And yet, the photographs also show something else. The way they looked at each other. The quality of attention each brought to the other’s presence. Mother Teresa led Diana to her private room. She closed the door. They sat across from each other in the small, plain space, two chairs, a window, a crucifix on the wall, nothing else.
Mother Teresa looked at her for a moment. “So,” she said, “you were in Calcutta.” “Yes,” Diana said. “I spent time with the sisters, with the sick. She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “I was there for a few hours, and I” She stopped. “How do you sit with that much suffering every day and not break?” Mother Teresa looked at her steadily.
“Who says I don’t break?” she said. Diana looked at her. “You break,” Mother Teresa said simply, “more than once. And then you get up again. And you find that getting up was possible, and that is enough for that day.” Diana was quiet. “But doesn’t it take something from you?” she asked, “to be so close to all that pain?” Mother Teresa thought for a moment.
“It takes everything,” she said. “And somehow it gives everything back. That is the only way I know how to describe it.” She looked at Diana. “You do this, too,” she said. “Not in the same way, but you go into the rooms that other people don’t go into, the hospitals, the people no one wants to be near. I have watched you for years,” Mother Teresa said, “the way you sit with the sick, the way you touch them.
” She paused. “You know already what I am talking about. That feeling when you leave, that something happened in that room that couldn’t have happened any other way.” Diana nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “I know that feeling.” “Then you already understand,” Mother Teresa said, “more than you think you do.” A silence.
Diana looked at the crucifix on the wall. “I sometimes wonder,” she said quietly, “if what I do matters, given everything else, given the context I come from.” Mother Teresa looked at her. “A dying man does not care what context you come from,” she said. “He cares that you are there.” Diana looked at her for a long moment.
Then Mother Teresa reached across and took her hands. “You are doing something real,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, not even yourself.” Diana didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “Thank you. I needed to hear that.” Mother Teresa smiled faintly. “I know,” she said. “That is why you came.
” Mother Teresa stood slowly. “Come,” she said quietly. “We will pray.” They went in together. They removed their shoes before entering, as was the custom of the Missionaries of Charity. Diana’s polished black heels placed neatly beside Mother Teresa’s worn sandals on the chapel floor. They stayed for a long time.
Diana was already at the door, ready to leave, when Mother Teresa stopped her. She turned to Diana with an expression Diana couldn’t quite read. “There is one more thing,” she said. Diana looked at her. “What is it?” Mother Teresa was quiet for a moment. She seemed to weigh something. Then one of the sisters appeared in the corridor, a small interruption, something that needed attention.
Mother Teresa looked up. When she turned back to Diana, something had shifted in her face, as if she had decided the truth could wait a little longer. “Not now,” she said quietly. “Not yet.” Diana waited, but Mother Teresa only took her hands one more time. “I will tell you,” she said, “when we meet again.” Diana carried that unfinished sentence for 5 years.
For the next 5 years, their paths did not cross again. This was not indifference. In the years between their Rome meeting and their final encounter in New York, both women spoke about each other with a warmth that suggested the 30 minutes in that private room had established something that did not require regular contact to remain real.
Mother Teresa of Diana frequently to the sisters and visitors who came to the convent, always with affection. She called her my daughter. Diana, for her part, kept the connection quietly. She spoke of the Rome meeting as transformative. She continued her work with the sick and the dying, the AIDS patients, the leprosy sufferers, the people the formal charitable world preferred to acknowledge from a distance.
They wrote to each other. The letters have never been made public, but they existed. And in one of those letters, Diana asked. She asked what Mother Teresa had wanted to tell her at the door. Mother Teresa’s reply has never been disclosed. But when Diana finally flew to New York in June of 1997, when she went out of her way, changed her schedule, flew from Washington to the Bronx just to see an 86-year-old woman in a wheelchair, those close to her said she seemed to be going with a purpose beyond the visit itself.
She was going to hear what had not been said. Mother Teresa had been confined to a wheelchair for months. She was 86 years old. Her heart was failing. The doctors who attended her were not optimistic about how much time remained. She had been in and out of hospital. The sisters around her managed her schedule with great care, limiting what she committed to, preserving her energy for what mattered most.
When word came that Diana was in New York and wanted to visit, Mother Teresa’s response was immediate. She would see her. She got out of the wheelchair. The people around her described this as remarkable, not just medically, given her condition, but as a statement of what this meeting meant to her. She had not stood for a long visit in a long time.
For Diana, she stood. They met inside the convent. The room was small, plain, the same kind of room as Rome, functional, spare, a crucifix on the wall. Mother Teresa sat across from Diana and looked at her with the same quality of attention she had brought 5 years earlier in Rome. “You look better,” she said. Diana smiled.
“I feel better,” she said. “For the first time in a long time.” Mother Teresa studied her for a moment. Then Diana said, “You said you would tell me. At the door in Rome, you said, ‘Not yet.'” Mother Teresa looked at her for a long moment. “I remember,” she said. Diana waited. Mother Teresa was quiet.
Then she said, “Before I tell you, tell me about the work. How is it going?” And Diana talked about the landmines campaign, about Angola, about the photographs that had changed people’s minds, about the hospitals she still visited, the patients she still sat with. She talked the way she talked when she was talking about something real, quickly, specifically, without the careful language of public statements.
Mother Teresa listened. When Diana finished, Mother Teresa nodded slowly. “You are doing what you were meant to do,” she said. “That is clear.” A silence. Then Diana said, “And the thing you wanted to tell me?” Mother Teresa looked at her. She was quiet for a moment, longer than felt comfortable.
