Chronicles of an Elder: Rivers of Time

“And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Little Gidding. T.S. Eliot

I measure time by my years on earth. I measure time by the restrictions of lockdown, trying to peer beyond the curves of confinement... I measure time by wondering what events I’ll live to see my grandchildren celebrate. I measure time by the Jewish calendar when the new year begins in the fall.

I wonder about time, how much I have remaining. I fear time, its inexorable passage. I love time, its endless twists and possibilities, the way it loops back and mushes together past and present. I’m awestruck by time, how it’s real though intangible. I move through time, calculating it via my daily rhythms. (How odd, that notion of moving through time.) Perhaps it’s a thin tissue of undulating threads, shifting with the winds of my temperament.

I beseech the gods of time, requesting more of their precious cargo.

It’s not original with me, though I cannot find the source of the idea that the present determines the past. But that is how I experience it. I’ve always lived beside the shadow of my mother, both when she was alive and after her death. Hers was not the kind of shadow under which I cowered in fear; rather, I was cautious about coming into the light. My mother was a fearful, uncertain person. Towards me, the eldest of her two daughters, she exhibited mainly impatience and anger, threatening to send me away if I didn’t behave. I was then, as I am now, a reactive, emotional, sensitive type. Intensely curious, I wanted to understand everything. She couldn’t deal with me. I asked too much. All my young years, I longed to burrow through her anger and find respite. Growing up, I gave up, replacing my longing to connect to her with the desire to stay away. And with the fervent hope not to emulate her in any way. Let me not behave nor look nor feel as she did. Her shadow pursued me, pushing me to be different, pulling me back into itself.

Years passed, as they do. (There’s that time thing again, moving, flowing, receding, expanding.) I look in the mirror and see the lines of her face etched in mine. I hear myself respond to my life partner in the voice she used with my father, angry, demanding. I recoil from others, unable to feel worthy of love as she didn’t teach me how to receive it. I remember my cruel indifference to her in her later years, and shrink from the possibility I’ll get what I gave her--nothing.

That’s the dark side, the scrim of memories made up of absent feelings. But now, I re-make the memories of my mother, changing our relationship. This occurs despite her having died years ago. Time, that strange mechanism, is at work. It’s elastic, magical shape-shifting meddling with what was fixed, changing it to a present narrative.

In the story now, I understand how difficult it was for her: the middle child of an overbearing Russian matriarch who shouted orders from her bed in the back room of our house. Marriage to a man with a depression which burdened them both. A demanding older daughter who was difficult to soothe. Relatives blaming her for her husband’s malaise. And yet she persevered, spending the last nine years of her life as a teacher’s aide. That was the pay-off; finally a classroom of her own, a dream realized. And that eldest daughter who forged a life of connection, that daughter now comprehends her mother’s sadness and finally, weeps for her.

Time not only heals wounds; sometimes it erases them.

Time is not linear, though it’s what we’re led to believe. One doesn’t go from point A to point B in a straight line. Days are round, not long. And time is not hierarchical, forcing us to look up to where ‘He’ is (and it’s always a he) at the top: father, god, ruler. We’re trained to look up instead of around; we’re told to keep our eyes on the prize, not on the person next to us on the bus. We’re instructed to conquer time and not waste it. Meanwhile, time flows all around us, pushing us towards memories past, re-making old truths, beckoning us to the present moment, merging us with that thing called space, and finally, calling us to enter into its eternal river.

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Chronicles of an Elder: Teach Us to Number Our Days

If I live to my next birthday, I’ll be the age my mother died, forty minutes short of hers. My mother’s memory looms over me, as it has all my life, along with the fear of dying at the age she did. This is a good time to reflect on my life as I’m not sure how much more I’ll have. I’d like to insert something cheerful here, but it would be a diversion from this elemental obsession. Writing about these matters gives me a sense of mastery over what’s inevitable. That’s a fundamental reason to write, the delusion that getting the words right means you’ll be immortal. Scrawling on cave walls came from the same impulse. I’ll leave my mark, and you won’t forget me. Although sometimes the marks I scratch on my computer are scary, and I have to remind myself that thoughts are not realities.

Not being forgotten is another obsession. I think about Hamlet’s father’s ghost, exhorting his son as he goes back into the shadows, ‘Hamlet, remember me’ and Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio, ‘draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.’ To be mourned, to be unforgotten throughout the eternity of death, is a strong urge. I argue with my needing self, trying to cheer myself up by recounting the good deeds I’ve done, the people whose lives I’ve influenced. Surely they’ll remember me, I say to myself; surely there’ll be some trace of the fact I was on earth. Yes, but: after two generations those traces will be gone. Yes, and: traces are all I can offer. Remember, my Jewish loved ones, to say Kaddish for me; remember me, my non-Jewish loved ones, in the ways you commemorate loss.

I’ve lived my life in many settings within diverse formations of people, each with their own customs around honouring the dead. In my family of origin, it was photographs. Notable is the picture of my great-aunt, Rose Lila Sasloe. I was anointed with her first and second name. She was the family heroine, world traveller and author of a book for young students. Beautiful, regal, unhappy; she died young after a short, unhappy marriage. I have a stack of letters she wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. I tried reading them, and gave up. They were boring, full of details like ‘please send me a button for the coat I bought in Newark,’ and ‘will you see that my small red valise arrives safely from London.’ In vain, I struggled to find flashes of brilliance from the family icon, but to no avail. Sometimes even the anointed avatar doesn’t come through. But her memory remains, seared into my brain. I was expected to honour her gift of writing with my own. Another way of not forgetting: follow the trade of the ancestor.

For twenty years, I was part of the Jewish community in Berkeley, California. Oddly enough, a place as out of the mainstream as Berkeley has a thriving traditional Jewish presence. Within this culture, I found grounding. California’s boundless sense of possibilities overwhelmed me, and the communal affiliation was a stable marker. Jews do transitions brilliantly, evolving rituals which uncannily mirror psychological realities. When my mother died, I sat on a low stool, wearing a blouse with a large rip in it. All the mirrors were covered with soap, so as not to distract from the task of mourning. People brought me food, and when visitors came, I was enjoined not to act as hostess but to allow them to comfort me. For one week, my sole job was to remember my mother and to absorb the fact that she was dead. After a week, released from the intensity of death’s initial shock, I got up from the stool and slowly began moving back into everyday life. The week of mourning acknowledged the profound absence death brings, helping in the chore of absorbing a forever blank space.

When I contemplate my demise, I’m not sure exactly what I want of my current family. My partner, David, and my stepdaughter, her husband and my two grandchildren are not Jews. They do not mourn in ways I understand. As they are not religious, there is no inherent conflict with the customs with which I’m most familiar. It’s customs, not beliefs, which concern me. I am a Jew by birth and custom, not belief. The absence of a coded response, which is what ritual is, leaves me wondering how I will be mourned and remembered. I play and instruct and adore the children, hoping they’ll find a way to keep me alive, that my desperate attempt to leave my mark will not go unheeded.

Rose Levinson

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