“The Civil Protection Department has declared an uncertainty level due to a dangerously powerful earthquake swarm that began yesterday.” The Daily News. 2025.

Mrs Ruth Isa and her husband had been the caretakers of the Church and its grounds and cemetery for thirty years. Before them, there had been many caretakers in the centuries of their Church’s history.

Their caretaker-pay was adequate. In thirty years, their pay had been raised a few percentage points once only.

There were two reasons they could afford to live comfortably on their pay.

First, the Church provided them a small comfortable rent-free home at the foot of the Church grounds, adjacent to the Church’s cemetery.

Second, they had no children.

And, when her husband died ten years earlier, the Church Authorities had added her husband’s salary to hers.

Ruth was forever particularly thankful that the cost of her husband’s tombstone was allowed out of the Church’s funds.

Although she was in retirement age, the Church Authorities had generously allowed her to continue caretaking until she herself would decide to retire.

She had been informed by the priest-in-charge a day earlier that the Church was to be closed permanently before the end of the year because of the sudden outbreak of earthquake tremors in the County.

The Church buildings, so far, had not suffered any damage. However, the City engineers warned that before the end of that year, the Church buildings would suffer damage to some extent. And so the Church Authorities had decided to close down the Church, immediately, permanently. There would be a Church service to de-sanctify the Church buildings and grounds before the demolition began a day-or-two afterwrds.

The Church Authorities offered Ruth she could live rent-free for the rest of her life in one of the Church’s Old Age Retirement Homes in the Country.

She was thankful for the Retirement Home offer. She had accepted it. She had applied to one of the Retirement Homes, and had been accepted.

She planned to move out the day-before the de-sanctification ritual-ceremony, and to spend some time alone inside the Church the night-before the day of de-sanctification.

She hoped the earthquake tremors would allow her that last-rite.

Every day, the tremors were increasing in severity and frequency.

Every day there were reports of buildings being swallowed up somewhere in the County.

She had not informed anyone that she would not be attending the de-sanctification ritual-ceremony that would precede the demolition of the building. She felt the experience would be too painful for her.

Adding to her pain was her disappointment that the Church Authorities had decided on demolition instead of trusting God to protect the Church buildings.

A few days before that day-before, she risked frequent visits to her husband’s gravesite. His burial ten years earlier had been the last in the Church’s cemetery because there was no area for more burials.

The Church and its cemetery were centuries old. Nobody was certain just when the Church had been built.

Officially, the Church Authorities had announced the closure of the cemetery to visitors. Despite that official announcement, the Authorities made no attempt to enforce it.

Ruth was among the many parishioners who ignored the announcement. Her resolve to visit the gravesite at least once a day was strengthened by her observation that gravesites were continually disappearing into tremor crevasses. Her continuous desperate prayer was that she be there when her husband’s gravesite was being swallowed down, or that she had been there the last day it had been spared.

Toppled tombstones littered the cemetery; some tumbled along far from their original sanctified places.

The main strengthening of her resolve to be there every day was her pain at noticing that with each passing day, there were fewer grieving visiting parishioners.

In fear in tears and trembling she informed her husband that when she left to live in a Retirement Home after the demolition of the Church building, she probably would not be able to visit him at the cemetery regularly because of the earthquake tremors.

She felt obliged to inform him even though she despaired that the destruction of the cemetery by the earthquake tremors could make visiting impossible.

She expressed her regret she would not be able to take their gardenia flower plant with her when the Church was no more. She had planted the gardenia flower plant on his grave.

The Church Authorities intended to exhume and re-locate the graves whenever the earthquake tremors ceased.

The Church Authorities had assured her the gardenia flower plant and her husband’s tombstone would be re-located with her husband’s Remains.

She had planted the gardenia because she and her husband did not use cut flowers. From before they were married they had not used cut flowers. Together they had composed a poem they titled “The Cut Flower’s Vow.” She had the poem engraved on his tombstone:

“The cut flower's vow.

These cruel

Evil arrogant barbarians!

Late comers to the

Neighbourhood!

They chop us down

At our best in beauty;

Prop us up

To smiling watch

For days and days

We bleed in agony;

We slowly wilt to death,

Obliged to hear them praise

Our excellence they

Desecrate deliberately.

We've been here

Long before they came.

We will be here

Millennia when they,

Good riddance,

Are far less

Than nuisance

Nightmare putrid-memories!”

At every visit in those last few days, she believed her husband joined with her in her prayer that the Saint after whom the Church was named would protect the Church building from destruction by the earthquake tremors.

The ‘day-before’ arrived. The County was engulfed by an ugly mighty angry storm of rain and wind and thunder and lightning.

Because she expected it would be denied, she had not requested permission to spend time alone inside the Church, the night before that fateful ‘day-before.’

Ruth was inside the dark Church during that evil deafening weather.

She had intended to pray at the Carrara-marble statue of the patron saint after whom the Church had been named. She felt a fleeting moment of disappointment at discovering the statue was not at its centuries-old place at one end of the marble altar.

She peered around in the dark to locate the statue somewhere else. She did not find it.

Was she being punished for having dared to pray inside the Church in a place other than on a hard bench in the Nave, the proper place for nondescript though perfectly devout worshippers?

The rising turmoil of guilt inside her and the increasing cacophony of angry weather coming in from the outside, caused her to collide with and stumble against objects when she tried to find another place in which to pray.

She was resigned; that was her end. She sat on the floor at one end of the altar.

A posture of complete submissiveness in spiritual pain continuously penetrating into infinite endlessness, made it unclear to her whether it was merely a repeated thought or, indeed, a repeated silent prayer: “Please, protect this Church.”

When the de-sanctification Congregation and the Clergy arrived in clearest-of-clear weather the next day free of earthquake tremors for the first time in months, they found a calm clear lake where the Church building and cemetery had been.

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