Outside Notre Dame. Photo Credit: Lloyd Morgan
– By Scott Sayare –
PARIS — Amidst a pallid, unearthly Paris haze that seemed to stifle the horns and sirens and bustle of the city, a crowd of thousands gathered last week outside Notre Dame cathedral in hushed remembrance of the victims of Air France 447.
The lonely tolling of a churchbell called forth hundreds of Air France stewards and pilots in sunglasses and black suits, wings pinned to breast pockets, striding unspeaking through the onlookers in the stone courtyard.
Elderly French women mouthed prayers from the square’s stone benches, wiped tears from downcast eyes, many in their Sunday best. A cluster of teenage girls sat weeping on the pavement, stroking one another’s hair, hands cupping their mouths in shock.
No one yet knew where the plane had gone down, where the bodies were, what had happened.
“From one day to the next, life is upended,” said Elyotte Dangin Chadrin, kneeling in jeans on the pavement next to the girls, her white sneakers removed and placed neatly at her side.
She had come to support those whose loved-ones had perished, herself a survivor of loss: the death of an infant son, her husband’s suicide.
“I’ve had ‘crashes’ in my life,” she said, looking up to a clearing Paris sky. “But life is beautiful afterwards.
“It’s not the same life anymore,” she went on, smiling knowingly, “but there is still sunshine.”
Most came to pay their respects, to mourn a modern tragedy so horrific in its medieval brutality. Others were there for love of country, they said.
“When the country is laughing, I laugh,” whispered Bruno Orlando, slowly, his head in his hands, a French tricolore slung over the shoulder of his denim jacket.
“And when the country lives a tragedy, I am there as well. Especially then.”
A young flight attendant, his eyes rubbed raw — he wore a red “Securité-Safety” badge on his suit jacket — stood amongst the crowd, nervously twisting a chain of rosaries.
Mourners flowed out from the cathedral and into the evening streets and cafés, their faces frozen and stern in grief, many walking alone. A young woman wailed, buried her face in the shoulder of a friend while others stroked her hair, offered a water bottle, a hand, whatever small comfort they could.
She clawed at her friend’s back, her fingers desperately clenched, not letting go, the others watching helpless.
Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in the Associated Press on June 2-3, 2009.
