AN OLD LADY AND A YOUNG LADY

• Share

The place seemed as unlikely as the coming together of the two principals. In June of this year, Princess Diana went to visit Mother Teresa in New York City's South Bronx, where the founder of the Missionaries of Charity was recuperating from an illness at one of her order's residences. Surrounding the world's two most recognizable women were the dusty tenements and gutted cars of the not yet revived area. The Saint of the Gutters was in her element, which more recently had become Diana's too. That is why the princess came to meet the nun, to pay her respects to the woman whose devotion to the poor and dying she was beginning to absorb.

So they met and chatted about the work they loved, for no more than an hour. Diana helped Mother Teresa rise from her wheelchair, and the two of them emerged from a private conversation holding hands, to be greeted by squealing children in a crowd. Diana, in a cream-colored linen suit, stood over her companion, in her sari, the way Billie Burke dwarfed the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They were affectionate toward each other, put their faces close to each other. Mother Teresa clasped her palms together in the Indian namaste, signifying both hello and farewell. The princess got into her silver car. And that was that.

Now they are dead, within a week, and one wonders how to grasp what has been lost. In a way, their deaths are the ending to two stories. Princess Diana's was the less significant but the more enthralling, a royal soap opera played by real people suffering real pain. When she was killed, her story was curtailed, and the silence that followed was overwhelming. One reason that masses stood in lines all over the world is that they knew a story they yearned to hear, and thought would go on, was over.

Mother Teresa's story was more of process and had fewer elements with which the audience could easily identify. For most of the years of her life, no cameras followed her when she bent down in the wretched streets of Calcutta to take dying people in her arms or when she touched the open wounds of the poor, the despondent, the discarded and alone. When the Nobel Committee blasted her with fame, she had already written most of the tale of her life, which was without much plot, was propelled by a main character who never changed direction, yet had a great theme. The end of Mother Teresa's story is not the end of her order's work, which is one reason (her age is another) that her death makes one sad without shock.

The two women were united by an impulse toward charity, and charity is a tricky way to live. A nun I know in Brooklyn, Sister Mary Paul, who has worked with the down-and-nearly-out all her life, once told me, "People in the helping professions are curious. I think they may feel something is missing in their lives. There can be a lot of ego, a lot of vicarious fulfillment. One wants to see oneself as a good and giving person. There is nothing wrong in that, but it can't be the only goal. The ultimate goal must be a change in the system in which both the giver and taker live." She doesn't like the word charity except in the sense of caritas, love. "Love," she said, "is not based on marking people up by assets and virtues. Love is based on the mystery of the person, who is unfathomable and is going somewhere I will never know."