Last week was February half-term. We
had planned to spend it with dear friends down south. January and February had
been relentless, and we needed this healing break. Then, two days before we were
meant to be together, we got the call. Unexpectedly, M was going to have to
begin another round of chemotherapy. We would not be able to stay with them
after all.
Quickly, efficiently, and with the grace
of God, Jo found us a Plan B. A holiday-let owned by the sister of a friend, in
a quiet seaside village just along the coast from a seaside town, overlooking
what, until the First World War, we commonly called the German Sea. And then we
grieved, for our own loss as well as for our dear friends, for life is not a
zero-sum game, nor grief competitive, but to be human is to weep—and to be
comforted.
On the last evening of our break, we
sat in the dark of a small seaside town cinema, having been sown to our seats
by an usher, having admired the sashed curtain and the cinema organ in front of
the screen. Thirty-seven people huddled together in the back third of the room—we
need one another, more than simply needing some distance from the big screen;
if we want to watch a film in the privacy of our own home, there is more choice
than you can imagine—while every so often we heard distant rumbles from one of
the other three screens. As I sat there, I thought of others, huddled with neighbours
and strangers beneath the streets of Kyiv assailed by the pounding of distant shells,
and prayed for peace.
And then the film began, the latest
adaptation of Death on the Nile. Opening on the devastation of a Belgian
landscape in the First World War. Providing a backstory for (Kenneth Branagh’s)
Hercule Poirot, a farmer caught up in the great conflict, a man who hoped to be
a farmer again, beyond this waking nightmare, and the husband of a farmer’s
wife, and yet who possessed a rare mind and a great deal of youthful certainty.
I was reminded of another retelling, not so long ago but on the small screen,
in which (John Malkovich’s) Poirot was a Catholic priest, whose neighbours ran
to the church for shelter as the Germans advanced on them, only to be trapped
inside and massacred, Poirot alone surviving, left to carry the burden of faith
in God and in humanity burnt to the ground, yet life carrying on. Agatha Christie
herself takes little interest in her creation’s backstory: canonically, it is
implied that he was a police officer in Belgium, but as Poirot is a notoriously
and intentionally unreliable narrator of his personal history, this can not be
taken at face value. He is undoubtedly a refugee who has made a new life. Why
not a farmer, or a priest?
Sometimes life gets in the way of our
plans. Derails them and then blows up the wreckage. It is not taking the road
less travelled that makes all the difference, nor even making the path by
walking it, so much as, what? So much as picking up the pieces and piecing them
together, in such a way that life can carry on, not as it was before but as it
can be now. There are no guarantees that this will be better than the life we
planned or hoped for—life is not a benign benefactor, nudging us into something
good we had missed at first glance, but the chronicle of all that happens, for
better or worse—but it has the advantage of being where we find ourselves. And
where we may be found. Where our wounds, visible and invisible, may be dressed by
love.
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