The icon of Our Lady of Damascus would make it into my mother’s magazine, but I suspected the point of the excursion had simply been for me to see it. Most Catholic iconography seemed like drama for the sake of drama to our irreligious family, but this particular image came to mean more and more to my mother. She would talk about it afterward, and as her death approached, she decorated an entire wall at Dar Riħana with pictures of the Madonna and Child. She even became involved in the restoration of one of the city’s first churches, and once its main parish church.
