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Grief, gratitude, grace bind S.D. family, monks
As a little girl, Debbie Jo Morgen dreamed that some day she would walk down the aisle with Brother Mark Kosiba, the Benedictine monk with the pearly smile, who lived at the nearby Catholic Indian Mission.
Debbie Jo’s wish would come true, but not as she had envisioned under the spell of a childhood crush. On the day she married Jim Ross, Brother Mark, standing in for a family of men lost to tragedy, gave the bride away.
Two decades later, Debbie Jo smiles as she recalls asking Brother Mark to do the honors. “He said, ‘Oh, good, I finally get to wear a tuxedo,’” she muses. “I wanted him to wear his habit. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him. He was so excited to wear a tux.”
Brother Mark, donning a tux for the first time, gives away Debbie Jo Morgen
on her wedding day.
Sitting next to her, Brother Mark, hair silvered by age, flashes the same brilliant smile.
Debbie Jo looks at him fondly and gushes to no one in particular, “I still can’t believe we’re here with Brother Mark.”
Out in Conception Abbey’s parking lot, its engine still ticking, a blue minivan cools from a 650-mile journey. “Abbey or Bust” is painted across its back window.
Debbie Jo, her sisters Dennine Krumm and Deanne Mott, and their mother Deloris fill the abbey porter’s office with laughter as they reminisce about the years when the monks of Conception Abbey were still serving the pastoral needs of the Native Americans on the Standing Rock Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. On a Friday, a handful of monks, “the boys,” as Deloris called them, would amble into the Dew Drop Inn, a “supper club” owned by the Morgens, known for the best ribeye in the Dakotas.
The Morgen women reunited with “the boys,” left to right: front row, Father Reginald Sander, Deloris Morgen, Brother Mark Kosiba, Father Augustine Dreiling, Father Edgar Probstfield; back row, Deanne Mott, Father Kenneth Reichert, Debbie Jo Ross and Dennine Krumm.
“We never had to order a drink,” Father Regis Probstfield recalls. “They already knew what we would order and they brought it to our table as soon as we sat down.”
As joyous as Debbie Jo’s wedding night was, it was also Brother Mark’s last day in the Dakotas. Just when the wedding dance was at its peak, he said goodbye. After 18 years of raising money for the Indian missions, he had been called home by Abbot Jerome Hanus to lead Conception Abbey’s Development Office.
“I remember standing in my wedding dress and crying,” Debbie Jo recalls. “We were all crying.” Brother Mark’s departure was a sign of things to come. Over the next decade, the Benedictine presence at Standing Rock dwindled. Father Regis and his brother Father Edgar Probstfield were the last to leave, in 1995, ending Conception Abbey’s 111-year ministry in the Dakotas.
Brother Mark’s wedding-night farewell was a microcosm of the four-decade friendship between the monks and the Morgen family. Though laughter was abundant, so were tears.
In 1966, as she mourned the death of her father, Joe, Deloris had no idea that mourning was to become a way of life. A year later, her husband Nick was setting a clock when he collapsed. Struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage he was dead at 46, leaving Deloris to raise two boys and four girls alone.
Colder and more forceful blows followed.
Three years later, in the summer of 1970, Deloris’s oldest son, Dennis, had taken a construction job in Fort Yates, N.D., to raise money for college. A month prior to his 21st birthday he was killed when a trench he was working in collapsed.
“Dennis was the oldest and he was the man of our life,” Dennine recalls. “He was smart and well liked and he had a head on his shoulders. He was mom’s support.”
Debbie Jo’s first memory of Brother Mark was of him arriving at their house to tell them Dennis had been killed. She was 3 years old.
Deloris says she doesn’t recall the words Brother Mark used to tell her that her first-born child was dead. “I just remember being glad it was him,” she says, fresh tears in her eyes.
He arrived at the Morgen house at 3 p.m. He had lately accepted the position of county coroner, so it was his job to be there knocking on their door. But it was as a friend that he chose the words: “We lost Dennis.”
The family leaned heavily on the monks as they watched the men of their family disappear. “That’s how we kept our faith,” she says.
“They are our friends,” Deanne says, making sure to speak in the present tense. “When we’ve been at our wits’ end, we could tell them anything.”
Conception Abbey monks celebrated the family’s baptisms, confirmations, first Communions and marriages. But in 1980, on Christmas Eve, a monk once again darkened the family’s doorway with tragic news.
On his way home for the holiday, the last of the Morgen men, 21-year-old David, had been killed in a car accident.
“David and Dennis were born 10 years apart,” Deanne says. “And they died 10 years apart.”
Days later, at David’s funeral, Father Joachim Schieber would try to find words, his own and those of Scripture, to console the inconsolable.
Brother Mark remembers a family bewildered in their grief.
“They couldn’t understand why all the men in the family had been taken,” he recalls.
Doloris remembers clinging precariously to her Catholic faith. “Without the monks, I wouldn’t have made it through,” she says.
This year, as Deloris’s 75th birthday approached, Debbie Jo, with the secret help of Brother Mark, began planning for the perfect gift.
They set off to see “the boys” who though far away, still hold a “piece of our hearts,” Debbi Jo said. “Just as any family member would.”
Brother Mark Kosiba stands before the minivan that brought Doloris Morgen and her daughters 650 miles to Conception Abbey.
The monks of Standing Rock who had been embraced by the Morgen family hospitality eagerly greet Deloris and her daughters. As they reminisce over lunch there are more than a few references to Deloris’s cooking. Father Regis admits that his subsequent encounters with beef have suffered by comparison.
Later, the women walk to the cemetery, where they put a red rose on each of the graves of the deceased monks they had known; among them was Father David Clements, who died suddenly, a month before Debbie Jo was married. “We missed you at the wedding,” she whispers.
As it has been for more than four decades of friendship, laughter and smiles are soon washed away by tears as the women climb back into the minivan to leave.
“In looking back,” Brother Mark says, “there are so many good memories and so many sad memories. I think we experienced the full spectrum of friendship.”
“It’s been 19 and a half years since we last saw Brother Mark,” Deloris says with a tremble in her voice. “This makes me miss him so much more. It’s hard to leave.”
We welcome your comments:
communications@conception.edu
www.conceptionabbey.org
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