Time is a slippery thing. One minute you think you have heaps of it, then on a Tuesday, you look back and wonder where it all went. Or, in my case, tragedy struck, and I was left dizzy with grief, wondering how I made the most of the ten years I had with my son.
At this moment, we were rushing Mitch to the ER. About an hour earlier, his stomach was writhing so much Mitch nearly passed out. I had never seen a child in so much pain.
Mitch rolled the window down a bit and hung his hand on the glass. He had a look on his face that was so very far away. I wondered what he was thinking. When I asked him, Mitch said softly, “Not now. I’m thinking.” To this day and forever, I’ll wonder what he was thinking.
A deep fog was rolling across the valley, and by the time we reached the hospital, we couldn’t see much of anything – which felt like a living metaphor. This photo nearly marked the beginning of Mitchell’s end.
“While we wait for life, life passes.” Lucius Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, said that about 2,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago. It would have been neat to know that 20 years ago, when I was a young father trying to find my place in the universe.
However much I tried to be in the moment as a husband and father, I failed more than I succeeded. Sometimes my heart is heavy over my countless moments of inattention, distraction, and procrastination; in my own deep work with grief and healing, I’ve learned how to turn regret into resolve. I can’t fix the past, but I can be in the present – and that will heal an otherwise painful future.
I don’t mean to sound so dramatic – as though everything is monumental. At least for me, being present has taken on a more hopeful meaning. How many of us have thought to record the voice of our little ones and said to ourselves, “Great idea, but I’ll do it later,” only to realize four years have passed and that tiny, helium-filled voice is deeper and more mature? It seems that even when we recognize THAT, we put it off. Then suddenly, our kids become adults, and those opportunities are irretrievable.
Whether we’re losing our loved ones to death or time, it’s the same. You will never have now again. We only have this moment – and what we do with it matters. This isn’t an original idea – but the realization (the awakening to it) is a revelation we’ll all have – hopefully sooner than later. At the deepest level, it seems like only the dying are the ones that awaken to how precious time is – and for the rest of us, we draw from an invisible bank account, never knowing the balance.
Time is a fast-moving river. We don’t often realize how fast it’s moving because we exist in the river of time – in the same way, you can be sitting in a car going 85 mph and not sense that you’re moving. In the same way, we don’t realize we live on a planet that’s spinning about 1,000 per hour, and when we lay our head down to sleep, we’re orbiting the sun at an average speed of 67,000 miles per hour (that 18.5 miles per second). Even still, our solar system is orbiting the galaxy at about 490,000 miles per hour, and the galaxy in which you now live is moving at about 1.3 million miles per hour into the immensity of space. Mitch loved stuff like this, and we talked about it often.
The point is we have no real sense of how fast things are moving … including time. For that reason, I’ve found it helpful to remember that it’s always later than you think. That invisible bank account from which you draw your minutes and hours is finite. One day your account will be empty. You’ll marvel at how fast it went, wonder where you spent it, treasure where you invested it, wince where you squandered it, and wish you had more of it. The prayer of the dying is almost always, “I wish I had more time.”
So, just a few weeks after I took this photo, I found myself kneeling by Mitchell’s side – the candle of life flickering out before my eyes. I’ll never forget how I was awakened by a force unseen. I was sleeping on the floor next to him. I was so tired. Then, suddenly I was wide awake as though someone shook me. I had an impression that felt like an emergency. I knew at that moment I needed to tuck Mitch in. I placed my hand gently on his chest, his heart barely fluttering. I told him I was so proud of him and wanted to be like him when I grew up. I still do. I told Mitch he could go when he was ready and that his mother and I would miss him, but that we would be okay. I whispered other sacred words, father to son. I kissed his face pulled his blanket around his shoulders just how he liked it. Although his body and senses were all but shut down, and what I did and set probably felt like a distant dream, I think he was hanging on for permission to go. I believe he heard me and felt my love for him. That was my last act of love.
Thirty minutes later, he was gone.
That thing you need to do. The words you need to say. That love you need to show.
Do the thing. It’s later than you think.
