On Time

Uncompromising. Unyielding. Indomitable. Immutable.

I was looking for a record of one of my increasingly numerous passwords in the notes app on my phone, and I came across a few thoughts on time that I wrote back in July of 2021 when my mother was dying:

And yet in the changelessness of these movements, glances, and sounds, there is a glimpse of the eternal; a reminder that though time moves inexorably, some moments linger outside it’s march, to lay in our hearts the hope of redemption.

John Keats asserted “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It’s a nice try, but he’s wrong. Sometimes truth is horror: a loss that is irretrievable, a grief inconsolable, a betrayal so brutal we are never quite the same. Truth, though, is that time moves; and with us takes it all - all our longings, all our failures, all our glories, all our loves.

What had struck me was that although Mum was indescribably altered by sickness and age, there were still times when I saw her as she truly was, as she had been in my youth, and it was the cruellest and most heartbreaking thing. She could be both there and not there in the span of an instant, and there was no predicting it. But these tiny worlds of milliseconds where she smiled or looked or said one or two words transported me to a place of comfort and security of such keenness it was almost unbearable because I knew it was utterly momentary. But there she was, just for a heartbeat, and it was beautiful in its familiarity and I was ok. And then I wasn’t. Because for the most part, she was dying.

Time has fascinated me since I was a child in church, reading the prayers typed in bold in The Australian Prayer Book with the rest of the congregation each Sunday. As we read them with one voice, I wondered how many others around my city, Adelaide, were reading the same prayers that morning, and how it would sound if I could hear us all at once, in unison. Then I would sing a hymn and wonder the same thing, and I would wonder how loud it would be if I could hear everyone who had ever sung this hymn all at once in one massive and simultaneous rendition. I would wonder how vast the space would need to be to hold us all, and what kind of space it would be. Was there a cathedral large enough? Or could we all gather somehow in the floor of a valley and hear our song echo against the valley walls? I found the thought engrossing. And I loved the idea of God being outside of time and space, and the possibility of Him being able to hear and take delight in what I could only imagine.

And as time passed and I grew up and Mum grew old, I began to think more and more about what time did to us, and how it changed us. (I didn’t think about how it changed Dad because Dad never changed, he has always been as he currently is, perhaps with slightly fewer age spots and more hair, and that is a story for another day.) The thing about Mum getting old was that she got sick. She got an illness called Lewy Body Dementia, and it was brutal. It has the symptoms of both Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia, and so it slowly erodes both the body and the mind. It’s awful. It took more than nine years for this illness eventually to claim Mum’s life, and as I visited her and watched her ail and ebb away, I reflected frequently on the passage of time.

Since I lived interstate from Mum I could only see her once or twice a year, if that, so the difference in her was very noticeable between visits. After one visit in 2018 I watched the film adaptation of “The lady in the Van” by Alan Bennet. It contains the brilliant line: “There is no ‘marking time’. Time marks us.” And it sat me down because I had just been with Mum, and having spent an entire day with her, I felt irrevocably stamped and marked by what I had just seen. Mum was still talking then, and still able to walk (with assistance), but she spoke little, and it might not be based in reality or the present time. Spending a whole day with her felt like three days, because time seemed to move so slowly as I sat with her. She couldn’t converse like she used to, she couldn’t move or do things for herself like she used to; even lifting a cup of tea to her mouth took at least ten seconds, then she had to manage a sip, then at least another ten seconds to put the cup down again, and she might not put it where she had wanted it… and I would watch intently the whole time in case she spilled it. Time seemed to warp and slow, and yet it didn’t because it can’t, and the whole experience had challenged me in patience and endurance.

Because she couldn’t interact as she used to, it was up to me to work out how to pass the time so we didn’t just sit in silence for the day. I read her psalms, I sang her hymns, I read her prayers, and I imagined it all overlaid with all the times I had sat beside her in church for the entirety of my formative years. And once, when my voice broke because I was trying not to cry reading out a particular psalm which had a particular poignancy, she looked at me intently, directly into my eyes, and said clearly and without emotion “Keep going”; two of maybe twenty or thirty words she said to me for the entire day. (Mum’s personal decisions to keep going at various points when others might have given in is, like Dad’s changelessness, a story for another day.) I felt the instruction like an admonishment, and I kept going. That day was not the day to have a philosophical debate with Mum over the prudence of attempting perseverance at the point of emotional overwhelm.

That day I also gave her a manicure, watched a gardening show on the telly with her, ate with her in the dining room of her Aged Care facility, and went for a walk around the block while she had a rest. It took for ever. And it was the strangest thing, because in reality it was just the same length as any ordinary day. And that’s the mystery. And I was marked by it. Time does not speed up or slow down. Either the minutes and the hours are full or they’re not.

Two years later I visited her over New Year’s Eve, and recorded the following:

The passage of time is a great leveller. It moves at the same pace, in the same increments, ever onward, for all. In some moments it seems to fly, to escape us; at others it would appear to have stopped entirely. I feel it most keenly when I study the faces of those I love, and as I watch them perform the most mundane tasks. Ever the same, despite the years. It might be my father, tucking a newspaper under his arm and setting out for a walk; my brother leaning back in his chair and grinning with bemusement as he delivers his verdict on the news of the day. It arrests me as I marvel at the broadening of the shoulders of my sons, or admire the still-handsome countenance of my beloved. Mostly I sense the magnitude of the passage of time in my mother’s eyes. So altered, but in fleeting moments taking on the same expression that I recall from my earliest memories. It is in the gait of an old friend as she ambles along the beach, and in the ring of her laugh, unchanged over the years. Though time passes, and we are more wrinkled, or softer around the edges, or richer, or poorer, or slower, or sicker, or better behaved, or worse, some things never change. The particulars and peculiarities of those I love, of all of us, remain unchanged despite time marching on, and they bring me great joy. None of us escapes it. Each of us is marked by it, for better or worse.

The thing that has struck me the most is that what endures in my memory, what things stand outside time, what things are permanent, and all the more strikingly so as they stand against the backdrop of the impermanence of nearly everything else, are idiosyncrasies and literature. Idiosyncrasies and literature. And the Air for cello by J.S. Bach that was playing on her radio the last time I said goodbye to Mum. Time cannot claim them. And yet even these things and their potency, though they live in my memory and carry great meaning and joy for me, will die with me when I die. Time will have its way and will carry the idiosyncrasies I cherish in those I hold dear, the literature, psalms, and hymns I love, and Bach’s cello Air, and the particular way I remember them the way of all the earth.

In Mum’s last weeks towards the end of 2021 I recorded this thought:

Time will not be made to heel; nor will it bow to any man’s plea, no matter how impassioned. it neither hastens nor slows, and inevitably strews all things in its wake.

For the entirety of her decline (almost a decade) and after her death I wrestled with the incessant assault of illness on my mother. I could not be grateful I’d had her for so long. I could not be grateful for all the good she had done me. I could not be grateful for the provision, the nurture, the service, the care, the humour, the wisdom, the gentleness, or the faithfulness. I was overtaken by the injustice of her disease and deterioration and it was consuming. I could not be grateful for the time I had had with her, for all forty-seven years of my life, or that she had lived a full eighty-five years. It was too much. It was only with time that I was able to reconcile and recant some of my sense of injustice. Not thought, not research, not the strength of my will or a miracle, but time. And so time, in its measured relentlessness, has been a balm as well as a thief; and my feeling that this might be duplicitous or deceitful eventually gave way to the realisation that these are merely two sides of the same coin.

Now here I am, governed by time and yet unconquered while in its thrall; having lost so bitterly, yet holding, clasping each of my precious treasures that it cannot destroy. Time cannot claim them, and though they will fade away with me when I die, to me they are seeds of eternity. They are tiny deposits of glory which will go with me when I meet the God of my childhood. In them, indeed, is the hope of redemption. God is a God who has said He will fashion a bridal gown for His glorious bride, the community of all believers, from all the righteous deeds of the saints; and isn’t every one of my treasures, those peculiarities of my loved ones, those fragments of literary grandeur, those soaring notes on a cello, precisely that?