Faces from a Tomb in Tarquinia

When my mother was dying she kept company with the Etruscans. We had moved her downstairs to the guestroom off the front hall where her bed faced a door that opened toward the winding staircase. Lying in bed she could see all the activity on the stairs through the transom, would watch all the comings and goings, and likewise we could peak in on her on our way down the stairs to see if she was still alive or had maybe turned into a corpse. She seemed atuned to our furtive glances as she always knew when to blink her eyes open and wave, “I’m still here!” When no one was moving up and down the stairs, she would commune with the Etruscans on the wall wrapping around the staircase, their faces in profile on a series of wood slabs representing the famous frescoes from the tomb of the Triclinium in Tarquinia. Dancers with lutes and lyres, twittering birds, cats seeking morsels, a joyous procession of the ancients sashayed continuously before her. Sometimes she would wiggle her fingers in a wave at the Etruscans, too, and giggle. I was never quite sure whether she was giggling at them or at herself.

My mother was thought to suffer a kind of dementia. What kind was never really clear even though doctors did MRIs of her brain and other tests that should have been able to detect such things. I thought she suffered from something willful—a stubborn determination not to cooperate with the world by engaging in its varieties of tedious discourse. How much more delightful to regress to some childlike realm of make-believe and whimsy. In a certain sense, I fully understood and was right there with her. It sometimes frightened me that I did understand and could see things through her eyes—what did such say about my own well-being? But certainly during her dying days, I was willing to go the distance, follow her feeble mind wherever it was willing to lead.

Once a week the staid Presbyterian preacher would come to call, usually after services on Sunday. He would stand politely at the foot of her bed in his preacher suit and collar, his back to the door and the transom, and ask her how she was doing and then perhaps say a prayer. One particular Sunday my mother seemed more inclined than usual to talk about her deathbed visions. She had been seeing ghost people and ghost dogs. I loved it! I would walk into the room and she would say, “Cindy, let me introduce you to Great Aunt Julia, the one I’ve told you about countless times, the one who died in the car-wreck at the intersection of Smith Avenue and Pinetree when I was in college? Well, that's her and, in her arms, that's her little dog, Sweetie.” The ghosts were so present to her, I could almost see them myself and hear the other side of my mother’s conversations with them and I’d begun to press the preacher about the spiritual basis of such visitations—they were universal, but what did the church have to say about them? He started to pontificate about the 23rd Psalm and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “Yay, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death…” My mother was walking through the valley—that’s as far as he would take it. “But you don’t understand,” my mother tried to explain to him, nodding toward the transom he could not see. “I’m not going through your valley—I’m going with them!.” The preacher smiled the smile he reserved for the insane, but I got it! She meant the Etruscans. Somehow, lying there all those weeks, she’d converted to Etruscan, at least in so far as her beliefs about the afterlife were concerned.

I'm teaching the Etruscans this week--am off this morning to the well, this afternoon to the Archeological Museum. I've been reading Mary Johnstone's book on Perugia and it's People, fascinated by her whimsical approach to history. I love a historian whose favorite means of research is to stand by a sarcophagus and let it speak to her. I am going to let the Etruscans speak to me. Perhaps they will have news of my mother.