I once made an if-you-go-first pledge to my close friend, Beverly Schmidgall, that “someday” I would sing my song, Soldier, at her funeral. Of course, I didn’t expect someday to come early, but on February 25, 2001, at age 51, Bev died in England, due to complications from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, the toxic Ukrainian town where a nuclear meltdown had occurred fifteen years earlier.
We make such promises, hoping never to have to keep them, not only because we dread a last goodbye, but also because the death of a peer reminds us that our own “someday” might come sooner than we expect.
I met the fiery redhead with hair the size of a ten-gallon hat in February 1969, when thirteen Oral Roberts University students formed a weekend singing group that quickly became an international missions ministry called Living Sound. By the late 70s, we had toured in almost forty countries on five continents, along the way forging the kind of foxhole bond that war veterans try in vain to describe.
When Bev went solo in 1977, she headed straight to the world’s trouble spots was. Among other adventures, she lived in Croatia for a year and hitchhiked with soldiers into the battlefields of Bosnia to pray for war victims. She also traversed nearly all of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s 6,000 miles of track, often disembarking on impulse in some dowdy Russian town, and then whispering the word Xristianski to passersby until she either met a fellow believer or got hauled in for interrogation by the Soviet KGB.
In one city, the secret police took her into an unheated office and made her strip to her underwear while undergoing more than an hour of questioning. It was minus 50 Fahrenheit that day.
In another town, she made contact with an underground congregation and within hours was in someone’s apartment, being mobbed by dozens of seekers wanting prayer and teaching. That scene was repeated from morning to night for two more days. Only when the local pastor was walking her back to the train did she learn why so many people had shown up: That little group, way out on the backside of the world, had waited all their lives for fulfillment of a century-old prophecy that a “woman with flaming red hair will bring spiritual revival to you.”
Bev moved from Oklahoma to England in the late 1980s, partly because she loved the beauty of the British countryside, but also because it was only in England and France that could she be treated for radiation poisoning she had suffered in May, 1986 at Chernobyl. Just days after the nuclear accident, she had obtained her visa in London, flown to Kiev, and then hitchhiked and talked her way past every checkpoint, all the way to Ground Zero, where she spent more than two weeks praying for—by her estimate—nearly 3,000 fatally-poisoned pregnant women.
When facing her own demise 15 years later in a Derbyshire hospital room, Bev stared it down with typical grit and determination. Death tugged at every breath, and she knew we were thousands of miles away in Florida, but still she said to a nurse, “I’m not leaving until Dolly gets here.” And so she remained, not surrendering her spirit until the next evening when she and the one she often called her “angel” had spent a tender eight hours together.
Even then, though too weak to speak, Bev welcomed Dolly with regal splendor. Sure there were the bed and the gown and the tubes. But there she sat, propped up by pillows, her thinning hair done up, two-inch diamond earrings dangling from her ears and a gold ring scotch-taped onto her skinny finger to match ten metallic gold fingernails. She was borne away easily that night, a teaspoon of ice still between her lips.
Dolly and I, though by then we were Bev’s closest confidants, had never broached the subject of Chernobyl with her; never asked the questions that haunted a thousand fans back home: Are you sure God told you to go there? And if He did tell you to go, then why didn’t He protect you from the very radiation you were praying against?
No doubt Bev, herself, had wrestled with these very questions countless times over the past fifteen years, years filled with unquenchable pain she described as “fire in my spine.” But Dolly and I refrained from asking. She had already volunteered months earlier that, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about my death.” So we waited, knowing that when the time was right, she would talk.
That time came one November, on the next-to-last day we we would see Bev alive. We had been Christmas shopping at the Chatsworth House garden shop, followed by tea and scones at the Cavendish Hotel on the way home to Alfreton. Now we were back in Bev’s living room, browsing mementos and, for the first time, discussing who should get what when the time came. Suddenly, in the midst of talking about everything and nothing, the unmentionable at last was mentioned.
She knew people wondered about why she went to Chernobyl, Bev said. Knew they questioned her wisdom, her judgment, her ability to hear God’s voice. She paused and stared at the wall for a moment. “Well, Jimmy,” she said—and very few folks are allowed to call me that—“I guess most martyrs die a quicker death, don’t they?” And then she went back to browsing and never mentioned it again.
She was right, of course. Indeed, every question whispered about Bev had also been broached 2,000 years earlier by a forlorn little band of friends, as they made their way down the hill from Golgotha to a nearby graveyard. “Did God really send Him? And if He did, then why didn’t He protect Him? Why send Him here just to die?”
If you can answer that last one, then you understand the late Dr. Beverly Schmidgall.