Goodbye Mum

So much of human suffering and pain shares a common cause. We all feel it, but; may not consciously recognise it working upon us. It is something we are all subjected to and cannot escape or avoid. Should we hide from it, it comes for us anyway. Should we fear it, it cares not. Every human communes this dreadful knowledge, shared universally across all countries, no matter our nature, our beliefs or our creeds.

It is the sting of time’s arrow as it draws us, inexorably, towards loss.

For while we all may move freely in space, we are locked into step with the arrow of time. Tick follows tock, follows tick, follows tock. The pain is caused by the fact that time moves on regardless of you perceiving it. Weeks can blur into years. Moments register in our memories as fleeting images having passed us by. We return to places to find them changed and different, ourselves changed and different and the moments we experienced nowhere but our memories. Each moment can be the last, the last time you do something, the last time you can visit somewhere, the last time you see someone.

We only know the importance of a moment by the scars it leaves behind.

Scars of fundamental loss. Oh! To be able to return to a previous time and undo those scars. To un-weave the narrative of our memories and reach for a different future, a different outcome. To not have the scars emerge in our mind again and again to torture us. And at strange times on strange tides do they recall to mind. At tremendous moments they can snap us back to remember, at our happiest can we foolishly say to ourselves, “She would have loved this…” and it is back again, and we relive our loss. It leads to a fear of life as much as death, for if we make no new memories at all, no bumps in the mundanity of our existence, then the memory cannot be triggered. We shrink down and hide away.

But by neither living or dying, is time hindered. Our fear of it makes no difference to its ticking and tocking.

Can we not find a way to transcend the arrow of time? Can we not develop a sense of history that enables us to visit the past without that one moment being like the sun in our eyes? Blinding us to living life and having a future? Can the sleeper not awake and be renewed?

We must. We must create for ourselves a future where our loss is but a solid ledge upon which we can build ourselves anew. A future where we do not hide from our past choices by stopping making any new ones. To do this we must love those we lost just as much now, as then. For, if time is something they have now left behind, perhaps this love can be an anchor for their spirit to return? The feeling of loss can be overcome by the belief in their presence. Is this not the very heart of most religious traditions? Fear not and live! For those you have lost are still with you! Maintain a ritual to remember them in the now, and they never truly left; you never truly suffered their loss. With this comes the realisation that, on one day, you too will pass out from under time’s arrow, and then you will perhaps be with them again.