Grief in the Days of Time Machines
Eventually, I know that I will take the risk and attempt to transfer Terri and me and our song to a DVD. Physicists may have shut the door on my dream of a time machine, but I still have this moving, speaking memory that can take me at least part of the way there.
There was once other footage of the two of us—far older footage—but it did not survive the floods in the basement of my former house or the fiery summers in the uninsulated attic. This footage was held on old reels of fragile, fading film—home movies my father shot with an enormous camera and a carefully positioned spotlight so bright and glaring that, in nearly every frame, Terri and I are squinting, our hands held up to shade our eyes.
Dad had a movie projector to play these reels. Occasionally, he would proclaim that it was Movie Night and hang up an old white sheet across a wall in the dining room. Mom would let us shake a container of Jiffy Pop over the burner until we had a huge bowl of white popcorn, which we drizzled with butter and sprinkled in salt.
We sat on the carpet while the reels turned, their revolutions making a loud, repetitive, rhythmic sound. The projector emitted waves of heat and a brilliant light in which dust motes danced. Our bodies cast long shadows across the sheet. This was a time machine I will never get back again.
Instead, I have Google and Facebook, iTunes and YouTube to take me backward into the world I once knew. But something essential is lost forever.
In one scene, Terri’s face and my face look up into the dazzle of my father’s light, blinking and waiting for him to tell us what to do. We are silent film stars. There is no sound. There is only motion to reveal who we thought we were in those long-gone days, or who we might become in the years ahead.
“Wave!” my father instructs us. “Wave at the camera.”
And so we wave.
We do as we are told, thinking that we are waving hello to whomever might watch us in some shining future we cannot yet comprehend. We are young and perfect and safe in a world that will be ours for a much shorter span than we know. And I don’t have to travel backwards in time to understand what I now do—that as we flicker and leap and laugh across that rumpled sheet in that hot room, the message we send is a different one.
We are all traveling through time in another kind of machine—the machines of our own bodies. We have a destination we cannot help but move toward, no matter what it costs us.
As we carry out our father’s directive, we are really waving goodbye.