Photo by Collyn Ware
All-devouring time, envious age, Nought can escape you, and by slow degrees, Worn by your teeth, all things will lingering die. --Ovid
Oh, all-devouring time, glutton with an insatiable appetite for things beautiful and dear! You’re the agent by which all things will lingering die: childhood, summer, beauty, life. The Roman poet Ovid understood how time gnaws away at the things and places, the moments and people we’d most like to preserve. When I look at this photo–my granddaughter’s hands framing her bright 4-year-old face, her eyes filled with promise, her hair honeyed against a backdrop of spring, everything green and greening–I can only sigh. How I’d like to linger in this loveliness, spend an afternoon with a dollhouse and a tea party for two. How I’d like to linger in those moments when our world was so intimate, so small that we had eyes only for each other. How I’d like to thumb my nose at time and burrow into all the best moments, pulling the quilt of their beauty and goodness around me.
When we linger, we’re most often reluctant to leave, and this reluctance creates a tension between now and then. In college, when I climbed into the back of a vintage convertible, hoisting a blue velvet cape behind me, I knew that my ride around the football field as homecoming queen would take a few scant minutes. The rhinestone crown they’d positioned on my head had begun to tilt precariously over my left eye, and as I pushed it back atop my head, we’d already rounded the first turn on the track and were heading down the straightaway on the visitors’ side. I remember thinking how desperately I wanted to be in the moment but couldn’t. I was painfully aware that time was passing quickly. I understood that the next morning I would wake up–robeless and crownless–as just another college coed. I wanted to linger in now but was ambushed by then.
In his novel, Enduring Love, Ian McEwan writes: I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still. Possible. Both my father and mother were able to die in our family home, surrounded by family and friends. Inevitable as their impending deaths were, I recall those moments when I caught myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, the doctors were wrong. As our loved ones die, we may cling to a universal desire to linger in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still. Possible. Perhaps death isn’t the imminent outcome. Perhaps a miracle, perhaps recovery. Perhaps life. Time may tease us with hope for a different, a better outcome.
But time may tease us, too, with anguish as we watch those we love diminish before our eyes. A few weeks after my father had come home from the hospital to die, my mother turned to my sister and me in a private moment and said, “What if he lingers?” She didn’t have to elaborate, for we understood her greatest fears: that he would go and that he would stay. Here was the love of her life who, just weeks before, had walked miles each day through town, but was bed-bound now, waiting to die. Lingering can be such a cruel thing, as we watch the ones we love curl into themselves, leaving the world and us bit by bit, hour by hour. As much as we want them to stay, we also want them to go. As much as we want to hold on, grounding them with our great love, we also want to release them, sending them to heaven, whole and perfect.
In her novel, White Oleander, Janet Fitch writes: Life should always be like this. . . . Like lingering over a good meal. Oh, that time and life would not devour us, but rather linger with us over a good meal: a steaming pan of lasagna, a crisp salad, and a loaf of crusty artisan bread! This is lingering at its finest, a momentary stay against the knowledge that this, too, shall pass. I did my best lingering around my family’s dining room table at 611 West 27th Street in Kearney, NE. This is where I cut my teeth on philosophy and poetry, social and moral issues. During the hours I lingered around this table–the dessert served and dishes cleared–I grew up. I tried on ideas and arguments. I listened and learned. Even my mother agreed that the second-hand dining chairs she’d bought were terribly uncomfortable, but we all lingered, our bottoms numb but our heads and hearts full.
Like so many things, lingering is bittersweet. We may linger sweetly, willing the moments to pass more slowly. Or we may linger painfully, willing the moments to pass more quickly. In either case, we linger with a keen sense of who we were, are, and may be; what we had, have and may have; where we were, are and may go. Utterly human, we linger with our eyes fixed on earth and beyond.
In Requiem
The fishing dock that Boy Scout Troup 15 built
has been condemned.
Its legs are splayed unnaturally into the shallows
having lost all cartilage years ago.
Today, I think about ducking under the rope
that holds the cardboard sign reading:
Danger! Keep out!
I think about walking all the way to the edge
to test the structure’s will
and my own mettle.
As the sun just begins to break
over the eastern tree line,
I find I’m unreasonably sad thinking that,
one day soon, the dock will fall,
easing to its knees and into the forest of lily pads below,
succumbing to the elements it has braved
for decades.
I find that I can’t stop imagining its death:
the aging timbers laid to rest,
algae slicking each plank with much,
the water swallowing the structure whole
to leave no trace of the spot
where boys stood shoulder to shoulder to fish,
their bobbers marking the surface
with promise.
I can’t stop remembering my father in his final days,
how, just weeks before, he’d walked miles through town
and then how his legs went dormant,
their muscles molting beneath the blankets
on his hospital bed.
And so, I will this dock to make a quick death—
to hurl itself into the water, the sound splitting
the dawn, the force swamping the cattails
below—
until finally, a moment of silence
for a life that had been.
