It was 12:38pm.

My mother had texted a link to a USA Today article, which wasn’t abnormal in the slightest. My family group chat receives an average of five article links per week. I was lounging in the Law Library between classes when I saw the text, and, since I obviously wasn’t too busy, I decided to open the link.

When I saw the headline, I instantaneously held my breath. I suppose I was hoping for the reality to be much less horrific than what was insinuated. But my hyperbolic hopes were dashed when I saw the photograph below. A photograph of the Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze.

My mother grew up in Paris. She moved to the United States when she was 18, but the entirety of her extended family still resides in France. She received the news from her mother and father, who were watching the live broadcast from their home in Vannes.

My mother sent a series of messages directly after the link: “Breaks my heart. My mom said the entire roof is on fire. And it’s spreading extremely fast.”

For the next four hours, I focused on nothing else. I simultaneously watched the live news feed, listened to broadcasters’ updates and interviews, and read articles online. I’m not sure what drove me to maintain such close attention. Perhaps I was afraid I would miss seeing something important transpire in the fire, but I don’t really think so. When I saw the spire fall, and fall again, and again (the footage was particularly devastating, and thus a broadcast favorite), I immediately wished that I hadn’t. That catastrophic image is forever ingrained in my mind. Instead, I believe my relentlessness was rooted in hope, hope that the fire would die down, that more firefighters were still set to arrive, that all precious artifacts had been removed. Hope that it would rain—you wouldn’t believe how many times I wished for rain—but rain never came, and most of my other hopes were left unfulfilled for hours.

At 2:08 p.m., my mother sent a photo of our family in front of the cathedral from 2013. At 2:57 p.m., my brother sent a photo he took of the cathedral when studying abroad in 2017. At 2:59 p.m., my mother confirmed in a text what I had just heard on the news, “Paris officials just announced firefighters may not be able to save it.”

My eyes welled up. As a generally unemotional person, this shocked me, but I couldn’t help it. I just wanted to cry. Imagining Notre Dame, an absolute wonder of the world, a symbol of history, faith, hope, art and perseverance. Gone. A new sentence being added to history books worldwide: “The great cathedral was destroyed in a renovation fire on April 15, 2019.” Only a ghost of the formal cathedral sitting on the Île de la Cité as tourists strolled by.

No more postcards. For some reason, that thought made the situation especially real. Paris streets strewn with postcard racks—the Notre Dame Cathedral nowhere to be found.

But why was it getting to me so much? I don’t live in France; I don’t walk past the monument every day on my route to school or work. I’m not religious; I don’t possess a deep-rooted connection to the structure as a symbol of my God and my faith. I’m not a fanatic of the Gothic era, or fine art and architecture in general. Why did it mean so much to me?

Only recently did I realize why. All of the above. It meant so much to me because someone does walk past the monument every day, because someone possesses a deep-rooted connection to structure as a symbol of their God, and because someone awes at the cathedral as an image of beloved Gothic architecture. It meant so much because Notre Dame is an incarnation of human endeavor and human soul.

At 4:12 p.m., CNN released an update that the cathedral’s structure had been saved, and that the fire wouldn’t spread to the north section. At 4:14 p.m., I let my mom know. At 4:15 p.m., I finally exited the broadcast.

Notre Dame still stood. And so did everything it stood for.