Does anybody really know what time it is?

back porch/bird room

Tick tock, motherfu%@er. This could be the theme of my current life phase.

living room

I think I’ve told this story before, but I remember when I was 15 worrying that my mom was at death’s door, maybe even one foot over the threshold, and that I would somehow have to go on without her. How would I manage? Would I be forced to go live with my dad? Would my brothers and I all end up in the orphanage? Would I have to run away and live on the mean streets?!?

Mom was 35 at the time. THIRTY-FIVE.

I’m turning 70 this year, and I’m here to tell you my take on time has drastically changed. It took another twisted turn when I retired just before I turned 65—time crawled to a stop as I re-thought my daily life, and it simultaneously sped up as I made friends with my mortality. How could it be doing both?!?

kitchen

I won’t say there’s no such thing as time—as Siddhartha argued—though I have come to believe that time, at least our marking of it, is irrelevant. If I get up with the dogs at 5 a.m., the world goes on. If I sleep in till 10 a.m., the world goes on. If I stay in bed all day reading another Louise Penney novel and eating Scottish shortbread cookies, the world…well, you get it.

All that time I spent worrying about getting older, and what happened? I got older anyway. All that time I spend slathering on 18 organic Norwegian moisturizers, shea and beeswax magnesium body butters, beef tallow and Manuka honey hand cream, coconut oil and rosemary foot creams, and what’s the result? I have a face full of beautiful wrinkies, veiny longshoreman hands, skin that flakes off every winter, and tired feet that smell pretty good.

music room

Some days, I don’t know what time/day/month it is—unless I look up at my 92 clocks and calendars or at my slave-driving Apple watch, which also helps me remember to be mindful, drink water, and stand up.

Speaking of which, I have my Apple watch, which syncs to my phone’s calendar, in which I keep track of birthdays, appointments, Ray’s band gigs, my poetry stuff, my kids’ and grandkids’ events…basically my life. I have two wall calendars, one upstairs and one downstairs on which I track the same info; I have a purse-sized monthly calendar with the same info; and I have a BIG kitchen white board on which I write the current week’s activities/appointments. I STILL forgot a speech therapy appointment (post-stroke vocal cord exercises) and had to reschedule.

broken but still in the living room

I also seem to have a sort of love/hate relationship with time now. After working since the age of 14 (except for three periods of late pregnancies/childbearing/birth to pre-K homing), I now mostly refuse any unnecessary scheduling of my life. I don’t like to join things that require regular attendance; hence, my spotty or non-participation in clubs, organizations, and social/exercise/spiritual/political groups.

I mostly arrange things so that I only have to attend/do ONE thing per day, so the rest of the day is mine all mine. If I kayak, that’s it for the day. If I have a doc appointment, that’s it. If I clean the bathroom, that’s it. If I’m going out in the evening (getting more and more rare), I don’t do anything else that day. I jealously guard my time now, after years of feeling like I never had enough. At long last, I’m the master of my days!

kitchen

At the end of Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha contemplates the river and its cycle of flowing, evaporating, raining, filling, flowing, evaporating, etc. and comes to the conclusion that time is an illusion. And when I remember that the stegosaurus had been extinct for 80 MILLION YEARS before the tyrannosaurus even existed, I think Siddhartha may have been onto something.

kitchen

Do I still watch the clocks (one in almost every room of our house)? Slavishly. So much for being the master, I guess…

Because I could not stop for Death...

Here I am, contemplating death again. We’re not great at talking about or dealing openly with death and grief in Western culture. But now, as I’m fast approaching my seventh decade in this incarnation, I can’t seem to avoid it. And maybe that’s a good thing.

I’ve said goodbye to people throughout my life—grandparents, too-young friends, cousins—but right now, maybe starting just before the pandemic, it’s become a pile-up of losses, and it’s the pile-up, I’m convinced, not any single loss by itself, that’ll do you in. In a pile-up, there’s no recovery/healing time between blows. I’ll spare you the list of people we’ve had to let go of in recent years—trust me, it’s a looooong list that includes both parents. And I know I’m at the age where more frequent deaths are natural and inevitable—just check out obituaries and you’ll see how many people are…well…my age. What I’d rather talk about is how to climb over the pile-up and keep moving on.

Everyone has their own way of navigating death and grief—some ignore it, some bottle it up, some rely on religious faith, some fall apart. I’m not a person who can choke it down effectively (I tend to spontaneously spew my despair eventually; heaven help the innocent bystander). Bottling usually results in some physical manifestation for me—a twitch, a pre-ulcerous condition, inflammation, achy joints, etc., so that’s not a good strategy for me, either. So what I try to do is what I do with most things—analyse: its wrinkles, contours, possible meanings, effects, and outcomes. My basic belief about what happens after death is that, like everything else, we are energy. And because energy doesn’t die, I think we just drop the skin suit and disperse. That much is science, not woo-woo. Beyond that, I don’t KNOW, and neither does anyone else still alive (some BELIEVE they know, but belief isn’t KNOWING).

That’s actually pretty comforting to me. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, some essence of us continues. But I don’t think the part of me that will continue has anything to do with the “me” I’ve crafted over the seven decades of my earthly life—the stories I tell myself that make up what I perceive as my individuality/personhood. I don’t think I’ll be playing canasta with my mom and grandma in some heavenly parlour, or have wings, or burn in an imaginary hell. Instead, I’ll revert back to unformed pure potential. Potential for what purpose? I don’t KNOW that either.

I do have a personal BELIEF (woo-woo) in reincarnation, because it’s energy changing forms, which energy is wont to do, and would explain a lot of things for me—déjà vu, memories that don’t seem to be mine, instant feelings about someone I’ve just met, a finite amount of energy (remember it cannot be created) and a constant or growing population—recycled energy.

Science and my beliefs help me process grief, which we don’t really “get over” but learn to live with—I’ve experienced waves of grief out of the blue months or even years after a loss. An “energy is all” death/dispersal explanation doesn’t satisfactorily explain for me why people have to suffer, why there are so many devastating ways to die, why we can’t just “blink out” when our bodies are injured beyond repair or are no longer serviceable. I guess maybe it’s still better than my energy suddenly changing forms by being eaten by a leopard or an alligator, as happens with many other animals.

This week we’re saying goodbye to a dear friend of many years, and to a gifted mentor and poet. In both cases, they leave their kind-hearted, intelligent offspring and their musical, artistic, and lyrical talents behind for those of us still here—like bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition. And now that we know a mother’s cells continue in her offspring (https://www.sciencealert.com/millions-of-your-mothers-cells-persist-inside-you-and-now-we-know-how) and that cells might have memories (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-a-cell-remember/) I have even more faith in our continuity, albeit in a different form.

I'm excited for new neuroscience and quantum physics, both of which are re-thinking consciousness, time, space, and life/death. But for now, when it comes to death and grief, I guess I find solace mostly in energy science, with a smattering of woo-woo, to remind me that life truly does go on. Also, I have a strong community with which I share this road, and as Ram Das said, "We're all just walking each other home."