So Much Destruction...

“So much destruction—I can’t bear to look at it.  My heart hurts.”  My father’s parents came to The U.S. from Germany in 1923. Transatlantic travel being much harder back then, their first trip back to their birth country for a visit was in 1938. He spoke often of the visit and the realization of what their country was becoming.  “So civilized a place—great philosophers, composers, artists, scientists—now it turned to brutal ideas.  A great place torn apart.”
The next visit was in 1951—a few years after the end of WWII. I was surprised to learn that my grandfather, Max, kept a meticulous journal of that journey. I read it recently having been given a box of mementos rescued from his attic’s eaves by a kind neighbor and by the demolition company tearing down my grandparents’ house (after it had changed many hands).
In the writings, Max recounts the ocean voyage, the changing colors of the sea, the anticipation. And then, when in Germany, he writes of the horror and sadness of his wife’s first sight of her old neighborhood. “All of downtown destroyed! Can’t find way around anymore—museum damaged—destruction—ruins throughout—most houses burned out…Wilma too shocked to cry.”  He writes this not in his native language, but in English, as if, I thought while reading, he was communicating  these things to me--his only grandchild and someone who did not speak German.
I put the journal down, so saddened by the vivid descriptions. Then, this afternoon, I got a text from a kind friend: It was a photo he took this very morning of the home my parents had lived in from the early 1970s until their deaths 30 years later. It was being bulldozed to make way for new townhouses. So much upheaval. So much destruction. How much, I thought, do we tear down in our lifetime? Not even buildings with solid foundations survive. Not human lives. Way leads on to way.
So what lasts? What can we count on in this ever-changing world? Where are humanity’s struggles and joys and loves and angers and fears and sadness and transcendence?  Maybe—maybe— it’s all in the telling of its stories. 
And in the listening.

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