‘Time’ is a human construction…what happens when we lose it?
It seems to me, we humans like to “make sense” of things and of the world around us. We need to categorize, organize, label. We like to know where we’ve been and have some idea of where we’re going. Pictures, journals…everything serves to place us in time and keep us on a path. Sometimes we choose the path, sometimes it feels as if the path chooses us but we seem to need to feel a path of some sort under our feet, in our life.
This need must be what led our ancestors to come up with the construction of ‘time’. Without it, would there be a ‘past’? Would (could?) we have a ‘future’? The angst caused by such questions may well have driven ancient or even pre-historic humans to create the concept of ‘time’.
These are thoughts floating around in my head as I watch my mother, now 97, float in time. It’s an odd sensation for me and yet, it doesn’t seem to be so for her. She now no longer knows me, nor anyone else whom she previously did just a very short time ago. This loss happened relatively suddenly and very recently. I call it a ‘loss’ only in the strictest sense of the word–she has lost memories. Many of them. But there’s very little else lost. Her personality remains the same (if anything, she’s more cheerful and carefree now than she has been for the last while), her sense of humour is still uniquely hers.
However, where we (the great, worldwide we) depend on our memories to keep us grounded on that linear path of time, my mother quietly and happily floats. As if in a pool of warm, tranquil liquid. Sometimes she asks how my father is and whether I saw him this morning…dad passed away in 1994. There may be an occasional ripple–she sometimes identifies my sister as her mother (my mother’s mother) and seems to be seeing and thinking of herself as a very young woman, maybe even as a girl. It’s a curious thing though…I was concerned–when I am there also and she is told I am her daughter, what sort of ripple (maelstrom?) would that cause? How do I–clearly a gray-haired woman in my 60’s–standing in front of her fit into that picture with her, of her as a young woman? The ripples move, flatten out, bear her along gently and she turns to me and smiles. Politely saying hello, not feeling the need to draw that linear path from her young self to my older self. Just happy to chat and walk out to the garden to admire the flowers.
I am sad. My mother and I have never had an extraordinarily tight bond. Whether it is personality, generational, or whatever–we never had the moments of shared confidences or deep secrets. My relationship with my own children is much closer and I thank the universe for that every day. But losing this part of my mom–her memories of me and of others–is weakening the fabric of my own sense of time. I miss her asking me what her great-grandchildren have been up to, how they’re doing in school. I don’t want to lose what little connection I had with her. I want that line to still be there–connecting time from her generation across to theirs. She’s always had such a good memory and we would all enjoy asking her questions about happenings and hearing her recollections. Where does all that go? Floating out to the ethernet? I feel a weight–a pressure to now remember everything my mother has ever told me so that, if asked, I could draw that line for the family…back into time, connecting it forward to the future. Loss is primarily a selfish sense and my feelings of sadness and loss here is no exception.
Her great-grandchildren, visiting their GG since this change has come upon her, are innocently confused. Used to having their names mixed up (I already routinely call my various family members by each other’s names lol) they are puzzled when she doesn’t acknowledge or understand their relationship to her. “How does she not know she’s my GG?” When they witness her bewilderment over my identity, there is a slight trace of fear in their eyes. Not physical, not of their GG, not of the very elderly lady in front of them. But a nameless, cloudy fear of…what? A loss of self? A sense of where things–and people–belong?
Of course, they’re curious and I love that. Being curious is a good thing, a healthy state of mind. I have no desire to shush them for asking questions about what has happened to their GG. There was a time when aging–and death–were much more a part of life than it is now. When generations experienced the sadness of departure from life as a matter of course and not so much to be feared.
I have tried to describe their GG’s mind like a muscle–one that has worked very well for a very long time. The same as seeing other things age and change, her mind has now done so. Happily, her retention of her personality means the children, knowing her likes and dislikes, are still comfortable chatting with her. They are less bothered by those ripples than I am.
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