Thoughts On Death and Time Travel

I’ve always been fascinated by time travel. It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I discovered time travel was actually possible.

Now, of course I don’t mean The Time Machine type of time travel, where some brilliant scientist builds a machine to travel time and has great adventures. What I mean is much closer to home, residing in the imagination — like all good time travel stories do.

My grandmother is gone.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of my grandmother’s death, that blessed old woman who was like a second mother to me, a constant presence throughout my life and an inspiration to me in many ways.

I see myself there now, a happy Friday morning when I got the call. I see her laying there, not in peace — death is not peace, it is just an absence, a hole, a void. My insistence to see her as she was, not painted face in a coffin, but the drastic reality of life staring blankly back at me. She would have hated anyone to see her like that, the proud woman that she was. I stayed with her until they took her body away, imagining some essence of her floated nearby, but finding no comfort there.

Sitting with her in the final years, listening to her stories, asking her all the questions that have always burned in me about the past, I was able to watch through a glass darkly all manner of things which we cannot see except aided by one who has traveled that way before.

Through her eyes I witnessed the birth of my mother, my uncles and aunt, and my own birth. I watched the arguments with my grandfather, his lonely face as he lay dead in the coffin. I saw the Earth spin in more simple days, in wartime and peacetime, in happy and sad times, I walked alongside my grandmother’s grandmother into Port of Spain in Trinidad to collect rations during the war. I saw her faint in the heat. I spent summer days before the threat of global warming, before holes in the ozone layer. Before apes flung themselves into the sky to stand on distant spinning stones, and pronounce themselves masters of the universe. Before the Bomb.

My grandmother lived for her children, she had no lofty goals for herself except to be the best mother and grandmother she could. To give of herself until there was nothing left, to empty completely.

My grandmother is not dead. She is nought, simply nothing. She died, but she is not in a state of death, she simply vanished into the breeze in a moment. No longer bent forward; no more crying; no more roaming in darkness; no more hiding unpleasant reminders of growing old; no more hand wringing. She no longer exists of her own accord — only that which lives through us left behind who choose to remember.

The particles of light which graced her face allowed me to see her old brown eyes, and the waves of sound echoing through her chest transferred memories which will live on in me.

I carry her holy old soul in my body.

I’ve always loved the idea of time travel.

I can go back and be with her now, without moving an inch.

[The above is a mixture of my thoughts written down in July 2014 and present thoughts looking back]