Emma Griffin

“While all of these are reasons that this story matters,I believe that there is one reason that eclipses all of them, and that is that it tries to honor the true story of this event. It is very easy for us to look at these plaster casts like they're some kind of artifact, a sculpture or a reproduction that someone made nameless, faceless shapes that sort of spark a morbid curiosity in us. But the reality is that every single  one of these plaster casts was a person exactly like you and I. They had families and they had dreams. They drank wine and ate dates and wrote their names on the wall. They laughed and cried and felt joy and boredom and disappointment and every feeling in between today, all that we have of those dreams and aspirations and memories of entire lives are hunks of plaster and brains turned to glass. As romantic as the story of Pompeii is today, the reality is that these people's final moments were horrifying, and it is impossible to imagine the fear that they felt as they saw hell rip through the sky on a clear October morning or the acceptance that they reached in their final moments as suffocating, scorching death thundered down the mountainside.

Today, their final moments are told only by bones, some encased in plaster, frozen in time. Some of them are in groups huddled together for shelter. Others of them are families, men and women protecting their children. Doors barricaded with furniture in a futile attempt to protect the only thing that's important. There are a few that are in pairs. Friends, lovers, strangers brought together by the end of the world, or a master and servant made united and equal in the face of death. And finally, some by themselves, someone's friend, someone's child to someone's love. Someone who spent their final moments on this earth alone as the world caved in, looking at the rough face in a cast or the hollow sockets of a skull makes it hard to see the people that they were. They may have spoken a different language or held different beliefs and were born at a different time, but they were us. Archeology is filled with facts about lost civilizations and figures of bones and burials. And while to a degree science needs to leave emotion at the door to remain objective, when the gloves are off and the paper is published, it’s important to remember that each fact and figure concerned the lives of real people.

I tell these stories not just because they're interesting but because I believe that we, the living, have a responsibility to tell the stories of the dead as honestly as possible. That those with a voice have an obligation to speak for those with none. And if we can find empathy for the faces and minds that once filled these hollow skulls with light so many years ago, we may begin to find the same empathy for the people that we share the world with today. That by giving a voice to lives thousands of years ago, we may also begin to find a voice for lives as precious as yours and mine today that are viewed as less than so.

When you look at these final moments preserved in plaster or a burial from a site on the other side of the world or the systems today that dwell on our differences, to desensitize us to their atrocities while lives like yours and mine are reduced to numbers, statistics and casualties, remember that our differences are trivial and our similarities run as deep as the blood that pulses through our veins, and that no matter who we are and the differences that we choose to dwell on, we will all spend eternity the exact same way with hollow eye sockets and the worms as our chambermaids.”