The Mutability of Time

Brief thoughts on writing about our children, mortality, and time.

Dawn in our French village, my favorite time

This week I interrupt the stories of our interruptions again. I’ve been telling the stories of our forced separations to illuminate aspects of diplomatic life not often considered, as well as to think through how we have navigated a liminal life without certainty or stability. How perhaps this has prepared me for living with the infinite uncertainty of cancer.

Yet as I was about to post the last part of our covid evacuation story, I realized that it may not be a story Theadora wants me to share. I asked her to read it and she definitively said NO. Theadora is a private person, and I have already written too much about her. It is difficult to find the line between what is my story and what is hers, as they are so interwoven. Panels at literary conferences often address this topic: how can we write about parenting or our lives while respecting our children’s privacy? Ultimately the answer always seems to be that we each must sort it out for ourselves and our children. It feels impossible to get it right.

Thus I will only briefly sum up that last period of our evacuation. Theadora attended school in the neighboring town, where she was deeply unhappy. We adopted a wild kitten, saving her from being euthanized. For the first time I was able to teach an entire term in Rosemont College’s MFA program in Philadelphia, because for the first time it had gone online. Because of the time difference between France and Philadelphia, I taught my classes between midnight and 3 a.m. This is not a time I am normally conscious or functional, but I found that the moment I was online with my students (with a very strong cup of coffee), I came alive. They were each struggling with the solitude of covid and other personal challenges. Our time together in the middle of the night came to feel cozy and nurturing. I was grateful for the vulnerability of their writing, that they trusted me with it.

In February 2021, Theadora and I were finally granted permission to return home to Uzbekistan, to be reunited with Tim. But the day before we were to fly, I came down with covid for the first time, and then gave it to Tim, who had come for Christmas. Thus we were delayed again.

Two weeks later, we landed in Tashkent, a complete family again. I woke up in bed with my husband instead of my daughter. Theadora began yet another new school. We cautiously began exploring the country, traveling to Khiva, Nukus, and what is left of the Aral Sea. I began writing a new novel, while continuing to work on my doctorate.

There is only one separation story left, the longest and hardest: the eighteen months I spent going through cancer treatment in London while Tim and Theadora remained in Tashkent. While apart from my beloveds, I did not endure those eighteen months alone, because people came to me. Friends from Norway, France, New York, North Carolina, South Africa, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere flew to London to look after me, cooking, cleaning, juicing, and making sure I didn’t pass out on the floor as I did after my first chemo. I was almost never alone.

But that story will keep.

This week instead I offer you some brief recent thoughts on mortality and time.

It is easier to live alongside my awareness of my mortality when I am feeling well. When I have the energy to work and hike and meet friends, it feels impossible to believe it will ever be otherwise. I cheerfully tell people that, statistically speaking, I am not expected to survive this for long, that it will keep coming back until it finishes the job. But I don’t believe it.

My oncologist has permitted me to go back onto the maintenance drug Niraparib, even though it so recently wiped out all my significant blood cells, putting me on half of the lowest dose possible. There is no evidence that this tiny dose will keep the cancer at bay. But we both figure that a little is better than none.

So far my bloods are holding up, though barely. My platelets are currently at 77,000 and they must stay above 75,000 in order for me to continue to take the drug. I’m still anemic, but not severely. I am hoping that my bloods remain steady, so that I can travel to the US to see my family this summer. We bought plane tickets without knowing if I would be able to go. The world requires us to know so much in advance, and right now this is impossible. Maybe always this is impossible. We know nothing in advance. We bought tickets because we hope.

Work, as always, is helping more than anything. I am grateful to have been given time, this time, however long it lasts. I am greedy for time.

I’ve been reading bits of poetry in the mornings before writing, as a way of priming my brain for word generation. Last week, these lines from May Sarton’s “On Being Given Time” resonated:

“And all we’ve learned from time that really matters

We’ve learned from moving clouds and waters

Where we see form and motion lightly meld.

Not the clock’s tick and its relentless bind

But the long ripple that opens out beyond

The duck as he swims down the tranquil pond,

Or when a wandering, falling leaf may find

And follow the formal downpath of the wind.”

This prompted my own meditations on time and its mysterious workings. My life has been measured in journeys; we’ve measured time by the length of our flights and postings. When asked when some significant event of our lives occurred, I first think of the country in which it took place. I know I was kidnapped in 2009 because it happened our last summer in Yemen. I know Tim was attacked by a suicide bomber in April 2010 because it happened just before my first book tour in the United States. I know I first went to the Words & Music Literary Festival in New Orleans in 2012 because it was my first journey from our home in Bolivia. My memories are each attached to a country, divided into four-year or four-month blocks.

I only remember that Theadora learned to crawl at ten months old because I know it happened in our flat in Amman, Jordan in September 2010. I know she spoke her first two words that same month, as she spoke them in our Jordanian bathtub.

I have no idea how I would remember what year anything happened if our travels did not provide me with the dividing lines of cities and countries. How can anyone remember their children’s milestones if they all take place in the same house, the same country? Doesn’t everything run together? Tell me. How do you differentiate one Halloween from the one before? I would muddle all of my memories if their context were not constantly changing.

Our four-year postings also have a strange effect on the passing of time within them. When we first arrive in a country, time is boundless. There is so much to learn and explore. But we have four whole years, we tell ourselves. There will be time.

Each year in a new country is shorter than the last, until time begins sprinting forward during our last few months. We’re always appalled to realize in those final months how much we have failed to experience or explore.

I learned to write down every detail for the first few weeks, every impression and observation, because after that, time normalized everything until I no longer found it remarkable that I could see the Andes at the end of every street, that all I could see of the women were their eyes, or that breakfast was buckwheat porridge.

Now, in our first (presumably) permanent home, time staggers. Some mornings I don’t know how I can bear waking up in the same place for more than four years, and time feels eternal. When I am working, time swishes past without me noticing. When I am very sick, time contracts, the reminder of mortality making me scramble to get things done when I am least capable of scrambling.

Today, I am trying to release any attempt to control time. Time cannot be controlled. Nor can we significantly change how much we have. I am grateful for the time I have, however much that is, that will be. But I still want more.

I’d love to hear your own thoughts on time, mortality, and anything else you feel like sharing this week!

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash