There’s an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. As we move through life and have many different encounters, we start to realize that we are all connected in ways we might not have expected. Sometimes joy for one person means tragedy for another—and sometimes those two feelings are experienced simultaneously.
In one story from CBS This Morning, reporters found a truly unusual bond between two women that started in a hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana.
It all started with Benjamin Hall and Connie Dispanie together in the delivery room.
Dispanie had just finished giving birth to the couple’s newborn son, Kingston. The two were celebrating the birth of their healthy baby boy. Still, the couple got a surprise shortly after the birth from one of the nurses. It was a letter from a stranger, addressed to “my dad’s angel.” It read:
“Even though I will never know your name, you are the first child born here after my Dad’s passing at 10:41am approximately this morning. When one life is taken, another is given — so you are the angel that I will relate with my Dad.
I hope your life and the life of your family has as many blessings as my Dad gave me and my eight siblings.
God bless you all!
Jamie Fontenot
Please keep my Dad in your prayers. His name is James. Thank you!”
As it turned out, Jamie Fontenot was the stranger.
Fontenot had written the letter immediately after her father, 86-year-old James Lee Grimmett died and she heard a lullaby playing through the hospital corridor over the PA system. That music signaled that a baby had just been born—and it was the music that inspired her to start writing an anonymous note.
Fontenot then handed the letter to a doctor and to nurse Cydney Begnaud—and things got even stranger from there.
When CBS did their interviews for their segment on “A More Perfect Union,” it turned out the newscaster had a personal connection to the story as well.
While interviewing Dispanie about the events, she gradually remembered who the nurse was who had given her the letter. A moment later, the TV host reveals that the nurse is his mother! That’s because Begnaud was the one who tipped the news station about the story in the first place.
After everything, Dispanie and Hall decided to give Kingston the middle name of James, in honor of Fontenot’s father.
As final closure for the story, Dispanie and Fontenot were able to meet face to face.
The two looked at one another with tears in their eyes and expressed their thanks and gratitude for the moment they had created together. Fontenot was able to hold and kiss baby Kingston and the two gave their reactions to the entire story. “Family is everything,” Fontenot said, “and if you don’t have faith you don’t have anything.” Dispanie put it even more simply:
“You just never know when a blessing is going to come and fall in your lap.”
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