When Time Stands Still

 As we jump feet first into the season where we speedrun the last part of the year, I couldn't help by be reminded of the song Don’t Blink as I hung back and watched my youngest during their senior portraits. Their uncanny resemblance to the grandma I lost this year, recently made apparent, now more poignant than ever. (And with so many synchronicities at the photo shoot, I can’t help but wonder if grams was sending a little nod."I’m here still. I’m watching. As long as you remember, you’ll find pieces of me").

I’ve never been a Kenny Chesney fan, (a blasphemy for people round these parts, I know) but I’d be lying if I said this song didn’t strike a chord.

In the wake of a rough 18 months, I’ve been hyper cognizant of the passage of time. The surreal way it slows down and speeds up, seemingly at random. A day can feel like a minute. A year can feel like an hour. (Yet somehow, January always lasts 48 years). 

And I’ve thought about all the little tricks time plays on our memories. Moments etched into our minds so detailed that if we close our eyes we can even smell a lingering perfume. a specific laundry soap. The sweaty smell of a toddler napping in the stroller after a hard day of running around the park. 

And other times, the details just slip away.

This morning my husband and I happened upon a real estate listing in his old college town, and when I saw the address I commented that I vaguely remember the area, and walking around it. Turns out, ave and street in that town are wildly different areas, and in the quarter century since those college days, my mind didn’t recall things quite right. I had inadvertently reminisced on walking around a sketchy area that he informed me we most definitely would have never gone to. I thought I remembered the town well. It turns out, with the passage of time, the grains of sand that are the details of my memories get washed away a little more each time the waves of memory break ashore. 

Or so it seems.

I worry often there will come a time that even the memories emblazoned in my mind, the smells, the sound of a voice, the way a smile would steal across someone’s face will slip from my grasp. I will close my eyes, expecting to smell that distinct smell of walking into Nana’s house, only to find it no longer accessible. 

And it will be gone. 

Lost to time. 

Lost to memory.

A void where comfort used to dwell. 

I wonder if this is how dementia patients feel. The slow ebbing, washing away of the things they hold dear. Do they realize it is happening? Or do they wake up one day, and nothing is there; a blank slate where a lifetime of notes should be. 

That scares me. I think: “ I don’t want to live that long”. But shortly on that thought's heels tromps “Don’t blink, life goes faster than you think” and I realize, I do. I want to see life through elderly eyes. 

I’ve seen so much death in my life, I’ve come to fear it. Not in a “I don’t know what comes next so I am afraid kind of way” but more the, “I don’t want to leave” kind of fear.

 I know death intimately. It often feels like we are old friends. Or rather, frenemies. He knows too much about me, I know too much about him; we’re locked in a never-ending tango and I’m stuck with a dance partner that pushes me to places I don’t want to venture, leads me into liminal spaces I have no desire to occupy. I am at his mercy, beholden to his whim, always worrying about his next move. I wonder, if I keep up the dance can I stave off the next harvest? ?How long can I distract him until his scythe reaps me? I know too well the remnants of his harvest; I don’t want to be the cause of that for those I love. 

In a culture where death, dying, and the varied accoutrements that enshrine it are taboo. it’s an uncomfortable subject. It’s not something we ever really talk about with those we love. It’s an isolating experience, to engage with Death so often; to have the main theme of your life be one that is only spoken of briefly in hushed wilhispers in the parlor of a funeral home for a couple hours. We are, it seems, expected to run the gamut of loss as fast as we can. Time, so out of our control when it decides to speed or slow, well now it must act in warp speed, because by the time the flowers have wilted from the graveside, the world expects business as usual. Dry your eyes, chin up, carry on. We have no time for grief. We have things to do, places to go, things to see. Life is too short; we always notice this at the funeral home, whether the dearly departed is 19 or 99, and this anagnorisis makes us loathe to spend our precious seconds pondering our loss.  Don’t blink. We don’t have time to blink. We can’t spare the seconds to wallow in our loss. We have to squeeze every moment out of life. 

But the leaves start to turn in October. And time speeds up, and slows down, somehow all at once. And suddenly, whether we want it or not, we have the time to sit with the discomfort; the memories sneak up and flood in. We page through them.

Laughing.

 Crying. 

Raging at the unfairness perhaps. 

Because it went too fast. No one told you it would go by like this. Except, maybe, Kenny Chesney if you were listening to country radio in the early aughts. He tried to warn you, but you flipped the station.

And now, all you have are the photographic ghosts in your memory, slowly fading, thumbed through too often and turning to ash…