There are people who have everything a person might want and still can’t hold it together. Then there are people whose lives should fall apart, and who somehow manage to stitch themselves whole.
We hear a lot about the first group - libidinous golfers, dissolute actresses, narcissistic politicians - and very little about the second. But they’re all around us, carrying burdens that might break an ordinary person, giving no hint of how it is that they have quietly survived.
If you happened upon her at the Zoots in Wellesley, you might not have noticed anything remarkable about Vyoulit Mikhayel, the 64-year-old seamstress with the short gray hair and the pearl earrings. You might not notice her at all.
At first, even the nuns at the Jamaica Plain convent where she works two days a week had no inkling of the awfulness that put Mikhayel on the long road to their fluorescent-lit sewing room. She has made habits there for five years, pulling magic from thick bolts of blue fabric, her fast, manicured hands stitching skirts and veils that always fit perfectly.
“One day, she asked me to pray for her daughter,’’ said Sister Bernadette Reis, a member of the Daughters of St. Paul who supervised Mikhayel. “She did it very hesitatingly. I said, ‘About what should I pray?’ ’’
Mikhayel had always babied her younger daughter, Renee, born in 1965 near Beirut. The active girl was too big to have her hand held crossing the street, but Mikhayel took it anyway. Her older daughter, Pauline, had her own bed, but Mikhayel and Renee slept together.
Mikhayel was raising her girls alone. Her husband disappeared in 1975, caught up in the civil war that roiled Lebanon for 15 years. One sunny day in 1981, the bombs shut the schools, and Renee, 16, went out to gather mushrooms for an evening omelet. But, unable to resist, she ate them all by herself.
By the next morning, she was gravely ill.
“The doctor asked me, ‘Where is her father?’ I said, ‘I am father, I am mother.’ ’’ Mikhayel recalled, sitting in her convent sewing room on a recent afternoon, crying. “He said, ‘I have to be honest with you.’ I said: ‘Don’t tell me anything. I will take her to another city and another country. . . . I will take her anywhere.’ He said, ‘We need Jesus to be on the earth to save her. No one else can.’ ’’
Renee slipped into a coma and died. After that, Mikhayel’s days were misery, and her nights - without her younger daughter beside her - were hell. She refused medication to dull the pain. She threw herself into her sewing, and her Maronite faith, taking consolation wherever she could find it.
“I say to God, ‘You take one, and you leave me one, I have to thank you every minute.’ ’’
The years drained away. Pauline married and had children and left for Saudi Arabia. Mikhayel’s mother and some of her siblings went to the United States. She was busy, but still consumed by grief. Come to America, her mother said.
And so, at 50, Mikhayel launched herself into a new life, and a new language.
“Sometimes, I felt like I had a big building in my head, it was so heavy,’’ she said. “English is so hard.’’
She loved Lebanon. But here, she has a big, extended family, a church and convent that sustain her, and distance from all of the places that remind her of Renee.
“When I have some time for myself, I do some handwork,’’ she said. “I don’t want to think about that bad past time.’’
This week, like every week, Mikhayel will be sitting behind sewing machines at a bustling suburban dry cleaner and a huge, spotless convent. It is the work of a lifetime, mending pockets and inseams and a wounded heart.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. 
