Sam also accepted many speaking engagements that took him on tours around the world. He was in the British Isles in the summer of 1932 and in Northwest China the following year. Sam and Amy made time to visit their ever-growing family. By now all four of their children were married. Bessie and her husband, Claude, were missionaries in China. Raymund completed his medical degree and attended Yale and Harvard universities. Amy married a man named Homer Violette. Mary married Robert Brittain, a poet and author. Between them, their four children provided Sam and Amy with fifteen grandchildren.
The years teaching at Princeton flew by, and in May 1936 the family gathered to celebrate Sam and Amy’s fortieth wedding anniversary. They were both still in excellent health and looked forward to spending a long and happy retirement together. Less than a year later, however, tragedy struck. Amy had gone to New York City to participate in the anniversary of the Women’s Board of Foreign Missions. At the event she suffered a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. Sam received an urgent phone call to come to her side. But by the time he arrived in New York City, Amy had died.
Sam was stunned by the death of his wife. He broke down and wept as he thought of all the experiences they had shared. He remembered the first time he saw Amy—a pretty, young nurse—and how she had managed to pull the tablecloth and the best china off the table in Basrah; how he had helped her study Arabic in Baghdad and fallen in love with her quiet determination and intelligence; their wedding at the British consulate in Baghdad; the birth of six children and the death of Katharine and Ruth in Bahrain thirty-three years before; how Amy never complained about the constant traveling or the need to leave their children behind in the United States while they returned to the mission field. Unable to think how else to pay homage to his lifelong companion, Sam wrote a poem:
Her love was like an island
In life’s ocean, vast and wide,
A peaceful, quiet shelter
From the wind and rain and tide.
‘Twas bound on the north by Hope,
By Patience on the west,
By tender Counsel on the south
And on the east by Rest.
Above it, like a beacon light,
Shone faith and truth and prayer;
And through the changing scenes of life
I found a haven there.
The Zwemer family gathered in Michigan to honor Amy’s vibrant faith and Christian service. They buried her alongside the other members of the Zwemer family in Pilgrim’s Home Cemetery in Graafschap. Now, at seventy years of age, Sam felt adrift and alone without Amy. Princeton University had a strict rule that faculty members must retire at age seventy. The school made an exception for Sam, allowing him one more year of teaching and giving him time to adjust to the sudden loss of his wife.
Soon after his official retirement from Princeton, Sam moved to Manhattan in New York City, where he rented rooms at the Carteret Hotel, just off Seventh Avenue on Twenty-Third Street. Even though he was officially retired, there seemed to be more than ever for him to do. Sam preached in churches and at conferences, prepared new books and tracts, and met with old friends.
In September 1939, just as war was breaking out in Europe, Sam had dinner with Jim, who was now also retired and whose his wife had died in 1927 after a long illness. Jim invited two women along for the evening to dine with him and Sam, and Sam found one of them, Miss Margaret Clarke, fascinating. Although Margaret was only fifty years old and Sam seventy-three, he invited her out to several events and the two of them fell in love. They were married on March 12, 1940, and moved into an apartment on Thirty-Third Street in Manhattan.
Sam was grateful to again have a wife at his side. Sometimes Margaret laughed that he had needed to marry a younger woman to keep up with him. Together Sam and Margaret made a formidable team. In one month they traveled by train across the United States twice, and Sam spoke at over forty-five events and services.
In 1947, Sam turned eighty years old, but he showed no signs of slowing down. Invitations to speak poured in, and Margaret began making plans for them to travel to Kuwait to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Arabian Mission in 1949.
When they arrived, it felt strange for Sam to be standing in Basrah and reminiscing. He wished Jim could have been there with him, but Jim had died in 1940, soon after Sam and Margaret were married. How the city had changed! Sam could hardly recognize it as the same place where he and Jim had opened the first station for the Arabian Mission.
From Basrah Sam traveled on to Bahrain. What a transformation awaited him there! Oil derricks now dominated the skyline, and everywhere he looked, air conditioners poked from the windows of houses. The Mason Memorial Hospital was now a huge, sprawling facility, but it still carried on the same mission: to show God’s love to people through acts of compassion and care.
While he was in Bahrain, Sam visited the cemetery where Katharine and Ruth were buried. Their grave was overgrown with weeds, which Sam cleared away before saying a prayer over it. Sam knew all too well that total commitment to serving God and proclaiming the gospel often came at a high cost.
From Bahrain Sam traveled to Kuwait, where he spoke at the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the Arabian Mission and was the guest of honor.
As he reflected on this visit to Arabia, Sam wrote, “Challenged by the opportunity for evangelism among both Arab- and English-speaking communities, the mission called for large reinforcement and for prevailing prayer. The burden of Arabia is Islam, but that burden is being lifted. God’s providence and His gospel are at work.”
Soon after Sam and Margaret returned to New York from Arabia, Margaret became sick. She was hospitalized, and her condition declined. She died on February 21, 1950, at the age of sixty.
Sam accompanied the body of his second wife to Michigan for burial in the family plot in Pilgrim’s Home Cemetery in Graafschap. He had expected Margaret to outlive him, and he found it hard to believe she was really gone. But still he carried on. He wrote an article about his favorite hymn, “Christian, Dost Thou See Them?” The words of the hymn were written by St. Andrew of Crete around the year 700. Sam found particular comfort in the last verse:
Christian, dost thou hear them
How they speak thee fair?
Always fast and vigil? Always watch and prayer?
Christian, answer boldly:
“While I breathe I pray.”
Peace shall follow battle,
Night shall end in day.
By now Sam knew he was nearing the end of his own life, and he took as his motto the line from the hymn, “While I breathe I pray.”
A year later Sam attended the General Synod of the Reformed Church in Pennsylvania. During the event he began to feel ill. A doctor told him that he had a serious heart condition and there was nothing that could be done about it. Sam decided to soldier on until the end. He preached in New York City, and in Virginia in February 1952 he addressed the missionary conference of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The night after the address he was hospitalized, and in March he was transferred to a convalescent home, where he preached at the Sunday services to the other patients.
On Wednesday, April 2, 1952, Samuel Marinus Zwemer died quietly, ten days short of his eighty-fifth birthday.
After a stirring funeral service held at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City, many people read the words that Sam had penned four years before, intended for a conference in England he was unable to attend.
How memory brings back the occasions when we met together, and the happy hours spent in prayer and Christian fellowship. I am now in my 81st year and have spent sixty years thinking of the Moslem World and its problems! It began when I signed a card in 1886 expressing the purpose to become a foreign missionary! Little did I realize all the ways God would lead me into Arabia and Egypt and across the world of Islam, and guide my pen to call to others.
“With mercy and with judgment
My web of time He wove
And aye the dews of sorrow
Were lustered by His love.”
Never have I regretted choosing a hard field and an impossible task. How much has changed for the better, and how many doors have opened in Arabia since 1890, and in all Asia and Africa. God’s providence has been so visible that all may see His purpose. We must not lose faith or courage, but be earnest and steadfast and diligent until the going down of our sun—or the rising of His Son at His glorious appearing.
Sam’s children escorted his body back to Michigan, where Sam was laid to rest in the family plot in Pilgrim’s Home Cemetery in Graafschap. His family sang from his favorite hymn, “Peace shall follow battle, night shall end in day.”
