Time is the Wound

An essay on the inevitable

It’s been a while. Time’s arrow flies or drags, but it always moves in one direction. I can’t believe it’s already been more than a year since I lost my father. February was his birthday month. On the night of his birthday this year, I had a dream that I was searching for items at a house out in the Florida sticks. I awoke and knew the dream was about him.

A friend of mine texted me that his father had died recently and that he couldn’t comprehend the fact that he had received his ashes via USPS. Certainly, no one ever tells you that you will one day receive the remnants of your parents via the mail carrier. That the person you loved so much and who was so central to your life will one day be delivered to you the same way as your bills and junk mail. I suppose one could tritely argue that all of these items become dust eventually too. But it is sane to find this incomprehensible.

No one prepares you for the strangeness of loss, the way grief grips you in moments that feel like insanity. How isolating it all can feel despite friends and family emailing, texting and calling you at the beginning. This isolation is part of the disconnection and sterility of how our culture handles death.

We stick our heads in the sand and wall off anything to do with death. We aren’t allowed to have long public displays of mourning. We don’t have time off from work apart from a few days - if our employer even allows that. Beyond the funeral, which passes quickly, we have nothing to mark the enormity of the loss.

This loss is as enormous as the implosion of a star. And like an implosion that happens millions of light years away, grief unravels slowly after the initial big bang. The expansion of that loss never truly ends. The only thing that helps is to build up a new way of living to counter the impact.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

We don’t process death correctly because we have lost a connection to being alive, to savoring our lives each day. Instead we have a sterile, removed process in dealing with death. In many ways, that is how we drift through our daily lives as well.

Unmoored, isolated and detached from the essence of being alive. We take both life and death for granted.

To live. To be a body moving through time and space, bound to the rules of this dimension. Moving forward until we no longer can. The arrow of time leaves a deep wound.

As I was texting my friend back, I told him that I felt that the closest concept of death might be what Christopher Nolan was trying to get at - but didn’t quite achieve - in his film Interstellar. I offered this as a consolation, but felt stupid to even try to pin a pretentious sci-fi film to someone’s loss.

It forced me to re-watch the film to make certain I was correct in my assumption that he was positing that ghosts are interdimensional beings that can communicate through certain devices and that time and space aren’t what we think they are. That time isn’t necessarily an arrow; time is a dimension that can be climbed in and out of.

The rest of the film just moves the plot along to an ending that doesn’t stick its landing. But that particular scene inside the tesseract is haunting because Matthew McConaughey’s character can see every moment of his life - or his daughter’s - and recognize all the times he made the terrible mistake of leaving his family. But he can do nothing to change any of it, except by small communications as the “ghost” who haunts his daughter’s bookshelf.

Sometimes I wonder if my father is dealing with this same situation on the other side of life. Can he see every point in time? Is he able to communicate through electro-magnetic devices too?

“They say time heals all wounds, but time is the wound.”

In the film Lisa Frankenstein, which I recently watched while visiting my sister in Florida, I was struck by the above line as it was delivered. It pierced so hard I knew that those who made it understood loss. Zelda Williams directed it and we all know that she lost her father the comedian/actor Robin Williams ten year ago. We all felt that collective loss, as if he was our father who had died.

This line functions poetically. It has an essential truth. As we continue to live, we leave behind those we loved who are no longer with us. The film itself is a campy hilarious 1980’s-esque teenage romp, but that line felt like the heart powering its story.

I keep thinking about how we move forward through our lives. Time amasses regrets. It changes things. It pulls things from the past into the present, like the currents and the undertow of waves. A memory will bubble up here and there. And then you’ll realize that years have gone by. Like an ocean, time has moved you so far from the shore where you last saw the person or people you miss.

I’m in the middle of the Netflix series One Day. It’s a beautiful adaptation. Infinitely better than the film. It has so much truth in it that each episode makes me gasp. I feel like I’m watching scenes from my life play out in front of me. I suspect I’m far from the only person who feels this way. There’s an intimacy to the language and interactions between the characters and an understanding of how most of us move awkwardly through our 20s and 30s, messing everything up.

One Day opens with lines from the poem Days by Philip Larkin.

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

This is also a story where time is the wound. It’s only when we get to the very end of One Day do we recognize this.

All the time we thought we would have to spend with the person we loved. We think we have forever. We take it all for granted.

That is how we live.

—

Some Housekeeping:

I’ve been busy writing a long essay for an anthology I was asked to contribute to. I’ll probably publish only once or twice here in the next month. After that, I’ll kick up back to a more normal rhythm again.

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