Paris, Mon Amour

Like millions of people around the world, I am grieving the fire damage to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris this week. Even as a partial loss (grâce à Dieu!) it’s a sobering one. One that sinks to the pit of my heart…I felt it as I watched Parisians singing hymns outside the cathedral as she burned. I ache for the French and what they are feeling right now. And I’m reminded of times my European friends and family reached out to me when America suffered losses.

I lived in France as an exchange student in 1984-85. I remember the day I visited the cathedral, shortly after arriving in Paris, the awe I felt when I first saw it from afar. The enormity of its size but also of the amount of art that grace it…it just boggles the mind. It’s a museum like few others in the world. I climbed one of the towers, taking countless photos from the little windows in the winding, narrow stone stairwell. Gargoyles and an overcast sky, slate rooftops below, the French flag in the distance. I also took photos of the stained-glass windows; I was disappointed that the rose window wouldn’t completely fit in the frame of my camera. Seeing that window in person had been a goal of mine since my mother had given me a foiled jigsaw puzzle of it when I was twelve. Even the puzzle couldn’t contain the complete window. Seeing the whole marvel in person, I felt a sweet twinge of accomplishment, as if I had fit in a final piece of the puzzle of me.

When America suffered the terrible loss of the Challenger, shortly after I returned home, I remember my boyfriend in France (whom I’d left behind, waving a white hankie as my plane pulled away from the jetway) sent me a very warm and consoling letter. I remember being so moved by that gesture. He recognized it was a national loss but also, in some way, a personal one for each of us. It was like losing a piece of our identity as a brave, proud, and generous nation willing to invest in global curiosity, risk our treasure and people, and share our discoveries with all humankind. The Challenger crew had our imaginations and aspirations on board with them; some of us still feel that phantom pain.

I was again blessed with consolation and sympathy on September 12, 2001. Friends from Germany and Italy left condolences on our answering machine. I was touched that they would do so. They understood the wound our collection consciousness had suffered, a sympathy no doubt born of the personal losses they endured in wars started when they were children.

All this is to say that when the horrible happens, watch for good people to reach out, offer solace. Our world seems torn in many painful directions these days, anger ripping like a Martian wind across every continent. I hope the compassion and largesse that responds to this collective grief moves you. We spend so much of our lives avoiding sadness, but when we allow ourselves to feel it, sometimes we find each other, stripped of the things we think separate us. I could spend some time in that space if it makes us a little more tender, a little more hopeful.