"Time is a wonderful, if slow, ally." A friend recently wrote that sentence in a letter describing her "recovery" from a miscarriage. And it's true, time can be an ally.

But what is time? For most people, time is relative, mostly defined by the method used to measure it. To a track coach, time turns on tenths of a second; for payroll accountants, time revolves around the 40-hour work week; for historians or geologists, time means centuries or eras and eons (millions or billions of years).

For a bereaved parent, time can range anywhere from another day we must somehow get through to our dead child's lifetime that we cannot share. However, time is not "something that happens to us." We all choose, for the most part, what activities fill the minutes of our days. Grief is a terrible burden that we did not choose, however, which we carry along with all of our other adult responsibilities. So how do we survive long enough so that time indeed feels like an ally rather than part of the grief burden?

Some people rely on their faith, believing that one day they will be reunited with their child who is already in a "better place." Some of the Eastern religions teach that life (time) is circular, with no beginning or end, but an underlying constancy in which we are all connected to each other. And some of us simply get up every morning and do the best we can to make it through the day--sometimes it's a good day, and sometimes its not.

In many ways, grief is cyclical, much the same way the seasons change: fall is the death; winter is the despair; spring is the hope returning; and summer means growth and the experience of fullness again. But summer does not mean erasing from our memories what fall and winter felt like. And we return to this cycle over and over --for each of our losses, whether huge or small--during our lives: its length may be minutes, days, or years. It may be intense, or it may be hardly recognizable as loss-grief-hope-growth.

At the time of his death, our two-year-old's favorite movie was The Land Before Time. In one scene, the main character, a baby dinosaur named Littlefoot, experiences grief after his mother has been killed by Sharptooth (a tyrannosaurus). Littlefoot runs into old Rooter (a more benign dinosaur), and the following conversation takes place:

Littlefoot: It's not fair
Rooter: You pay attention to old Rooter. The great circle of life has begun, but you see, not all of us arrive together at the end.
Littlefoot: What'll I do? I miss her so much!
Rooter: And you'll always miss her, but she'll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you. In a way, you'll never be apart; you are still a part of each other.
Littlefoot: My tummy hurts.
Rooter: That too will go in time, little fella, only in time.


We watched that movie a lot in the days before he died (when we knew he was dying of cancer), and I always cried. It took nearly two years before I could bear to watch it again without him. But now, even though I still cry, I find it comforting. It tells me that time is a measureless dimension in which my son and I are always part of each other. On the other hand, it is a passage we make ourselves (an ally with whom we walk) at our own speed until our tummies don't hurt so much anymore.

Home	Top of Page	Reading Nook