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.

Mother's Days

A year ago on Mothers Day I was in Illinois visiting my mother at Arden Courts Alzheimers Assisted Living.  She had moved there from her independent living apartment just two weeks after her husband Will had died.  They married when she was 70 and he was 75, hoping to have a few good years together.  They had 18.

Back in February, I had gone to Illinois for the funeral and to arrange for the care she would need now that he was gone.  My last sister Martha, who lived nearby, had died in August, just six months before, and I was now the only daughter left.  Will’s daughter Linda and her husband had been managing many aspects of my mother’s life as well as Will’s, with amazing devotion and generosity.   Once Martha was gone and I realized how badly my mother’s memory was failing, I stepped in and did all that I could from California and during a visit in November.

And then Will died, at age 93, on February 6, 2010.

So there I was, frantically trying to make arrangements to keep her in her home with round-the-clock care.  It wasn’t working.  It would be double the price of assisted living and I would have to manage it all from California.  I wanted so badly to do the best thing for her.  One night, leaning on her walker in her living room, she looked at me and said, “You are doing a really good job, Ruth.”  I will never forget the look on her face as she stood there or the quality of her voice when she said the words I’d been waiting 57 years to hear.

I was proud of the way she accepted the necessity of moving to assisted living.  This was when I most appreciated her matter-of-fact, practical, down-to-earth nature, which otherwise had left me stranded in the more complex and creative parts of my personality.  Before dementia really set in, she was the kind of person that just wanted the facts and then let’s get on with it, if that’s how it has to be.  I didn’t feel guilty that I was moving her, just a heavy sadness that her life was shutting down towards its last chapters.

She also felt it, and made another unforgettable statement as we sat down to dinner at the round oak table in her kitchen, the very table from my childhood. 

“I’ve lost my husband, and now I’m losing my home, and I’ll never have another one.” 

My mother didn’t often express her personal feelings; I felt honored to be entrusted with this intimate disclosure from her heart.  But I almost couldn’t bear the poignancy of those words.

Arden Courts turned out to be a lovely place with exceptionally wonderful staff, where she felt at home and content for four months until she broke her hip, had surgery, and went to a nursing home for rehab.  From there I moved her, for the last time, to Berkeley Pines Care Center, here in California.  

Where I visited her yesterday, Mothers Day 2011, with a card, flowers, a new shirt, and a Happy Mothers Day balloon which will last at least a week, reminding her that I think of her, and visit her, and love her.  She still has a daughter.