The Stranger on the Train

I was on the train from Brussels to Paris in March of 2017. It was a Tuesday morning, not a busy train. I had a window seat. A woman sat across from me at Midi station — older, perhaps seventy, dressed simply, carrying a small bag. She nodded when she sat down. I nodded back. We did not speak.

I was in a difficult period of my life. My marriage had ended the previous year. I had recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that was not serious but was chronic and required ongoing management. I was not in crisis, but I was tired in a way that went deeper than sleep could reach.

I spent most of the journey looking out the window. The woman across from me read a small book — I could not see the title — and occasionally looked out the window herself. At one point I noticed she was holding something in her hand, turning it slowly. I could not see what it was.

We arrived at Gare du Nord. The woman stood, gathered her bag, and left without looking at me. I sat for a moment before getting up.

On the seat where she had been sitting, there was a Miraculous Medal.

I picked it up. I looked toward the door, but she was already gone — the platform was crowded and I could not see her. I stood there holding the medal, not sure what to do with it.

I put it in my coat pocket and left the train.

I am not a practicing Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but I had not been to Mass in many years. I knew what the medal was — I recognized it from childhood — but it had no particular significance to me at that point.

I kept it anyway. I am not sure why. It seemed wrong to leave it on the seat, and wrong to throw it away.

Over the following weeks, I found myself holding it occasionally — the way you might hold a smooth stone, for the simple physical comfort of it. I started reading about it, out of curiosity. I read about Catherine Labouré. I read accounts of people who wore it. I read about the chapel on the Rue du Bac.

In June of that year, I went to Paris for work. I went to the chapel.

I have been back three times since. I am still not sure what I believe, or how to categorize what I believe. But something shifted in that period — something in the way I understood my situation, the way I held the difficulty of those years. Not resolved, but differently held.

I have never been able to explain the woman on the train. Perhaps she dropped the medal accidentally. Perhaps she left it intentionally. Perhaps she was simply an elderly woman who lost a medal on a Tuesday morning in March.

I do not know. I know that I found it, and that it mattered, and that I am still carrying it seven years later.

Some things do not require explanation. They only require attention.