Marion Bartscherer has been through the wringer in her long life. The 102-year-old resident at The Gardens at St. Elizabeth has seen her fair share of suffering, pain and grief. Yet, the longest-reading patron of the nearly 125-year-old Denver Catholic has kept her sense of humor, her smile and her faith through it all.
Even before Marion was born, the Bartscherer family grieved the loss of her brother, Leon. So profoundly was her mother affected by the loss that she fell seriously ill only two months after Marion was born in 1923. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Marion’s mother was sent from Bristol, South Dakota, to a sanitorium in Denver.
“Being older, I know it must have been a very difficult thing for a mother to give up a baby like that,” Marion said.
For the next several years, Marion lived with her aunt and uncle in South Dakota, whom she credits for instilling in her a deep faith.
But when she was 10, Marion was sent to live with her mother again, a move that pulled her away from the family she knew and loved and situated her in difficult, even abusive, circumstances.
She persevered, and years later, on one fateful Holy Thursday, she would meet her future husband, Jacob Gerard, who went by Jerry, at a dance. Given the day’s solemnity, she wasn’t supposed to be at the dance — and Jerry was almost sent off to military flight training in another state. As if by divine coincidence, the two met and fell in love over a Coke, neglecting the dance floor in favor of quality time together. They were quickly married and began a family soon thereafter.
Jerry would be deployed to the Pacific during World War II, serving in B-29 bombers in the war’s eastern campaigns. Deeply worried for her husband, Marion often found herself in prayer. A daily Mass-goer, she would pray constantly, especially while her husband was deployed. Though she isn’t sure of the exact timing of things, she is absolutely convinced that her prayers saved her husband in the war on more than one occasion.
Sustained by her faith through the war and the years that followed as she and Jerry formed their family, Marion would lean on God all the more heavily when her 32-year-old son, John, passed away from cancer.
A few years later, she and her family would discover that Jerry was a genetic carrier of myotonic dystrophy, a form of muscular dystrophy that involves an expanded repeat in the DNA. The disease would be passed down to her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to varying degrees of severity. It would later claim Jerry’s life and has been the source of decades of suffering for her loved ones.
Today, at 102 years old, Marion continues to grieve the loss of three of her six children and her husband. At times, she wonders why God took them so early and why he left her here on Earth.
But despite and because of it all, Marion is grateful for her faith and for God’s presence in her life.
“He’s been my life completely,” she said. “I wouldn’t have made it through life — I’m sure of it — if I didn’t have God to lean on. That’s the way I feel about it. He really helped me. And the saints, too.”
A deep devotee of Mary and the saints, Marion shared her appreciation for St. Anthony of Padua, the legendary locator of the lost, and the Blessed Mother, saying with a chuckle and a smile: “I prayed to all of them! I want their help!”
In short, Marion credits her perseverance to God and his Communion of Saints, saying, “God helped me a lot.”
When asked why she didn’t give up on God despite all the suffering she experienced, Marion answered matter-of-factly: “He’s the answer.” In a world broken by illness, suffering and death, even as her own heart was broken by the same, one simple truth resounds for Marion: Jesus Christ is the answer. God-with-us is the Father’s healing response to all the world has to throw at us.
Her witness of faith and trust in the Lord resounds through the generations, as her own children and grandchildren credit their faith to her great example in the face of severe suffering. In her humility, Marion shrugs off the compliment, but her daughter Carol and grandson Brendan told the Denver Catholic that it was her example that inflamed their own faith.
“She has the deepest faith of anyone I’ve ever met,” Brendan affirmed.
“She has lived a life of heartbreak that continues today,” Nancy, Marion’s niece, added. “But my aunt’s faith has never been broken and God is her strength!”
What’s the secret to a long, happy, faith-filled life? What has Marion learned in her century plus? She said it all comes down to patience.
“If you’re patient enough, he’ll answer your prayers. Gotta be patient, though,” Marion said.
“When God feels he’s ready, that’s when you’ll get the help,” she continued as Brendan recalled that everything happens in God’s time.
Nodding assuredly and with a smile on her face, Marion concluded: “He’s the boss!”
Amid great challenges to hope, faith and charity — that is, intimacy with the Trinity — in today’s world, Marion’s child-like faith and trust in her heavenly Father serves as a reminder that God is in charge, and that he is present with us even during serious suffering.
Despite losing her husband and multiple children, incredible global change in the course of her life, and all her suffering, Marion witnesses to the simplicity of the Gospel call to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Dt 6:5, Mt 22:37).
