Call it mid-life. Call it parenting tweens. Call it the late-stage capitalism and the fall of democracy. Blame it on my current coursework in the theology of time.
Whatever it is, I've been thinking a lot recently about the grief and the passage of time.
Specifically, this: That the passage of time in my own life (and its embedded trajectories of growth and decline, stability and grief, youth and aging) does not take place in an otherwise fixed world.
Let me explain.
One of the unfortunate features of my own mid-life journey is a persistent sense of both grief and nostalgia. Being old enough to have memories that are not just in the past (duh), but far enough in the past that I can't pretend they are still a part of my immediate life.
For instance, we cleaned and reorganized my nine-year-old daughter's room over the weekend. I got nostalgic--almost teary!--observing the toy shelf along her wall, which I can deeply and fondly remember as a piece of furniture in her older brother's nursery, and the process of setting up that nursery in our old house in expectation of the first baby in our younger generation of sisters, and the meager quantity of baby and toddler toys that were housed in baskets on that shelf, and the way we used the small top shelves for board books. And then, just for fun, my daughter started reminiscing about her own memories of toddler-hood, and wanted to ask me questions about her old crib, and the span of time where she demanded to sleep on the floor, and the years in which neither she nor her brother could fall asleep unless a parent were lying next to them.
And it hit me, deeply, during these conversations and memories, that while my children are still young enough (nine and twelve), they are so very much not babies and toddlers, or even preschoolers, and that all of those memories seem like an entirely different life ago.
Same with thinking about and grieving my parents. I was looking for a recipe that my dad had sent me, years ago, and spent half an hour last night reading through old emails from him in an old and now-unused email account of mine. Some of the emails were like letters; heartfelt. Some were us making plans for Sunday family dinner gatherings. Some were him sharing news about friends and loved ones. Some were nagging emails reminding me to send him my past-deadline contributions to our church's annual Lenten devotional book.
And, again, a lifetime has passed, it seems, since that version of my life.
Sometimes the nostalgia I feel in this gap is comforting, enjoyable, warm.
Often, it just feels like grief. I am sad about things that I can't remember about how my babies sounded or felt in my arms; about worrying that I will forget my parents' voices.
And, to get all the way back up to where we started, what makes this sort of grief so strange--and annoying?--is that I am watching other fixtures and features and structures of my life follow their own trajectories of irrelevance or decline.
It is weird to me that some of my favorite--and longstanding--childhood restaurants have closed, chains and independent ventures alike. And it is weird to me to see businesses like Target in decline. And don't get me started about shopping malls! Or the fact that I can remember the older or original versions of places like Starbucks and Dairy Queen, with things like actual varieties of syrup flavors or giant laundry lists of Blizzard candies, instead of whatever special, concocted, and/or x-treme flavor combination is being currently marketed at me in pursuit of trying to lure customers with "new" and "limited" items.
Or, if we want to veer from the commercial side of things, I'm currently working at the intersection of two institutions that are facing rapid decline--the church and higher education. And don't get me started right now on things like democracy or the government...
Of course, over the history of time, it is verifiable and obvious fact that empires rise and fall; that no institution is forever; that change and decay are inevitable; that both progress and decline represent change, and change always invokes grief, because change is always accompanied by loss.
And so this is part of why the world seems so heavy right now. Not only the shock and trauma of the acutely terrible things that are happening in our nation, but the bigger stuff: that each of us is carrying the weight of our own personal passage of time while also witnessing monumental shifts in the stability of all that we had come to rely on as lasting, true, surviving, foundational. Even things like the Starbucks menu.
My circles of memory, grief, nostalgia, and uncertainty are intersecting in ways I might not have anticipated; maybe in ways that my elders would assure me are not unexpected or unprecedented.
I've often talked about grief, as others have, in terms of "before" and "after." Moments of grief divide up our lives into discernible eras, pre- and post-. Today is one of those days when I am feeling the weight of having more and more of those dividing lines piled up, more and more distinct fragments and sections of my own life as I reflect on it.
The result: a lot of intentional self-talk about living in the present. About letting this current version of my life be my "real life," without labeling previous moments of my life as either more or less real than this. Releasing feelings of guilt for thoroughly enjoying this stage of parenting, in which my children are discovering everything about themselves and the world with eagerness and excitement and possibility. Remembering with fondness and not with judgement.
And knowing that, despite it all, I can still get a mocha at Starbucks.
Tags:
musings