Carrying Another Time

I just read a gorgeous piece on Longreads about grief that I think a lot of people will appreciate here. It is a man grieving the loss of his wife after cancer (though his adoption story features, too), but the concept of loss becomes universal as he discusses what he has learned about time.

Like the Longreads author, Matthew Salesses, I also just finished Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. I started it as an audio book in the car, driving through the dark on my way home from my friend’s house, shivering as he tore down everything we think we know about time, staying with him because he promised to build a new understanding of time in its place. And as the Longreads author so apt states:

As consolation, Rovelli offers the mind as a time machine — we travel via memory. This is a disappointing compromise. In mourning, memory is only another cause for mourning. It does not change time, only reminds one that time has passed.

Salesses describes grief as carrying that time you had with the other person, of always having those hours, those days, those years that you spent with the person lost. He writes:

That shared life is the time I carry. In my dreams, I go to that other time. I dream that my wife is still in the middle of cancer treatments, that it is still conceivable she will come out of them okay. I don’t dream of a time that has never existed — I don’t dream of her recovery. I dream of taking care of her. I dream that our shared time has simply gone on.

It’s not about fantasy. It’s about carrying that real time with you as you move through current time; two layers of time that are carried simultaneously.

You need to read the whole piece. And then you need to go get Matthew Salesses’s books.