Gerda was born August 15, 1929 in Dieren, Netherlands to James and Albertha deWit. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 20. She was a great advocate for the unborn.
Gerda was preceded in death by her parents; husband, John Robert Leland; son, Peter Shane Leland; son-in-law, Donald Miller; and brother, Jacob deWit.
She is survived by sons, Timothy (Theresa) Leland, Robert (Janice) Leland, Fr. Thomas Leland; daughter, Catherine Miller; daughter-in-law, Patricia Lehman; brothers, Piet deWit and Benjamin deWit; sisters, Henni Van Ooy and Sjaan Markley; 26 grandchildren and 34 great grandchildren.
Rosary 7pm, Friday, February 28, 2014 and Mass of Christian Burial 10am, Saturday, March 1, 2014, both at St. Patrick Catholic Church, Kingman, Kansas. Interment will follow at St. Peter Parish Cemetery, Willowdale, KS.
Memorials established with St. Patrick Catholic Church, 630 Ave D. West, Kingman, KS 67068 and Priests Retirement and Education Fund, 424 N. Broadway, Wichita, KS 67202.
Feb. 28, 2014
Eulogy for Gerda Johanna Leland
As the oldest child of Gerda, I wanted, in memoriam, to give a brief account of her life. A task that nevertheless gives me pause – for how can I do justice to this remarkable woman, wife, mother, sister and friend?
Gerda Johanna deWit was born Aug. 15, 1929 in Dieren, a small town in the province of Gelderland, situated in the central eastern part of the Netherlands. She was the first child of James and Albertha deWit.
Her early years, as she recalled them, were happy ones. Being the eldest and a daughter she soon assumed the role as her mother’s right hand as the family grew to include two sisters and three brothers. Within a few years of her birth the family moved onto a small farm near Utrecht where her father began a business growing fruits and vegetables in greenhouses and in the gardens adjoining the home. Life was simple and centered around family and the local Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist Protestant profession with deep roots in Holland.
When she was not quite 11, the whole world turned upside down. Her memories were of awakening one spring morning (May 10, 1940) to a pervasive droning and to a sky black with airplanes, followed later by the sound of explosions as the German army began the conquest of Holland. She would tell stories about the next five years under the Nazi occupation, but many of those memories were painful, especially the winter of 1944-45 when the Allies were stopped at the Rhine, and the western part of Holland, where her family was located, suffered a terrible famine. As children growing up we witnessed the legacy of those years – she would never allow us to waste food. The stories she did tell revealed that her father participated in the Dutch underground resistance; the family would take in young men who were trying to escape the German draft and hide them in the greenhouses. There were constant threats of German patrols where a violation would result in summary execution. She remembered the terrible effect this had on the community, where no one knew whom they could trust. These were for her, painful years.
After the war, at the age of 17, she was sent to England, where she acted as a nanny, caring for her young cousins in her uncle’s home. This gave her the opportunity to become fluent in English. During her absence, her father, frustrated by the lack of opportunity in the post-war Dutch economy and the uncertain political climate, had packed up the family and emigrated to the United States, specifically to the area around San Bernardino, CA – where there was a sizeable community of Dutch emigrants held together by their ancestral Calvinistic Reformed faith, and where two of his brothers had settled earlier.
My mother returned to Holland from England to find her family gone. Living with her grandparents she took a job and began the application process for entrance into the U.S. Faced with the hopeless Dutch bureaucracy and the rapid approach of her 21st birthday – when she would lose her ability to emigrate under a family visa – in desperation she wrote a letter to the U.S. ambassador in Holland. Her visa came through in a matter of days. This experience won her heart over to the United States. It is hard to imagine the emotions she must have felt as she bade goodbye to her grandparents, knowing that she would never see them again (because they were old, and her grandfather crippled, she had to take a train to the boat – she later found out that her grandfather climbed on his bike and somehow made it to the harbor to see her off; she never knew at the time). And then the trepidation of facing the unknown - setting out to a new country. Indeed, when she landed in Hoboken NJ she found herself stranded, having to wait, staying in the local seaman’s home until her father could scrape together enough money to wire for the purchase of the train tickets to California.
Arriving in San Bernardino she found the state of affairs not exactly matching the advertisements of wealth and opportunity that she had heard while in Holland. Her father was struggling to start a business and had gone into debt. She immediately found a job in a bank and poured back all her earnings into the family coffers. At the same time there was the process of adapting to the American culture. Even though she and her family had settled into the little Dutch enclave, there were noticeable divides between the 2nd generation Dutch and the newly arrived immigrants who were regarded as out-of-step and provincial. My mother, who has always had a strong and independent will, did not spend much time trying to fit in with her Dutch peers and it wasn’t long before she met a young man who was so decidedly different and unconventional, who loved the outdoors and doing things in the outdoors – fishing, hunting, camping – and who so persistently wooed her that she could not help but be swept away.
But there were some barriers: my father was a divorced man and was largely unchurched. My mother’s faith, at that time Reformed/Calvinist, was central to her life. My father, out of a great love (and admiration) for her, and a great attraction to their close-knit family, converted. Once the local church investigated and found him not at fault for the failure of his first marriage, the way was cleared for marriage.
Thus John and Gerda were married: a wonderful and unlikely compliment of characters, temperaments, gifts, and visions. Their adventures together for the next 47 years carried them across four states, five children and many fresh starts. And much to the joy of their children – much camping, fishing and outdoor adventure. But not much material wealth or worldly fame. Oddly enough, this full and wholehearted committal of my mother to her husband, and to her vocation as wife and mother brought out another aspect of character – a deep, rich interior life and serious intellect that was consciously focused on God. Although she had only the equivalent of an 8th grade education – being she was the eldest, and a daughter, and all her time and energies from an early age were dedicated to helping her mother and maintaining the household – she developed a systematic reading and study habit. She is the most well-read person I know, even after years of hanging around universities. This reading odyssey took her primarily into theology, history and literature; and it profoundly affected our family life. I have vivid memories of my mother sitting her sons (then as teen agers) down around the table and reading to us from some theological or historical treatise. This attests to not only her intellectual depth but also to a strong presence which attracted respect. For us teenage boys, if Mom was interested in something – it was important. She gave all her children a great love for reading. In her last years she extended this to her grandchildren – holding a daily reading hour in which she would captivate their young minds with Bible stories, the saints and classical literature. Perhaps this modern world would say that Mom was an example of missed opportunity – she could easily have been an accomplished professor or writer or professional woman. Perhaps, but for us her children, her vocation as wife and mother was a great grace, and even more, gave her a freedom to search for God and thus truly develop her personality and character in all its fullness.
There is one other character trait that underlaid all the above. I can only poorly articulate it, but it might be best described as a restlessness and a spirit of searching. Looking back and remembering our family life – the local church we belonged to and the practice of Christian faith were central. My mother had deep roots in the religion of her childhood, the religion of her parents and grandparents, but there was always a certain restlessness and questioning. I remember this as we moved around. First, away from the Dutch enclaves of California, then in the process of seeking for a church with a similar Calvinistic creed often driving over an hour to attend one deemed suitable, in the Sunday tradition of discussing the day’s sermon, in watching the changes in congregations. My mother was visibly troubled by the lack of unity and tendency to divisiveness over minor doctrinal issues; by what she saw as interminable debates over the meaning of various biblical passages. Nevertheless, for many years, nothing changed in appearances: our family attended church twice on Sundays, often on Weds. Evenings and on Saturday mornings for catechism. But I think this restlessness crystallized in the early 70’s, when Mom read a book given to her by her brother Ben: “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” by John Henry Newman (now Blessed). This book explained to her the continuity of Christian faith and pointed her to the Catholic Church. She described this later as something that shook her to the core of her soul. It meant a turning back on her own heritage. She could no longer be a Protestant. She announced her decision to the pastor as something her conscience required of her. And then with great trepidation she made an appointment with a priest from a nearby Catholic church. She was devastated when the priest counseled her to go home and continue as she was. This was a time of great suffering in her life. We can say that it was within God’s providence without having to understand it.
The restlessness now lost its uncertainty. She had seen the truth and the rest of her life was now directed towards it. Gerda quietly entered the Catholic Church on Feb. 18, 1979 after taking instruction with Msgr. Holz, the pastor at St. Peter’s in Willowdale. Following her in 1984, and confirmed with her – my father and brother Tom, who later was ordained a priest in 1999. It is not an understatement to say that her intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage profoundly influenced all of her children in their own journeys.
To understand her pilgrimage, it is necessary to say that she never harbored – as far as I could tell – any bitterness towards her Protestant upbringing. The faith that she had learned at her parent’s knees was what she still possessed as a Catholic; as she might have phrased it: “I found the door from the outer court into the castle”.
I think it is possible to see these threads of my mother’s life and relate them to who she was, who we knew her to be. Above all we saw in her a great integrity to follow the truth. Another way to perhaps describe this would be to say that she saw life with a certain seriousness: God had given her, her life, and she felt a great responsibility in returning to Him an interest. This conviction, along with her experience of WWII in Holland, drove her to defend life, especially that of the unborn. Mom told me once that in the suffering that God allowed her to go through to arrive in the Catholic Church, particularly the time in the early 70’s, she heard in her soul the words: “Life is a precious gift”. Part of her response was to join in the quiet (and sometime unquiet – as in the 1991 “Summer of Mercy” -demonstrations in front of the Tiller abortion clinic, when she spent 10 days in jail) and consistent witness for life, against abortion, bringing her grandchildren and husband with Fr. John Rickenmeyer for their Rosary vigil each Saturday. She often pointed out the parallels between the Nazi holocaust and the abortion holocaust in talks, interviews and letters to the editor.
God allowed her suffering in other things as well: probably first and foremost the early death of her son Peter in 1988, who was struck by lightning while building his house. “It is so hard for a parent to bury their child” she said. And also the loss of a son-in-law Don Miller and the widowing of her daughter Cathy in 2001, and finally the loss of her husband, John in that same year.
We also remember our mother and her great love for simplicity. This is something that bound her very close to my father – they always gardened, our years at home always included chores around the family garden and livestock. My father translated simplicity into engineering projects, my mother translated them into a philosophy of “small is beautiful”.
As we had the opportunity to care for Mom in her last weeks, I had the need to get out of the house and just walk. Her home sits in the middle of fields, midway on the county mile road. So I would take off north and go to the intersection of Smoot’s Creek road and NE 90th Ave., then turning west would continue down to the bridge over what I imagine is Smoot’s Creek. Mom, for many years would take a walk every day over these same roads, alone, spending time with Our Lady, saying her Rosary (we had some concern, because an occasional truck would come roaring down the road with her walking in the middle of the road). The thought came to me that these roads were the same roads she walked as she prayed. The words “sanctifying the pathways of this world” came to me, a phrase that St. Josemaria Escriva used to describe the Christian’s duty in this world.
Mom, you sanctified the paths you walked and we have received grace through you.
Mom, you passed to us the Faith and have given us an example of how to live it with integrity, and how to go against the grain.
As I went through Mom’s books by her bedside, I came across a book of meditations by one of her favorite authors, one whom we have already met: John Henry Newman. In it is a poem which I think is appropriate to consider in the context of my mother’s life:
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home.
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene – one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
Oer moor and fen, oer crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!
Mother, we will miss you!
Mother, we will pray for your rest in Jesus!
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