Playing with Time

I have decided to play with time as much as time has been toying with me. Going against the season and moving around or through the hour faster or slower than sixty minutes is my next way of moving through this grief. Using seconds like a lifetime, I inhale and exhale a single breath cycle. I can defy time’s expectations of me. It is not a rebellion as much as it is a joining the timelessness that lives outside human constructs. Perhaps, I am attempting to merge with the mythology and mysticism that seeps into everything so I don’t have to feel the pain of loss and time passing that can dominate so many hours each day. Timelessness, when I can find it, is the perfect pain-free place to hide or reside. There, in the liminality, all possibilities live paradoxically existing side by side. It is where I find peace, comfort, and Edmond.  

The funny thing about timelessness, where there is no time, is that it cannot last or be sustained indefinitely. It is ironic that these states of being provide an experience of eternity that is fleeting. Typically, timelessness doesn’t last long but leaves me with a longing for another moment of reprieve from the painstaking tasks of moving through the monotonous, metronome tick, tick, ticking of linear time. Time, as we know it here in the earth realm and if we are able to step into presence, is a perpetual letting go and releasing of each moment that occurs into the past. It is a constant experience of aging and dying and loss. We lose time continuously. I take the timeless moments in as gifts, blessings, and mercies. I cannot always control when or how they will arrive, I only hope that they do. And, they do come. My ability to find presence in as much of my day as possible seems to increase these merciful moments.

With time as my leader, perhaps even my companion or fellow protagonist, I observe how we, the humans, have tried to control it, structure it, and create a certainty within it. We know what is next because of our constructs around time. Watches, calendars, alarms tell us what to do and when. We have only continued to improve upon what the ancient Egyptians started with our smart calendars, smart watches, and smart phones that help us be efficient with our days and nights, even tracking our sleep. 

Yet, our sense and source of control around time has not prevented the inevitable. Time does eventually come to an end, sometimes before we are ready and sometimes long after our capacities to endure a given moment have worn thin. Death stops the clock on life as we know it. Then time keeps going with or without our consent and readiness. Despite what has been lost or left behind, time goes on.

Linear Time, the antagonist or even the villain, takes us and those we love before we are finished, before we have resolved our differences, or fully lived our dreams. I could hate Time, plot its demise if it were a being with a form and shape and vulnerability. There is no killing Time, however. 

So, I will befriend what I cannot control, own, or destroy. 

Ellie and I began decorating for Christmas before Halloween. A spooky life-size skeleton with a pumpkin in its lap sat on the stone retaining wall side-eyeing us as I placed a red and white pillow on the bench by the front door. A week or so ago, I moved snarky, judgmental skeleton to the shop shelf. Slowly unfolding the Christmas season, we continue to place wooden Santas on the piano, find the proper angle for the rusty wire wreath on the gate, and imagine where the twinkle lights we haven’t yet purchased might go. We may finish preparing for the season before Christmas Eve, or after, I just don’t know yet. Only time will tell. We might leave the glowing lights up all year long if they feel good. What feels good seems to change from day to day, hour to hour. Sometimes memories, photos, and candlelight are a comfort, and sometimes any one of those things guts me. 

Days grow shorter as the Earth’s tilt shifts incrementally. But we do not wait for the gentle darkness to fall little by little each day. Instead, clocks are changed going backward in time to force the darkness abruptly upon us. Our bodies are forced to adjust by an hour. If only we could really and truly go back in time, do things over, better, or again. If only I could turn the clocks back not by an hour, but by seven or eight months, holding on to the knowing I now have.

I welcome the darkness and night. Sleep, when time and I agree about when that will happen, is where I find him more of the time lately. Dreams take me into the timelessness where I am young or old, and Edmond is alive and next to me.

The fig tree in the garden, the one planted over the placenta that held Ellie, is playing along in this game with time. After losing all of its leaves in the heat and drought of summertime, it is sprouting new leaves pretending it is spring even thought the calendar confirms autumn. Even thought the temperatures lately are much cooler, the tree is bursting with baby leaves. Perhaps I will plant something and we, the fig tree and I, can live in our own time zone and season in a time capsule of the garden. Grief is powerful, and maybe even powerful enough to create an entire ecosystem.

I miss you. I love you. I write it on the glass walls of our shower. The image stays in the steam and disappears when the room is less humid. But, my words reappear again the next time I step under the streams of hot water that offer me comfort and a place to cry. Those words I say over an over because they are true are never really gone, never really not there, only more or less visible. I miss you. I love you. When I step out of the shower, the words are in reverse, backwards like my world. .uoy evol I .uoy ssim I

Spending time each day doing what is purposeful helps me pass the minutes and hours until I can sleep again. Washing dishes, folding laundry, and cooking meals have a new flavor of purpose and presence. These actions are no longer chores. They are not things I must do in order to do the things I want to do. I often do not even know what I want to do. Want and desire are a slippery slope into untethered territory, too easy to leave my body and get lost there. So, these tasks are the focus that keeps me from spinning off into the oblivion of grief. It is a place to put my foot, busy my hand, and know that I am making ritual out of the ordinary. The tasks are acts of love and creativity. These ritual actions are my agency in the world and a way to participate in time both linear and liminal. It is my needle and thread sewing myself here so I can stay and remain connected to those I love who are here and to those who are in other realms. 

Some would call it a distraction or staying busy, but it’s not busy work; it is meaningful, purposeful, presence. It would be busy work if I was not in awareness of the action connected to love and intention. And, I hate being busy. I detest it! It is why I left the dominating fast-paced-life of city and suburb to be here were things can move slower more often. I know what I am doing. I am not distracting myself from the pain by making plans or starting projects. These conscious actions and activities that are imposed or invited may bring frustration, joy, or any number of emotional states. None of which diminish my sense of pain and loss that lives in every moment and within every breath. However, these other experiences I engage give new textures and shift the context of the grief I cannot be without, set aside, or ignore. 

There are no appropriate adjectives to describe how difficult entering the holiday season without you has been. I knew it was probably going to hurt, but I had no idea how much. And, I cooked a kick-ass turkey and our family’s favorite French apple pie. I even found a recipe for the turkey and followed it. Were you shocked? I was, but I wanted to be like you. I properly thawed it over days, brined it a day in advance, buttered it, and was as diligent about it as you would have been when roasting it. Carving was not so pretty, but our people are pretty forgiving especially when their mouths and bellies are full. There were eleven of us at the table eating, drinking, laughing, storytelling. It was good. I know you were there. I felt you mixing into the casual chaos that erupts when we all circle up. That morning during all the prepping when the house was still quiet, I poured our traditional glass of sparkling wine. I toasted you and cried a lot. I felt you there with me too. I talked to you and you got me through the morning. Thank you, my Love. I heard you. I felt you. I love you. I miss you.

Time shifts things and it also moves in a circle. Things seem to come back around, landing similarly as they have in the past so we can look again or feel some familiarity. Thanksgiving was our favorite holiday. It was the first holiday we spent together. Edmond, my three children, and I stayed in a little cabin on the river here in the town we eventually made home. Edmond made me a carrot cake because my birthday was on Thanksgiving that year. He gave me a hand-carved wooden giraffe whose arms and legs move. After nearly twenty years, I still have it. One of the giraffe’s arms is now detached and sits next to the giraffe that sits on my book shelf in my bedroom, our bedroom. Last year, my birthday also fell on Thanksgiving, and it was the last time we were together for those two coinciding celebrations. 

This year, my 51st birthday happened the day after Thanksgiving. It was not happy. It was hard, and I did not know how to make the time pass more quickly. At eleven in the morning, I could not see a way through the rest of the day. I found myself asking why, the question of no return. In grief, any other question can be helpful: who, what, when, where, how, but not why. Why is almost never helpful inciting judgment, blame, shame, or worse, the defeating silence because there is no way to answer that line of questioning. When I begin to go there, into the why of it all, I know I need someone to reach in and find me in the tangle ball of grief. They did. Friends stopped by, called, texted, sent me treats, and held me here through the horrible day that I grew older than Edmond. 

It isn’t right. It is out of order that I am now older than you. You missed your 51st birthday by sixteen days when you died, when your clock ran out, when time stopped for you but kept going for us. I used to tease you about being older than me, remember? You were six whole months and a school year older because of the time of year when our birthdays fell. Sometimes you thought is was a little funny when I teased. Sometimes you did not. When you didn’t, I would tell you I loved how the grey in you hair came in at your sideburns. I loved how your beard, before you shaved your face in the morning, sparkled with silver. You were so handsome and fit and took such good care of yourself. I miss you shaving at your sink. I put my makeup on at your sink now. And, you can definitely put eye makeup on even while you are actively crying. I love you so.   

I lit a fire in the early morning on my birthday. There were no candles or cake, just a fire ablaze in our fire place. Keeping the fire going was a purposeful task of the day. The kids asked me what I wanted to do as they offered birthday wishes and hugs. There was nothing I wanted to do or have or eat. So we spent the day doing ordinary things like working on school projects and cleaning the kitchen. I did make it through the day, and am grateful for the days that have come since, the ordinary time that doesn’t have an association between Edmond and I. 

And, my ordinary time is another person’s difficult one. Another friend has lost her person, her partner, her spouse, and she has joined this shitty club. When I heard from her, my heart broke with her, and it called me into purpose and service, not because I can fix it or make it better. I cannot. But, because grief and loss has been my personal experience over my lifetime, and it has also been my professional offering, I know I can stand with her and hold her hand. This path is getting crowded, and I suppose it will only become more so as time passes. It is what happens in one way or another for those of us who remain here.