(Thoughts from an evening in a tiny room in the eternal city. A brief departure from my peninsula.)
Do you remember the first time you comprehended your mortality?
Mine came in exactly the same moment I first fathomed the concept of eternity. I was eight years old, spinning off the edge of a parquet dance floor after the heel of my patent-leather Mary Jane caught on a corner that had lifted a little after hours of merrymaking that had jostled it from its post in the grass. I remember tripping backwards a few steps, free from the blanketing of the reception's white canopy, dramatically letting myself fall backwards onto the damp blades, onto my shoulders. It didn’t hurt; this I remember, too. I was breathing heavily, laughter fizzling out of me, out of breath from the stumble. The smocked pattern of the cornflower dress I wore quivered with every rise and fall of my chest, matching the grass' movement. I vividly remember noticing a rhythm to this pause that didn't match the music's. I remember craning my neck upwards, realizing that instead it matched the sky's.
Something about the obsidian blackness of that sky, dotted with stars like sprinkles and the fake snow we made in science class, enraptured me. What for eight years had appeared so static and so regularly pretty seemed suddenly to pulsate with a life of its own, just like the party beside me. Now I was a bit removed, a spectator of both moving masses. Lying horizontally, I was slammed by a sudden awareness of the chronology of this present moment in relation to the others I had lived. I remembered my father's cousin tossing my brothers and me into the pool when I was three; now, if I were to sit up, I would glimpse his brand-new wife out of the corner of my eye, her eyes sparkling, him lost somewhere inside the tent. What was inside was something in my past, and also something exciting and new. What was out here was...forever.
And something about the metal bulb-ended 2006-era CGI-looking timeline of life that instantaneously popped itself into my brain then took my breath away again. Maybe it was prompted by imagining my birth, then myself at age three, and then marriage in the span of a minute—maybe this was too much for an eight-year-old brain; whatever the case, for the first time in my short life, the "end" of the timeline materialized in my mind like a rock. Will it be dark like this sky? I remember thinking. Or full of stars? Will I be in the stars? Will it... But even at age eight I remember remembering something obnoxiously simple like, But wait, it's eternal life; I believe that. So, having somewhat choppily corrected myself, I switched my little spinning gears off and away from the treacherous black orb of “ending” that had begun to race my heart and latched onto a different concept: “eternity.”
Forever, I remember whispering to that big sky. If it’s forever, it must go like…me in Heaven, for ever, and ever, and ever… I gulped and let the incomprehensible vastness of this idea firework and flay out a bit against my tongue and the roof of my mouth like Pop Rocks… and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and… Ever? And then ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and…
At some point, a good four or five minutes must have passed, and unable to cope with the impossibility of completing the eternity-sentence I had initiated, I shot up and returned to the distraction of the reception. But I remember entering a house on the property later in the evening for a little while and, upon exiting, pressing “play” again on this mind experiment, frantically trying out my “and evers” at different speeds, with sudden pauses and re-starts. As if taunting myself.
In the weeks and months that followed, I would pick up this game at random. I think I was more confused at my discomfort than my inability to fully wrap my head around the idea of eternal life, to “finish” the “sentence.” I surely have good catechists in elementary school to thank for already instilling in me, at age eight, the awareness that we, as humans, don’t have to (and can’t) comprehend some things in the faith, hence the name: faith. But I also had somehow absorbed the idea that eternal life was meant to be happy and joyful, or else it wouldn’t be the end goal—that was how I rationalized it, and I think that was why I kept succumbing to the temptation to dwell on this never-ending clause. I kept it close at hand because I knew that death wasn’t supposed to be a scary end, and I believed it—but I wanted to feel the joy the concept of eternity was supposed to evoke. I wanted it to feel beautiful, living, like I knew it should. An eternal new.
I’ve still never finished the sentence today, but its futility no longer haunts me. Developments through high school and college in my vocabulary, in my experience of liturgy, and in my understanding of theology, have slowly unwrapped the sources of my discomfort and replaced it with a peace. I accept what I cannot know. I understand that I, as a human, am temporal; God is not. I have learned that we do not believe we will be just floating orbs in Heaven, but that we will have glorified bodies. I understand that every celebration of the Mass gives us a glimpse of Heaven, of eternity, here on Earth. I have replaced the glitching leaden timeline in my mind with a Sharpie-sketched rendition of a touch-screen bubble (Time).
Now, I am perched on a wooden stool in Rome, alone, to write, considering again my life as just a moment. I am staring at the golden globe stationed atop the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, its topmost point. Apparently almost 20 people can fit inside. From here, it glistens at me sumptuously, but it resembles nothing larger than a period. It seems to beg me to acknowledge how I have virtually bookmarked my “and ever”s, punctuated this mind game for good. Now, I jump on an electric bike and pedal forward into Roman traffic, solo. I walk miles through cities I do not know with ease. I pause in a park for nothing more than adding a semi-colon to my afternoon. I work in bullet points.
No longer does the unfathomability of eternity make me stumble so. It doesn't make me feel scared or alone—just curious. I understand eternity as a life, something I cannot fully grasp because it is so good. Like when someone tells you that you will never in a million years guess what they’ve gotten you for your birthday. I have replaced my fathoming of the eternal new with the eternal now. I crave each moment I can peel back a tiny bit more of the tissue paper to discover a new bullet point of potential answers to the formidably awesome, eternally intriguing question of precisely what we’ll see, feel, and do after life . . .
As always,
Ellie
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