It was a place to seek sanctuary and find answers.
The woman sitting in the pew at the back of the church was looking lovingly at her daughter beside her. The young child was dressed all in white, she wore a pair of butterfly wings strapped to her shoulders.
The woman remembered the question. “Mummy, can little girls fly?”
“Of course they can,” she had whispered.
The woman turned the pages of the scrapbook on her lap, her fingers slowly caressing each of the pictures in turn. “All you have to do is believe,” she had said. She remembered the joy she felt when her daughter ran through the house, crying, “Look at me Mummy, I’m learning to fly!”
The priest had noted the woman sitting alone, but had held back for a while. The woman was shaken out of her thoughts by the movement of him settling quietly beside her. He hesitated before speaking. “I thought you might want to talk,” he said. The woman nodded; she slowly closed her book and hugged it to her breast. Above her, she could see her daughter hovering in the vaulted ceiling. She turned to the priest and tried to smile. “We lived on the third floor,” she said. “All of the windows there looked out over the trees below. In the summer, butterflies would sometimes land on the ledge outside and my little girl loved to watch them. She said their wings reminded her of angels.”
She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Every day my little darling would ask if little girls could fly, and every day I’d tell her that they could, if they practiced a lot.”
She took a deep breath. “I came out of the kitchen that morning to find her standing on the ledge outside. She wore the butterfly wings I’d made for her, and when she saw me she started to laugh. ‘Look at me, Mummy,’ she cried. ‘Look at me, I’m ready now, I’m flying.’”
She opened the book and offered up a large coloured photograph of the girl in her butterfly outfit.
Above her, the butterfly girl was looking down smiling, gently flapping her wings, just floating.
The distraught woman turned and looked at the priest. “Why would I do that?” she asked, with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why would I tell my daughter something that wasn’t true?”
The priest shook his head and fell silent.