IN MEMORIAM
Evelyn King Mumaw

Michael A. King

Evelyn King Mumaw’s writings in the Winter and Spring 2003 issues of DreamSeeker Magazine were popular enough that after it became clear she would be writing no more, a few subscribers called to cancel, noting that her writing was their main reason for subscribing. Hopefully, however, there remain enough Mumaw fans among DSM readers to justify passing on this word: Finally on July 30, 2003, she did, as she had feared but hoped nevertheless to avoid, lose her battle with cancer.

Readers of her two articles describing her journey as death drew close, "When Death Announces Its Nearness" (Winter 2003) and "Through Turmoil, Chamber, and Love" (Spring 2003), know how eloquently and honestly she shared her fears and hopes. It seemed appropriate, then, and moving, to hear Nate Yoder, one of her former pastors, quote from those articles at the memorial service where hundreds gathered at Dayton (Va.) Mennonite Church on August 3, 2003 to remember and love her.

I wish there had been even more writings. When this loved aunt of mine (for such she was) completed her second article for DSM, I asked her, as both her nephew and editor, to consider writing yet another. She declined, partly because her strength was ebbing, partly because she wanted to be able, if she wrote more, to end on a ringing note of faith, but amid discouragement she was struggling to feel positive. I suggested that for the countless people who face their own similar dark times during their final journey, it would be powerful for her to testify to the negative in addition to the positive. But that didn’t feel right to her, and I respected that.

Sadly, her fears did prove at least as reliable a guide to her future as her hopes. The miracle she prayed for and wistfully yearned for didn’t arrive. And when it became clear the cancer would kill her, her body insisted on lingering long weeks past her spirit’s wishes. But finally the time came, and there are those who report that near the end she had meaningful visions of what lay ahead, but, ever judicious in what she chose to share, she declined to detail precisely what she was seeing.

So now she is gone, but she lives on in the hands of the one who, as she quoted from Psalm 18 in one of her articles, "is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my strength in whom I will trust: my buckler and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower."

And she lives on in memory, very much including mine. I will never forget that 1990s night she sat on our living room couch, sharing who she now was with my wife Joan and me, as she said that now, a widow and a woman in her 70s who had completed her career goals, she had nothing left to prove. She was free simply to respond day by day to God’s promptings.

I shivered at the newfound majesty of her bearing. I had rarely experienced a person as regal, as commanding, as filled with authority. Yet as I said the week later in a sermon inspired by who she had been that night, I was seeing in her "not the secular authority of the earthly ruler but the humble and awe-inspiring authority of one whose soul overflows with God."

You will be missed, Evelyn King Mumaw.

—Michael A. King