Random drives often turn into discovery of things you’d never even imagine, which is at least part of the point.

This particular day, we saw a sign that said “Gravesite of Charlene Richard” and being prudent and inquisitive travelers, off we headed to see the gravesite.

Turns out that Charlene Richard was a very devout (VERY) young girl from the area who passed away in 1959 from leukemia; she was 12 years old and had been diagnosed only two weeks after her death. In addition to her grave, the cemetery had markers to commemorate her short (and devout) life, a plastic box where you could leave prayer requests for her, and a donation box.

I made photos, which I mostly forgot about until just the other day, and we headed on.

When I was researching what exactly we’d seen I ran across this article from the New York Times. It’s long and brings in a lot of narrative threads:

• Charlene may have been a saint.
• It’s easier now than it used to be to be officially proclaimed a saint.
• The priest who met Charlene just before she died was friends with Mother Theresa.
• Mother Theresa apparently made several unannounced trips to Louisiana to hang out with the priest.
• In 1985 the Diocese of Lafayette (Louisiana) (which includes the church Charlene and her family attended) paid a multi-million dollar settlement to victims who’d been abused by a local priest. And it was this case that started the global sexual-abuse-by-priests scandall.
• When investigators from the Vatican came to town in 2019 to investigate Charlene’s possible sainthood, they exhumed her body and removed her fingers for “collection as relics.” (The finger-removal was the most interesting thing in the article, brought up in the 4th paragraph and never mentioned again.)
• No word on Charlene’s priesthood.
• Or on the whereabouts of her fingers.

near Richard, Louisiana
photographed 10.22.2017

PS – If you’ve ever been to southern Louisiana, you probably already figured out that the name of the town – also Charlene’s last name – is pronounced REE-shard.