Last week my friend Linda sent me this picture of Saint Theresa, which she'd taken a few days earlier in Notre Dame in Paris. Why?
Because...when she'd told me she was headed to Paris back in June, I asked her if she planned to go to the great cathedral then told her this story...
Some years ago, we were among a small group invited to a chateau in the south of France for an international (we didn't use the word global then) think tank on networking. Only a dozen or so were invited, including a handful of Americans, along with a similar number from England, one person (the host, heir to a tea plantation fortune) from India, another from Colombia, and and still another from Japan. Though the environment was lavish, the food was extraordinary, and the weather perfect (September in Toulons), the conversations were not what we might have hoped. The Americans fought, for example. Incessantly and rudely.
Then on the last night of the conference four of us hived off from the rest and stayed up really late as "Roberto," the Colombian, told his story.
He was from a wealthy family (a cousin had married into royalty, for example). He was devastatingly handsome, very funny, and quite kind. In other words, his life seemed perfect.
Howevuh...shortly after Roberto began telling his story, he started to cry. He and his wife had lost their four-year-old daughter to what he called "brittle heart disease," which took her life just a few months after it was diagnosed.
Devastated - and with the means to do so - they jetted around the world, consulting the greatest specialists in genetic diseases to see if it made sense to have more children - or whether they would risk facing the same tragedy again. No, they were assured, it was a fluke, not genetic. Go forth and multiply, the doctors said.
And so they did. A few years later, they had twin girls, gorgeous, vivacious, and adorable. I remember the photos he had with him (he always carried them, he said). Pictures of two little girls walking along in their pretty little dresses, carrying their lunch boxes. I remember the girls in profile, with their left shoulders to the camera.
And then at four years of age, first one fell ill - of the same disease. She too was dead within six months.
You know where this is going. Not long thereafter, th other twin fell ill too and both were gone within a year of the same, extremely rare disease.
Roberto cried and cried and the rest of us cried too. The myth of the perfect life turned to dust once again.
* * *
The conference was over the following day and we flew back to Paris, where we were supposed to connect with our flight back to the U.S. When we landed, we learned that the air traffic controllers had gone on strike, not uncommon in France, and so we were stranded - if you can call it that when you're in Paris.
We booked a room in a lovely little Left Bank hotel where my husband and I had stayed when we were students at Oxford, enjoyed a good dinner (fondue bourguignonne, as I recall), and hoped that we would be able to take off the next day. Instead, all flights were cancelled again. And so we had a day off in Paris - or "a day on," as the wise woman we were traveling with dubbed it.
Why not go to Notre Dame on a day like this? Which we did, wandering in and out of the alcoves of the cavernous monument to French Catholicism.
And then we came to St. Theresa, whose statue had a name plate nearby indicating she had something to do with protecting children.
"Let's light a candle for Roberto's children," my husband said.
And as we did, a chorus of children's voices sang out.
We turned around to see where the children were. People nearby turned too, looking for the kids.
But there were no children anywhere to be seen in the cathedral.
