Let me tell you about a church.
It's in a minor city, and it got bombed
in World War Two. And it's beautiful, and particularly special to Ms
T and me, a treasured memory from the past, a symbol of the future.
Returning from London to Australia more
than ten years ago, we passed through Lübeck for no better reason
than Ms T's family came from there in the late 19th
Century (it's a lovely little place, by the way, and very walkable).
On of the places we visited was the
Petrikirche – St Peter's Church – whose restoration after its WW2
bombing was “finished” in 1987. I put “finished” in quotes
because it won't ever be fully restored. The interior was destroyed
and nearly all of it lost, and that's how it remains.
When you walk in, you're struck by the
pure white of the interior, except that in some spots there are what
look like discoloured patches. It took us a while to work out that
those were the tiny, tiny bits of the destroyed decorations that the
Lübeckers were able to find, painstakingly and lovingly returned to
their original locations. It's very striking and very touching.
It's almost tasteless to make the
Petrikirche a talisman for our personal lives, but that's what Ms T
and I have done.
Five years ago, her auto-immune system
changed our lives and our relationship, and for nearly all of that
time, our futures have had a very constrained window: sometimes death
has been imminent, at others times we've let ourselves think a whole
six months or year into the future.
This year, due to an unexplained (and
now, thankfully, arrested) weight loss, Ms T's lead specialists went on the hunt for possible cancers, because her main therapy,
cyclophosphamide is so toxic. It took a bunch of procedures,
biopsies, imaging and nervous waits to lay that to rest. And we have
a future to think about; five, maybe ten years, I dare not think of
more.
We're still here, still together, still
loving, still married, desperately aware that things have
changed. We talk all the time, and a lot of that talk is about what
happened, where we are, and how we can get back what we once had.
We can't, we now understand. And the Petrikirche has become part of the
evening talk, as we try to describe ourselves to ourselves.
With a structure still standing, we
find ourselves walking through rubble seeking that which we can save.
We find pieces, talk about them, find where they once fit in our
lives, see if they can be put back, and talk some more.
Our small, private ruin is too
broken for perfection, but far too precious to abandon.
