The Sad Life of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle

Last night I was reading a book about spies, particularly female spies. I came across a woman named Mata Hari. Her story so intrigued me that I went on line and checked out who this woman was.

She was born Margaretha Geertruida "Grietje" Zelle on August 7, 1876. Her father was wealthy for a while and sent her to a private school. In later years he lost his money and divorced his wife. Life as they knew it fell apart and Margaretha bounced around to a couple of different relatives houses.

At age 18 she answered an advertisement for a wife written by Dutch Colonial Army officer Rudolph John MacLeod. They married and soon after moved to Java in the Dutch East Indies. The marriage was a difficult one. They lost their two year old son to complications from syphilis. They also had a daughter who would later die at the age of 21 of the same illness. Officer MacLeod was not only a violent drunk, but also had another wife as well as a concubine.

While in Java Margaretha learned how to dance the Indonesian dances and adopted a stage name of Mata Hari ("eye of the sun").

In 1903 Margaretha and MacLeod moved back to the Netherlands and divorced. MacLeod kept their daughter forcibly and wouldn't allow Margaretha to take her. After the divorce she moved to Paris and started out as a circus horse rider. In 1905 she moved on to provocative dancing in which she would proceed to strip down to barely anything by the end of the show. She took the stage name again of Mata Hari and was known for her exotic dances and flamboyant lifestyle as a courtesan. Many of the men she attended to were high ranking German and French officials. Because of her involvement with them she would often travel between countries during World War I. She was suspected of and eventually imprisoned, and executed for being a double agent. (Wikipedia is where I got my info.)

I started thinking about who this woman was exactly. She was a real woman who lived at a dangerous time and suffered real pain in her personal life. She married an abusive man, lost a child, had another child kept from her by the abusive ex-husband, and was divorced at a time when that wasn't acceptable. The rest of her life is one of an erotic dancer and courtesan who went from one bed to the next with important men in hopes to find critical information for another country or in hope of love. At age 41 she was executed by a firing squad. Only a priest, two nuns, and her lawyer were there to say goodbye to her. The ironic fact is that no one really knows if she was a double agent or not. The records from her trial were sealed for one hundred years. In 2017 they may be opened and there is a very good chance that she was framed by France and not really an agent after all.

After I read the account of her execution I was deeply saddened by her life and death. She refused to wear a blindfold or be bound. She simply stood and looked the death squad in the eyes as they each pulled their trigger. BOOM!
After she fell another soldier bent over her body and shot her once in the head as well. BOOM!

What was the point of her life?
What was the point of her death?

There is a scene in Pirates of the Caribbean Part: At Worlds End that haunts me. Elizabeth is on a ship and sees her father rowing his boat in the underworld they are trapped in. She thinks they are back to the live world because she sees him, but then realizes he is actually dead. She yells out to him, "Father!"

He says, "Elizabeth, are you dead?"

"No"

"I think I am," he says. "There was this chest, you see. It's odd. At the time it seemed so important... Silly thing to die for..."

I wonder: Does Mata Hari sit in black nothingness and question her life, thinking it was all silliness and unimportant in light of eternity in utter darkness?

I wonder if my life were to end tomorrow would I see it as a failure or an accomplishment. Would I see my life as chaff in the wind, full of emptiness and leaving nothing good for my children? Or... Would I wake on the Other Side and find that I lived my humble life the way it was supposed to be lived and the treasures I live for was really what life was all about.

It is so easy to get caught up in this world and all it's vanity. It tells us that this is the only life we get and to live it to the fullest. It tells us that is the only life that's important and afterlife doesn't matter. It tells us that this life is really all about us. But this World is wrong. Dead wrong.

There is more to this life then money and glamour, brokenness and pain. There is a Hope that is worth living for. There is a Hope that is worth dying for.