Marvelous Menagerie

Last Saturday my husband and I went to see a Roman mosaic from Lod, Israel that takes up most of the floor of Gallery 1 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.  I didn’t want to miss it since the Legion is one of only four museums where it will be shown before it ends up on permanent display in Israel.  They’re calling it “Marvelous Menagerie” because the gorgeous mosaic images are of ordinary and exotic animals and mythological beasts.

The people who laid each little tessera in place have been dead for one thousand seven hundred years.  I stood at the edge, admiring the artistry and craftsmanship, imagining the laborers who made it, the artists who designed it, the owners of the villa and their guests and servants walking on it, the villa around it… and then l pondered the fact that I was thinking intensely about and honoring the work of people who have been dead for 1700 years.  I thought maybe they might like to know they were being thought of and appreciated.  And how absolutely certain it seems that they do not know, could not know.  That even if somehow individual consciousness remains after death, eventually after a few centuries of hanging around checking it out, they’d probably stop being invested in the ongoing story of what happened on earth after they died.  Or caring whether anyone ever thought of them and their work, some 2000 years in the future.  They’re just gone.

Even with three sisters already on “The Other Side,” and even though it’s certainly more real to me than ever before, I’m still trying to grasp the fact that I, too, am going to die.  This consciousness I am in possession of seems so immortal.  Maybe it is.  But I also have a very hard time imagining now, as my family religion taught, that my personal identity as Ruth Kalter is going to live eternally in some form.  Or care about how things turn out on earth.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Part of my problem believing in my own death is that I don’t really believe in my sisters’.  I know it as a fact that they are dead, but this also doesn’t make sense.  They were here, they were each a whole world; how can they be gone forever?  It may simply be denial saving me from the devastation of that unbearable truth.  It’s unacceptable, therefore it can’t be true.  Or, it must not be true because I can’t grasp it.  And this is how belief in the immortality of the individual persists.  I think this is called Emotional Reasoning (I feel this way, therefore it’s true) in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  It’s one of the 10 Distortions in Thinking that we are better off questioning when we catch ourselves at them. 

OK, none of this death stuff makes any sense.  And we can’t know what happens after.  We can only marvel.  We are marvelous animals, and we die.  But while I’m still alive, I’m wishing I could see how it all turns out, a few centuries from now.