I was ambivalent about giving my granddaughter my old Micky Mouse watch. Only 11, she has managed to avoid and has been protected from most of the constraints of time. But she is beginning to take the bus to school and was anxious about getting to the bus stop on time. Easing her anxiety took priority.
I was thinking about this as I waited for the clock repair person to put a new battery in the watch when a very old song, “The Time has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers, (a song I’d not heard for years) came on over the speaker. “We can’t put off another day”, “no place to run”, wafted in and out of my head.
Time is really an abstraction and a fascinating element in our life. We humans have tried to make sense of it since the beginning, back from the Egyptians and the sundials they developed to the minuscule measures of nanoseconds in the atomic clocks which now set the standard for world time. Humans once set time by the rhythms and flow of nature; they got up and went to sleep with the sun. For good or ill, we don’t do that anymore. Now digital time gives us the structure for marking everything—birthdays and deaths (monumental) to the next Zoom meeting (minuscule).
The pandemic has sharply taught us that time might be more limited than we thought. The past two years even have some of us thinking that time itself is less important than what we do with it. Perhaps that’s part of the reason we are writing and talking about time so frequently right now. We are also moving forward in our lives. We are beginning and ending relationships, buying houses. Writing wills. Re-examining friendships. There’s an urgency afoot which can be both engaging and scary.
That’s true in death as well. I get asked about time often in my doula work. The dying person or their family member want to know how much time is left. We never really know for sure of course, even when we reach what we call the “Eleventh Hour”. Death does not adhere to any time constraints either.
The Eleventh Hour describes the time (often just hours but sometimes days) when the person is actively dying. A part of the doula philosophy is that a person should not die alone so we take turns being with the person during the Eleventh Hour. Because it marks the last amount of time the person is on earth, everyone’s senses are heightened by that, including the doulas. We carefully coordinate and report progress to each other. It is a sacred time and as such, must be honored and tended.
While we do this, I often have a hope for the dying person: that before the Eleventh Hour, the seconds, the minutes, the hours and days and weeks and years had some richness and wisdom and sweetness. While not everyone has that, we can all choose to strive for it.
As usual, Mary Oliver says it the best:
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.