Departure, Connection

As these paired short essays explore, we can connect beyond the usual boundaries of time and space. Writing can be a bridge—or life can be a bridge, and we can write as we walk over.

Want more craft tips? Be the first to receive our writing advice in your inbox.

At the Grave of Charlene Richard

On December 28 of last year, I opened up Firefox, and noticed a suggested article through their “Recommended by Pocket” feature. It was titled “The Miraculous Life and Afterlife of Charlene Richard,” and it had just been published in The New York Times on December 20.

Written by Nathaniel Rich (son of well-known Times columnist Frank Rich, and brother of Simon Rich, a humor writer whom I’ve admired and envied since 2008), the story is quite long, and I didn’t read it word-for-word. Much of it describes local people’s effort to have Charlene canonized as a Catholic saint, and the Catholic Church’s slow and opaque response—which, for me, was burying the lede with respect to Charlene herself.

Charlene Richard was a girl who lived from 1947 to 1959 in the town of Richard, Louisiana. In 1959, after seeing visions of a hooded female figure, Charlene was given a leukemia diagnosis and told she had two weeks to live. With the help of a Catholic priest named Joseph Brennan, who introduced her to a doctrine known as redemptive suffering, she dedicated her final 13 days of agonizing pain to others. She never complained. Each morning, she would ask Brennan, “OK, Father, who am I to suffer for today?”

In the years since, people have prayed to Charlene, and have credited her with everything from helping them conceive children, to curing advanced cancers that were unresponsive to conventional treatment, to miraculously reversing genetic birth defects.

I live in New Orleans, LA, less than three hours from Richard, and I wanted to see Charlene’s grave site. So on Saturday, December 31, we went.

Charlene’s grave is in a lovely rectangular cemetery connected to a beautiful Catholic church. We spent some time in the church, and then, after a bit of searching through the cemetery, found her grave.

When we had been there a minute or so, a yellow-gold ladybug landed on my right arm. I showed it to my wife and daughter, and it flew away. Two seconds later, we noticed another ladybug on my wife’s right arm. We initially thought the first ladybug had flown from me to her, until we realized that it was a different color, red rather than gold.

In my own spiritual tradition, which derives from Tibetan Buddhism, a golden color is associated with confidence (something I had been wishing for myself), and red is associated with love and tenderness (something I had been wishing for my wife). Since that time, I’ve slowly noticed that my wife has been sweet and kind in a way I haven’t before felt. I’ve also been able to exercise regularly for the first time since the complex trauma of running middle-distance track and cross country throughout my teens.

I have a few points in sharing all this.

• One of the lovely things about nonfiction writing is that its subjects exist, on some level, within the world we all share. That makes it nicely interactive. If you are enchanted by a description of Naples, you can hopefully visit there someday. If you happen to live near the grave site of someone you feel drawn to, you can visit the grave, and see if anything happens.
• Not judging seems to be good general-purpose advice for nonfiction writing and reading. After I got over the swallowed toenail of the piece’s first sentence, which describes Richard as “a lonesome patch of boggy farmland”—a familiar punching down that seems to delight readers of New York-themed publications—I found its account balanced, sincere, and rich in detail, and unencumbered by a particular sense either of belief or of disbelief. I got to experience Charlene’s story myself and draw my own conclusions, and it made me interested enough to actually visit Richard—with, again, an open mind more than either skepticism or conviction.
• You never know what effects your writing will have. We visited Charlene’s grave a week after the article’s debut, and there were few other people there. The article definitely didn’t bring a crowd of curious tourists, which I was worried about—just us. For me, though, the article, and Nathaniel Rich’s craftsmanship and sincerity in writing it, made possible a unique and enriching experience that I appreciated, and that may even, in some mysterious way, be helping my life and marriage.

Egyptian Funerary Paintings

If you haven’t seen them before, I encourage you to Google “Egyptian funerary paintings.”

These paintings, commissioned by wealthy Egyptians to commemorate deceased relatives, drove home for me that all these people were perfectly real, despite having lived thousands of years ago. They didn’t look like mud-caked peasants—or, for that matter, like gods, which is the other problem with most art from antiquity. They looked like people, the kind I stand in line behind for chai latte and cookies.

On the other hand, people from a long time ago were strange. I read a nonfiction book about an English town in the seventeenth century. In one scene, a crowd challenged an accused witch to recite a prayer. When she recited it properly, the crowd concluded that it was one of the witch’s occult powers to recite the prayer. No voices in the crowd went, “Wait a minute…” Even with all our present-day vulnerability to confirmation bias, I feel very distant from the people in this story.

I think that this strangeness is an animating tension of all nonfiction writing. People—all people, even our past selves—are just like us, and yet they are also so different that it’s surreal. Like discovered art, the best nonfiction writing can bring those similarities and differences together, and present it all in one vivid package: a middle-aged mother, with large, beautiful eyes, smiling gently in a toga.