Surviving the Fire, My Mom and Notre Dame

When the Notre Dame Cathedral began to burn a few weeks ago, I was transported back in time thirty years ago to the summer after sixth grade. My grandparents took me on the trip of a lifetime through Europe. On our stop in Paris, I remember taking the guided tour through Notre Dame. I learned how the stone engravings on the façade and the stained glass images in the rose windows told the story of the Bible. I also learned how the flying buttresses supported the structure of the antique architectural masterpiece. I bought a watercolor print on the banks of the Seine and brought it home to hang in my bedroom. Notre Dame stood out as my favorite part of the trip. 

Six years later, I was a junior in high school. My mom told my sister and I that she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. I remember sobbing in the shower. This was really scary for us, because my sister and I had lost our dad to a heart attack just ten years earlier when I was six and my sister was three. My mom promised me, “I am going to survive this. I will not leave you as orphans.”

I pulled my print of Notre Dame down from the wall of my room and took it to her bedside at the hospital, specifically to show her the buttresses. I told her that these flying buttresses are the supports that hold up Notre Dame. “We will be your buttresses.” I said as I hung the picture in her hospital room.  She took the painting with her to the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC. This was 1994, when bone marrow transplants were cutting edge. She qualified for an experimental protocol that saved her life, although no one else on the same protocol survived.

My mom was gone most of that year. She lived with my aunt, who was local to NCI. She flew back for my prom and watched me compete in my high school pageant. She came home at the end of that year a survivor and returned the print of Notre Dame to my bedroom wall.

I remember how different my mom was after her battle with cancer. The thing that stood out was her increased personal faith. We had attended church before she battled cancer, but I don’t recall reading the Bible much or praying as a family at home. There were years when it seemed we did not go at all and that faith was in the background, not at the forefront of our family. My mom testified that while going through the trial of cancer, she met Jesus in a new way. She believed in Him before, but during cancer she saw Him and knew He was with her. Her experience reminds me of a verse in the book of Job. After enduring great trials, Job says, “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you”. I saw a stronger faith in her after that.  In fact, she promised God that if she survived, she would serve Him the rest of her life. Not long after, she was called to a position in our church as the Children’s Ministry Director. She has served Him faithfully through several churches and will retire this fall after 25 years cancer free, and 25 years of ministry in the church. 

With Mother’s Day upon us, I thought about the significance that she is still with us after facing various fiery trials in her life. I climbed into the attic and found that old print that I had bought in Paris so many years before.

For that brief time, while my mom fought cancer, my sister and I were two of many buttresses supporting her, but since then, she has been supporting us. She got us both through college and those uncertain 20s. She was there for our weddings, and the birth of all of her grandchildren. She was there when my son Joey died and supported my family through our loss. We needed her. We still do. When I think back to her fight against cancer and how it brought Jesus to the forefront of her life, I guess you could say it was meeting Jesus in the fire that saved her and made her strong for the rest of the race yet to be run. When the smoke cleared on that terrible day in Notre Dame, the cross was still standing. In the life of my mom as well, after the fire, it was the cross that survived.