CHAPTER TWELVE

How to Heal a Broken Heart: Mimi’s Story

Paris is always a good idea.

—AUDREY HEPBURN

YOU ARE THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD AND YOU have your whole life in front of you. You have a career in real estate, working with your father, and on weekends you go antiquing with your mother. You are the youngest of four daughters. Your mother is adorable—curvy and funny and madly in love with your charming father. Your father calls the two of you his Lucy and Ethel. He’s a runner and slim and he loves the fact that his wife is curvy and girlish. Whenever she sees him, she will say in the most charming whisper, “Oh, here comes that handsome Walter.”

You and your mother share a love for antiques. You shop the flea markets; you collect vintage dressing tables and French linens. You visit Paris and get to know all the markets. You are the auntie who takes your older sisters’ children to Paris as a graduation gift. Ah, the Paris expert.

Oh, and you are in love with Nigel. You are already talking about long-term plans. He’s in great shape. He’s a runner and strong and healthy, just like your athletic father.

You are thirty-five. Your dad is sixty-seven. And then, without warning, your father dies.

And he is gone. Just like that. And in that moment, your world is reeling, and still the changes and the loss have just begun. Only you don’t know that yet. You believe everything can go back to the way it was, and true, you and your mother are so very, very sad at losing her beloved Walter, your beloved father.

But you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and keep going. You and Nigel get engaged. You buy the wedding dress, you plan the reception, and you purchase the invitations. Things are moving forward. Life renews itself. Things begin again.

And then Nigel dies. He is only forty-four years old. And he was a runner. But still, he has a brain aneurysm in his sleep and he is gone. And this is not the first time you’ve lost your love. You were engaged when you were twenty-four and your fiancé died tragically in a water-skiing accident. You say, “That’s it for me. I’ve got my family and I’ve got my work. That’s enough.”

You are now thirty-eight years old. This world, you think—it is breaking you. You cannot take any more of this loss.

And then, one year later, your mother dies. She lost her Walter. She lost love. Of course, this is not what the doctors say. They say she died of a series of ministrokes, but you know the truth. She died of a broken heart.

It happened in 2005, and now you are thirty-nine years old. And it would seem that there is nothing left for you in this world, and so you do what generations of women have done before you—you pack your bags and you go to Paris. This is what Mimi did.

NOW VOYAGER

It’s a brilliant day in early October and I am meeting Mimi Bleu, the creator of Belle Inspiration Magazine. Mimi launched the digital magazine (www.belleinspiration.com) in 2010—it’s all about celebrating joie de vivre. At Café Bonaparte, we sit at the tiny café table facing the sidewalk, order our coffees, and begin our talk about life and love and Paris and women.

Mimi has a wonderful warmth and sweetness about her that is so comforting. She has beautiful hair and bright hazel eyes that twinkle a little when she laughs. And she does laugh, quite a lot. After everything that has happened to her, she certainly has not lost her sense of humor. She tells me her story of how her broken heart was healed.

“I had never come to Paris by myself before, but after everything that happened, I desperately needed a rest. It was May and so cold! I’m a Floridian, and I came dressed like a Floridian, so I had to buy all-new clothes.”

Truthfully, this sounds kind of fun to me, but I don’t say anything. She tells me that she stayed by the Champs-Elysées, near Ladurée—the famous patisserie where they make those magnificent macarons.

One evening, shortly after she arrived in Paris, she was strolling down the avenue when a man in a coat, carrying a briefcase, was coming from the opposite direction. As they walked closer and closer to each other and their eyes met and locked, she repeated over and over again to herself, “Do not talk to anyone. I am not here to meet anyone!”

Mimi takes a sip of her coffee and explains that this part of the Champs-Elysées is famous for pickups. Her eyes sparkle as she explains to me, “You just stand there for two seconds and some dope says something to you.”

And so, once she passed the man, she slipped into a café and ordered a hot chocolate. She was cold and tired. The place was almost empty, so she sat at a corner table. She smoothed her skirt and picked up the menu and when she looked up again, there he was, walking in the door—the man from the street, the one with the coat and briefcase. This seemed very strange to her. After all, on the street, he was headed in the opposite direction.

“So I knew he must have backtracked, and I think, Oh no, I’m not up for this!”

But, apparently, he was up for this, because once the man spotted her, he planted himself at the table next to her. By this time, Mimi had ordered her hot chocolate (or chocolat chaud, as the French call it).

He didn’t realize she was an American, and so he leaned over and said to her in French, “I know where you can get an authentic hot chocolate.” She responded in English and then he quickly switched to English, and they talked and talked and talked. And talked. He told her his name is Jean-Pierre.

“I felt instantly at ease,” Mimi confesses to me.

“But I was cautious. I was alone in Paris and on the plane over I had made up my mind to be careful because I just wasn’t myself and wanted my parents to be proud of me. Still, I noticed his extremely dark eyes. That was the first thing to catch my attention. They were hard to resist! He also had this heart-melting smile to go with it and a nice, strong build.”

He said, “There’s another café up the street, just three blocks up, and they have much better hot chocolate, and you’ll be safe.”

He explained how this particular part of the boulevard was a little bit tricky for beautiful women and he wanted to protect her from the local riffraff. But she refused his offer. And then he asked if she would join him for dinner. And again, she refused. He asked her if she’d like to get a drink with him, and she said no.

“I did ask myself, ‘Why not?’” she tells me, “But I was unhappy.”

Mimi explained that after that she figured she’d never see him again. However, that’s not what happened, because for the next few days, she would see him around the corner from her hotel, always at a different time. She bumped into him at random times on the Champs-Elysées. As it turns out, he was working nearby. During one of these encounters, he said to her, “Just dinner?” And she smiled and said, “No, thanks.”

But after these almost-karmic encounters, she did begin to feel something. “I actually kicked myself for the rest of the night for not accepting his offer.”

Finally, after running into Jean-Pierre for the third day in a row, she couldn’t sleep, and she kept thinking about this mysterious French man.

SLEEPLESS IN THE CITY OF LIGHT

The next day, after a night of insomnia, she slept in and didn’t leave the hotel until three in the afternoon. She bought a copy of the Periscope—the newspaper that lists current exhibitions and events—and she found a bench. Mimi sat and looked at the paper, and then she noticed a man’s legs next to her. She looked up to find Jean-Pierre smiling at her. He said, “Okay, I’m not following you. Clearly, this is meant to be.”

Once again, he invited her for a coffee. And this time, she said yes.

And nineteen months later, they married. Yes, of course, Mimi met Jean-Pierre’s family and Jean-Pierre met Mimi’s older sisters—who, as Mimi puts it, “wanted to make sure little sister was thinking straight!”

Mimi and Jean-Pierre have now been happily married for eleven years, and she has found a new life in Paris with the man who was always meant for her. He just happened to be French.

Oh, and what does Jean-Pierre say about Mimi? Well, this is what he tells me: “When I saw her coming down the street, I thought, There she is—the one I’ve been waiting for. It was destiny.”

Mimi offers this advice on finding love: “Be patient. But when the right time comes, it is always easy. When he’s not right, it’s not easy.”

Today, Mimi uses her expertise in the field of antiquing in Paris to offer private curated tours. She brings boutique owners from the United States and around the world, as well as individuals, couples, and lots of mother-and-daughter teams. She collects small sterling silver frames, and she loves “a good French desk,” she says. “They are very feminine,” she tells me, and then adds, “The key to antiquing is to practice restraint.” She smiles at me with the wisdom of a woman who has lived and lost love and loved again.

CHANGER LES IDÉES

Can you imagine what might have happened if Mimi had stayed at home, in Florida, bereft and broken-hearted? Well, she most assuredly would not have met the love of her life.

No, Mimi found love because she did what smart women do when they have hit a wall. They travel. They shake things up. They try something new. They change les idées. This expression doesn’t simply mean to change your ideas or change your mind. It goes deeper and includes the idea of changing the way you think, changing your habits, your environment, and your worldview.

This change can be something big and dramatic, such as going to an ashram in India, or it can be something small, such as taking a pottery class. It can be joining Habitat for Humanity or something tiny such as changing how you wear your hair and painting your kitchen walls tangerine. Or chartreuse. Or aubergine. This tiny change begets another change and another change—and before you know it, you have pulled yourself out of that rut and created a new groove that has the potential to completely shake up your life.

You see, we get used to our routines. They feel familiar and safe. And when tragedy strikes, or when our hearts are smashed to pieces, we naturally want to retreat to what is safe and familiar. We want comfort. And as contradictory as this might sound, this is not the time to seek comfort, but to stretch and grow and challenge your own assumptions about who you are and the world you live in.

So, dear voyager, be brave and take flight. Your heart will thank you for it.

Parisian Charm School Lesson

Let go of the notion that there are money-back guarantees when it comes to love.

Think of your heart as a muscle. It must be stretched and used and broken and healed and then even broken again before it is strong and resilient.

The French do not think about “getting back in the game,” but rather how they can comfort and console their wounded spirit. French women take their time with this healing process, and you can, too.

Know this: when the time is right, love will return, and it will feel easy.

Cultivate your own secret garden; where can you find your personal wellspring? Still, it’s important to get out of your comfort zone and take this opportunity to shake things up. Perhaps you need to book a trip to Paris. But then again, perhaps you need to return to your ancestral home in Puerto Rico or follow your intuitive voice that tells you that you must see the northern lights this summer in Iceland. Then again, if you’re obsessed with Victoria and Downton Abbey, then go to England. Or perhaps you realize, as Dorothy did, “there’s no place like home.” Then return. But first, go someplace new and meet new friends. Open your heart.

Parisian Charm School Pratique

Your heart should have an emergency first aid kit at the ready, because while you may not have a broken heart at this moment, one day you will have a broken heart, so prepare.

Make a list of the things that bring you solace and that make you feel strong.

Ask yourself if there is a place you might go to find your courage once again. You don’t have to go there right away, but you might put a photograph of this place in your emergency kit.

Finally, live your life with an open heart. Yes, it may get broken, but you will survive.