I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about time, and how quickly it passes. Just yesterday it seemed like youth was forever, and now I’m looking in the mirror seeing grey hair and wrinkles forming, and I realize it won’t be long now until everything just sags and collapses. Soon I’ll be wearing elastic waist pants (like I don’t already, who am I kidding)? and flowered shirts and wearing geriatric shoes and liking it.
I don’t know if this is just my perception, but there seems to be an awful lot of those “Before and After” celebrity shots that show stars twenty years ago and what they look like now, appearing everywhere. It’s jarring, to say the least, because even if you’ve followed the career of say, Kate Moss, the aging was gradual. Looking at pictures of her taken in 1992 and today side by side is shocking.
The sudden death of my mother several weeks ago has only highlighted this for me. Hours before she died she was making plans to meet up with friends she’d neglected while caring for her one hundred and two year old patient. Her perception of time was the same that we all have...that it’s endless. There will be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow, and a tomorrow and a tomorrow. My mother had run out of tomorrows, without warning. It freaks me out that she was urging me to eat her leftover Minestrone soup to help my cold at nine at night and had been dead over an hour by nine the next morning.
That she stopped by the house on Sunday (she had not yet moved fully back in after the death of her patient the week before) to drop off a bunch of stuff she was taking from her patient’s apartment and got irritated because I was not jumping for joy at the prospect of helping her. I had a terrible cold and it was freezing outside. She and her companion, her patient’s niece, began discussing how lazy “kids” (ha, I’m past forty) are today as if I was not there as I rolled my eyes and dragged myself outside to collect the items without comment. (Thankfully, without comment. Had I been feeling friskier there may have been comment).
She had less than forty hours to live.
She had not the slightest clue that she would never see another Sunday, or another Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, even. That forty-eight hours from her complaining about me in the driveway I’d be sitting in a conference room making her funeral arrangements, and that an hour before that I’d given away her eyes. (Yes, really. The hospital has no choice but to ask shortly after death because there is only a small window of time that they can be harvested).
I realized one thing, that despite the fact that we believe ourselves to have an infinite number of tomorrows, we have no way of knowing for sure that there is no tomorrow. That our tomorrows are swiftly running out, and we will never feel we had enough time. Even though it feels as though all we have is time.
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