I hear these sorts of ruminative regrets frequently from patients. The smokers who are now ruing the day they took their first puff. The morbidly obese who wonder out loud why they have always needed to compulsively eat. Then there are the truly sad souls who are wondering if some chance tumor — with no direct link to what doctors like to refer as ‘lifestyle’ — is some sort of retribution (divine or otherwise) for bad behavior, accumulated sins, or an inability to find simple happiness in this one and only life that has been granted to them.
There was a time when these scan-room confessions — usually blurted out in moments of mortal terror, shadowed by the great fear of the unknown — were all in a day’s work for me. Are they beginning to unnerve me because, in their own direct way, they are now forcing me to reflect on the ever-accelerating passage of time? For here we are again in October. And I am now in my forty-third year and still can’t totally figure out how a year has simply vanished. My dad — who taught calculus at a high school in Waterville — once explained this to me with elegant simplicity a few years back, when I mentioned how one of the stranger aspects of impending middle age was the way a year was over in three blinks.
‘And when you get to my age. ’ he said.
‘If I get to your age.’ (He was seventy-two back then.)
‘Always the pessimist. But I guess it comes with your professional territory. OK, I will rephrase. If you get to my age. you will discover that a year passes in two blinks. And if I make it to, say, eighty-five, it will be, at best, a blink. And the reason is a simple mathematical formula — which has nothing to do with Euclidian precepts, and more with the law of diminishing returns. Remember when you were four years old and a year appeared huge and so slow. ’
‘Sure. I also remember thinking how, every time Christmas had come and gone, the wait until next year would be endless.’
‘Exactly. But the thing was — a year back then was just one quarter of your life. Whereas now. ’
‘One thirty-ninth.’
‘Or, in my case, one seventy-second. This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that’s the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time doesn’t elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a week seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed — and its increasing preciousness as a commodity.’
Dad. He died last year after a slow, cruel descent into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. Twelve months earlier he had still been so mentally sharp. As sharp as my mother before the pancreatic cancer that came out of nowhere and killed her just four summers ago. Was it the love story of the past and present century? I can certainly remember moments when I was younger — especially during my adolescence — when there was a decided chill between them. I recall Dad dropping hints that teaching calculus in one of Maine’s smaller cities wasn’t the career stretch he had envisaged for himself when he was an undergraduate and the star of the U Maine math department. But it was Dad who had elderly parents in Bangor and felt beholden after college to turn down a doctoral scholarship at MIT in favor of one at U Maine in order to be on standby for his aging mother and father. And it was Dad who took the job in Waterville when he couldn’t find a college post in-state.
Dad.
I got lucky on the parent front. Despite those few years of quiet, yet perceptible tension — about which neither of them ever really spoke during or afterwards — I grew up in a reasonably stable household. My parents both had careers. They both had outside interests — Dad played the cello in an amateur string quartet. Mom was something of an expert on historical needlework. They both encouraged and loved me. They kept whatever sorrows or misgivings they had about their individual and shared lives out of my earshot (and only when I was a woman in my thirties, coping with all the daily pressures of family life, did I realize how remarkably disciplined they were in this respect). Yes, Dad should have been a chaired professor at some university and the author of several ground-breaking books on binary number theory. Yes, Mom should have seen the world — as she herself once told me was her ambition when younger. Just as I also sensed she often rued the fact that she married a little too young and never really knew a life outside of that with my father. And yes, there was the great sadness that happened two years after my birth, when Mom had an ectopic pregnancy that turned frightening. Not only did she lose the baby, but the complications were so severe that she had to undergo a hysterectomy. I only found this out around the time I was pregnant with Sally and had a bad scare (which turned out to be nothing more than a scare). Mom then told me why I was an only child — something I had asked her about many years earlier, and which was explained simply as: ‘We tried, but it never happened again.’ Now, looking into the nightmare of a possible ectopic pregnancy, Mom told me the truth — leaving me wondering why she had waited so long to trust me with this tragedy that must have so upended her life at the time and still haunted her. Mom could see the shock in my eyes; a wounding sort of shock, as I struggled to understand why she never could have simply told me what had happened, and why Dad — with whom I thought there was such total transparency — had conspired with her on this huge central piece to the family puzzle. Me being me — and yes, Ben was right, I always want to make things right for those nearest to me — I never once spat out the hurt that coursed through me in the days after this revelation. Me being me I rationalized it as all coming down to their worry about the effect it might have on me, and whether (had they told me when I was much younger) I might have even suffered my own dose of survivor guilt over it. But it still bothered me. And hearing the whole terrible story for the first time when I was twenty-four. well, it just seemed to exacerbate the confusion I felt afterwards.
Dan’s reaction was direct, to the point. And though I initially considered it just a little brusque, in time I realized he had cut to the heart of the matter when, after musing about it all for a moment or two, he just shrugged and said:
‘So now you know that everybody has secrets.’
Cold comfort. Dan never does touchy-feely. But at the outset we did function well as a couple. We had little money. We had a big responsibility as new parents. We coped. Not only that, bills got paid. A house got bought. We managed to hold down two jobs and simultaneously raise two children without any sort of serious childcare (except the occasional babysitter or mother-in-law). We suffered broken nights courtesy of babies with colic and were able to laugh about our four a.m. tetchiness the next day. We were frustrated about our lack of latitude. But even though we both felt a little closed in, a little overwhelmed with children and financial obligations, what I remember most about those years together was the way we fundamentally got along, dodged so many potential areas of conflict, helped each other through rough patches without ever playing the ‘I did this for you, now you do that for me’ game. We seemed to be a reasonable match.
A reasonable match. It sounds so profoundly pragmatic, so down-to-earth, so devoid of passion. Well, ours too has never been the love story of the century. Nor, however, is it one of those marriages where the last time we made love Clinton was president. Sex is still there — but even before Dan lost his job and began to disengage from me, it had lost its basic exuberance or the sense of mutual need that fuelled it for so long. When we met the attraction was (for me anyway) the fact that he was stable, unflappable, together, responsible. Unlike the man who came before him and was.
No, I don’t want to think about that. him. today. Even though, truth be told, I think of him every day. Even more so over the past two years when the realization was hitting me so constantly that.