day after day, at Shandia, while she did the next thing.