Letters from...
The only thing that cures the bite of the absurd
Whenever I go to Portovenere, to the church of San Pietro, I return to John’s gravestone – a young man in the prime of life who had signed on to the Teesbridge and who is simply listed as having ‘drowned’ on 25 December 1915. At Christmas, there were surely toasts and carols on that British merchant ship. Perhaps no one shouted ‘man overboard’?
Church of San Pietro in Porto Venere (Google Creative Commons)
Every time I go to Portovenere, to the church of San Pietro, which stands there like an extraordinary vessel, moored forever to the rocks, I return to John’s.
In the small cemetery overlooking the sea, there is a white gravestone, standing in a row amongst the others. It reads: John Hasluck Cole Symington, born in Blackhill, Great Britain, in 1894, died in Portovenere on 25 December 1915. A twenty-one-year-old lad, an officer cadet on the British merchant ship Teesbridge, which was, perhaps, carrying spices and tea from the Indies to the capital of the Empire.
I first saw that gravestone by chance. But I stopped, lost in thought, thinking of a young man from a hundred years ago. John, a young man in the prime of his life, aboard the mighty British steamer. The Great War had already broken out, but – as I checked on AI – there was no battle on 25 December in the Ligurian Sea. John is simply listed as having ‘drowned’. At Christmas, on the Teesbridge, people were surely toasting and singing. Perhaps no one shouted ‘man overboard’? What an unlikely death, what an absurd death, I tell myself, yet I find myself envying that grave a little, forever overlooking the light of the sea at Portovenere.
(The Teesbridge, too – I found out via AI – was not so fortunate. In 1929, it sank in the ocean off St John’s, Newfoundland. It literally vanished into thin air, along with its thirty-one crew members.) Yet, for some reason, this John is very dear to me, like a son. He died as a young man, so far from home. And who knows when his mother found out.
Just one thing, amidst the indescribable beauty of the cemetery with the sea on the horizon, soothes the sting of the absurd, of the nothingness that weighs upon me with every passing second. Beneath the name ‘John’, on a cross, three words are engraved: ‘TILL HE COME’.
It is archaic English, with the verb in the subjunctive. It is the exact same expression found in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: ‘Till He come’, until He comes.
Sleep, John, until he returns. When we finally see each other face to face. And all this pain, this anguish, this suffering will be over.