When Lisa told me she wanted to take Gabriella on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, I was skeptical. All we had gone through since her birth had left my relationship with God strained. But she felt we should try anything that might help, so we decided to go.

Now we had endured a difficult trip, only to find ourselves stranded in our cramped hotel, a short walk from the holy site. And it was pouring. I had hoped this journey would restore my faith, but I was having doubts.

It was not my finest hour. I had been negative as we sat for five hours on the tarmac, cynical as we raced across Paris to meet our connecting flight, and bitter as the setbacks mounted after we arrived in Lourdes. After a lengthy wait for the rain to slow, we abandoned the parking garage and returned to the Ibis.

The desk clerk handed me a message. Our travel agent had called, referring us to the tour packager in Paris. While I went back downstairs to fetch another bottle of formula from the hotel bar refrigerator, Lisa tried several times before getting through.

Coming into the room, I heard her expressing disbelief. Now what?

I tuned the conversation out, playing with Gabriella. I rocked her and whistled on the corner of the bed. Her smile broadened.

“There’s a pilot strike on Air Inter,” Lisa said after she hung up.

“What the hell does that mean?” She looked at me with pity. I had promised to watch my language, and here we were, so close to the shrine. But I was fed up.

It meant our return flight to Paris was canceled. We would have to fly back a day later, costing us our one afternoon in the capital. We had both been looking forward to that, figuring it might well be our only chance ever to see Notre Dame or the Louvre.

After more bitching, I resigned myself to spending the rest of the trip in this room, but I agreed to bottle my anger.

With our whole first day wasted, we headed to dinner. It slowed to a drizzle, and loading Gabriella in the car seemed like less of a hassle. Perhaps it was the reduced weight on my shoulder, with the massive chip hacked away. I only wondered how soon it would grow back, the way they said our daughter’s skull would close over her surgical site.

It was early and most of the restaurants weren’t serving dinner yet. The one open place we found was at no risk of earning a Michelin star. When we finished, it had stopped raining.

“Do you want to try?” Lisa said.

“To go to the grotto?” She nodded, and I added, “It’s after six-thirty, but we might not get another chance.”

Already it was dark, but a strange light flickered within me. This wasn’t hope, was it?

We parked near the holy site, unloaded Gabriella into the stroller and rolled down the narrow street to the bottom of the hill. The Pyrenees formed a rainbow of pastels on the horizon. The sun faded to brown, aided by a layer of clouds, but it appeared the weather would hold out. At least for a time.

I promised myself again to try.

We reached the outer fence. Many of the guidebooks portrayed Lourdes as a hotbed of commercialism, but this wasn’t so bad. A few vendors under umbrellas sold trinkets and shirts, hardy types who looked as if they’d braved the rain for hours.

Pilgrims rose into view on the entry ramp. People just like us.

Up the slope, a stone facing rose to a railed walkway. A narrow pipe leader ran along the wall, opening into taps every several feet. Lisa realized we had no bottles with us, even though she’d been planning to bring holy water to family and friends. We chose optimism, assuming we would get back in the two remaining days.

The piping wound back around the rock-face to a spot cordoned off by movie-theater roping. I was unsure what to expect, but it hadn’t been this. A few dozen pilgrims sat on benches on the perimeter and stood at the entrance to the ropes. Some were infirm, a few in chairs or stooped over canes or walkers. Compelled by pity and recognition, I wheeled to where I could get a better view.

The Grotto, riven into the rock-face, glowed with candles small and large and gigantic, all rising to the blue-robed figure of the Virgin Mary enshrined above. Dozens of flames, planted on the walls on both sides, twitched in the breeze. Dark clouds rushed overhead now, restless. I felt a sudden rush, plunging me to unknown depths.

All the torment of the past few days paled and faded, and then the anguish of months and years, the heartbreak of Gabriella’s short life. What it was – renewed faith, or joy, or something wondrous or mystical – I couldn’t define. But I saw my Christianity differently, a bright light as from within.

For an instant I was alone in the sweet light, apart even from my wife and child in the stroller between us, and yet also bound in something new.

What had conjured such a feeling, I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was the sight of pilgrims bent prostrate before the shrine, maybe the familiarity of the Madonna statue that seemed identical to the one we saw in our church every week. Had I needed to journey across the world to find the faith within me? I found it hard to believe it could be that simple.

We took turns taking our daughter up toward the Grotto. Lisa came back beaming and handed her to me, and her face split in a smile, perhaps because she knew she was going again. She gurgled happy sounds on our climb, and tears filled my eyes. At the top, a handful of pilgrims waited and we left them a respectful distance. Then it was our turn.

I carried Gabriella into the Grotto. Candles glowed in the night, with a smell like burning honey. Mary arched above, out of reach and yet able to touch us. Water dripped down the wall, natural – no spigots here. This wetness was purer, and it splashed onto my hand and then over the scar on her skull, nourishing the healing process. We circled the crescent, a slow and gentle sixty seconds, with holy mist filling the air. And then we emerged into the evening.

All at once I knew no guilt. For thousands of years, pilgrims of all religions had endured hardships and strife far more extreme than our few days to journey to holy sites and shrines. I had been weak, but my family had helped me overcome my obstacles and find my reward.

Within a few days we would begin a return trip that was blessedly uneventful, but first there was more to come at the holy site: Lisa dunking herself (and the son inside her) and then Gabriella in the famous baths; our visit to the basilica on the side of the hill; the three of us joining the candlelit procession to the underground church. But it was our brief time in the Grotto that gave me the foundation to rebuild my faith upon.

Soon after the final pathology report, Lisa suggested we take Gabriella to Lourdes. Our daughter was little more than a year old when she had the tumor excised from her skull, with the frozen section indicating the growth was malignant. After an excruciating wait, we got the diagnosis we prayed for. It was benign.

It had been an exhausting sixteen months. We were relieved and thankful. After the Level II ultrasound, we were optimistic as well about Lisa’s second pregnancy, which was about halfway along.

We would take a pilgrimage to the holy city of southern France.

We chose Air France, in part because they guaranteed a bassinet on board the plane. In Paris we would transfer to Air Inter, their subsidiary for trips within French borders, for the connection to Tarbes, a short drive from Lourdes.

On the day of our departure, we went to JFK. An Air France representative met us at the registration desk and assured us everything was as planned. When we boarded, however, we discovered that the bassinet we’d reserved was broken. We told the stewardess we had counted on having a place to stretch out during the flight. “It ees not possible,” the stewardess said with a girlish shrug, not the last time we would hear that charming expression.

Fortunately, we had purchased a third ticket for each leg to ensure our daughter could take off and land in her car-seat. Lisa gave her Benadryl and brushed a quick sign of the cross.

After a while I asked, “Why aren’t we going anywhere?”

Then the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker, first in French, then in English. The flight would be delayed for up to an hour.

By shifting her between the car seat and my arms and Lisa’s and a blanket we stretched across two seats, we kept her quiet for that hour. And for the one that followed. One announcement led to another, with the third inviting passengers to get off the plane and wander the airport. So far, however, Gabriella remained calm, so we stayed put.

At last we took off. We had spent five hours on the tarmac, during which Gabriella remained quiet. But by the time we crossed over Boston, the Benadryl had worn off and her patience vanished.

She cried and screamed and complained the entire flight. We were frustrated and embarrassed. I remembered my own annoyance on airplanes when parents couldn’t prevent their baby from crying. Now that was us. It was everything I’d feared about air travel with our daughter, and it has put me off flying with her ever since.

We landed at Orly with a groggy sense of losing our way. Instead of getting in after midnight, our flight landed in early morning, and we had slept little. We also missed the last connection of the day to Lourdes.

Many people have nightmare travel stories, and this was ours. We worried about where we might stay without that connection, for the Ibis Hotel we had reserved included a refrigerator to chill our daughter’s formula. The airline said they could get us to Pau, another nearby city. We collected our bags and staggered through the airport, then caught the shuttle for De Gaulle, from which the Pau flight would leave. We barely made it and three attendants waved us through. Maybe they were impatient with our tardiness, maybe we just felt wretched by this point.

We got to our seats and fastened our belts and secured Gabriella’s car-seat. She was tired, already whining.

Then the steward came over to us. “You must hold the baby,” he said.

“That’s why we paid for the third seat,” I explained.

He shook his head. “It is French law,” he said. “The baby can not take off in seat. Mother must hold her.”

“She took off in this car-seat on the flight from New York,” I said, incredulous. “That was Air France.”

“It ees not possible.”

“We can’t take off with her unbuckled,” Lisa said. “It’s not safe.”

The steward had been conferring with a stewardess not ten feet away, and now she approached. “In France, the child takes off and lands in the mother’s arms,” she said and smiled at me. “Or the father’s.”

We refused. Tense minutes passed before the pilot or co-pilot came out. He again explained the French law.

“Look,” Lisa said. “We’re going to take off with her in her car-seat. If someone wants to arrest me when we land, that’s fine, but I’m not risking the life of my daughter.”

It occurred to me this was the defiance of a mother, a quiet strength I could only admire.

At last, the pilot nodded and they backed down.

We landed in Pau and no one hassled us, but they seemed glad to see us deplane. After a lengthy discussion at the Avis counter, trying to explain why we were seeking a rental there and not in Tarbes, we reached our Volkswagen Golf Twingo. There was just enough room in the “trunk” for our suitcase, but we squeezed bags of formula and baby food into the front passenger side and affixed Gabriella’s car-seat in the back.

We set off for Lourdes, but every time we approached the route out of Pau, we saw the same landmarks. Could that possibly be the riverfront, again? Gabriella, exhausted from the trip, arched in her car-seat. She wanted nothing more than to lie down with a bottle to her lips, not sucking but only mouthing, a warm wet pacifier. Finally, we found a gendarme and got directions to the National Highway.

We reached our hotel in Lourdes in late afternoon. The room was spartan, with the double bed and Gabriella’s cot leaving a six-inch margin of hardwood around much of the perimeter. “Where’s the refrigerator?” I asked, dread setting in again.

I descended to the lobby. The desk clerk smiled back at me. I explained that we were supposed to have a refrigerator. She said they had no refrigerators in their rooms. “We need it for the baby’s bottles,” I said.

She shrugged. “It ees not possible.”

After a while, she offered to store the bottles in the refrigerator of the hotel bar. We accepted with gratitude.

After a room-service meal, we all fell into a deep sleep. Gabriella woke up hungry in the middle of the night. I struggled into clothes and headed back to the lobby, dreading the inevitable message. But not this time. A young man fetched our bottle bag from the refrigerator.

By noon the next day, we were ready to venture out to the holy site. It was a comfortable walk to the shrine and the grotto, and we had the stroller. But it had started to rain, hard, and everything we had come for waited outdoors and unsheltered.

After much deliberation, we squeezed back into our Twingo and drove to the Information Center. It was closed until two o’clock. And the rain picked up.

We parked in a garage a few blocks from the center. When we reached the surface, the weather was unrelenting. We opted to wait it out, but Gabriella grew cranky, whining, complaining. We returned to the car and drove back to our hotel.

My nerves frayed. I wondered whether we would ever reach the holy site. I wondered if I cared any longer.

To be continued…

As more of us do than would care to admit, I look to my faith in God more when my needs are greater, and they had never been greater than they became when we found ourselves responsible for our fragile little daughter.

Like a glass ball balanced on my head, I lived in constant fear those first few years that she would fall and shatter. So I prayed to God. Or rather, I beseeched.

As a child, I considered God an unknowable abstraction. My faith was a collection of rituals, the scapular from my First Communion, the rosary beads, the incense dispensed through the congregation and the edges of the cross on my throat on the Feast of St. Blaise. When Gabriella came, He became all-powerful, able to bestow a much-wanted baby but no less able to make her sick.

And so, just as much as I counted on Him to spare us, I also accused God of creating this situation in the first place. I recognized my blasphemy, but I was weak.

Before Gabriella was born, Lisa and I prayed the Fatima devotion over five months. On the first Saturday of each month, we attended early morning mass at the church or the convent, among a congregation of a dozen. We offered rosaries and went to confession. We had no idea what was in store for us, but thought it couldn’t hurt.

For a while after our daughter’s birth, I wondered what the point had been. I felt a twinge because I’d forgotten the rosary on one of those Saturdays, fearing that I had ruined the whole thing, but I was unable to believe in an unforgiving Old Testament God. I concluded our Fatima ritual had been a waste of time.

Later, Catholic guilt or fear surfaced another possibility. What if the Fatima devotion had helped Gabriella to survive her dehydration or other crisis of those early years? Piety was easier when things were going your way.

Several well-meaning souls offered us a compliment, saying that God only gives children like Gabriella to parents capable of handling the challenge. I would bow my head and thank them for their faith in our abilities, but in the wee hours, when my despair was the darkest, I would wish we were less capable.

Many nights I felt as if locked in a dungeon. Our daughter lay awake, complaining and impervious to sleep, while Lisa and I took shifts for ninety minutes or two hours at a clip. As the clock ticked toward the end, I remember the relief (I didn’t see it as selfish at the time) as I staggered down the hall and tagged my wife “it”.

Patience has never been one of my virtues, and it was a relief to make it through my shift without losing my temper. Other nights were worse. Anger would swoop over me and I would stomp around her bedroom, taking in the closet doors I painted, the crib we purchased, the bumper and pillow we received from loved ones, all to ready her room for her. Unfortunately, I was less ready.

My bitterness was never aimed at her. She was wholly innocent.

I didn’t blame Lisa or myself either. From the earliest diagnosis, none of the explanations for Gabriella’s condition suggested we were responsible. That was a huge blessing.

I wasn’t raised to believe in fate. So I blamed God.

I begged to know why so many children were born to uncaring or abusive parents, abandoned or even killed. Why, I pleaded, had this happened to our child?

In those moments, I had no use for the logic that God gave us the challenge because we could handle it. In the middle of the night, every whinge, every gasp, every surge of vomit would send me into despair. More than once, I pulled off my golden crucifix (never hard enough to break it, mind you), gripping it as if to crush it in my fist, tossing it aside, even hating or cursing God. I knew we were lucky to have Gabriella, and I hoped that she was fortunate to have us, too. There was no doubt she needed us. Almost at once I would feel remorse, crawling after the discarded chain, my hands pawing the rug, until I found it and slipped it back around my neck with a tiny prayer of apology, certain that it was too late, that I had assured myself of eternal damnation.

And that led me to another conclusion, flickering in a grim corner of my mind. Maybe Gabriella was my shot at redemption, even heaven. I questioned whether I’d had much chance before, based mostly on the sin of apathy.

I’ve always been an optimist, but the early travails and the diagnosis sapped me of my positivity. What if my overreactions in the dark had cost me my opportunity before I even recognized it? I rejected that prognosis, accepting that God was forgiving. If only I could forgive myself.

I seized this new chance, finding something to get me through the bleakest nights. Like an alcoholic in recovery, sometimes I slipped, but I had found a flicker of faith. It had been with us all along, in the innocence of our daughter.