Grief in the Days of Time Machines
I covered my ears. “Stop. Don’t. Don’t talk about it.”
And so we walked on, silent at first and then chatting instead of inconsequential things, the terrible and enormous subject shoved away because it was a horror I could not face. I closed the door on the vicious killer shrew that waited with its gnashing teeth. I silenced my sister as she tried to warn me. There’s a madman in the attic, Mel. Maybe we should do something about that.
Nearly every day, I walk for exercise. Nearly every day, I cross this intersection of two streets. I have never passed this spot without remembering, without hearing the voice of condemnation that I feel I deserve: Here is where you shut her down. Here is where she turned to you to help her wrestle with the enormity of all that she had been through, all of the fears that plagued her mind. Here is where you failed her.
There are different routes I could choose. There are options that would allow me to avoid the intersection of Westover and Cherry. But I almost never take them. I return to this spot like a penance. As if this is what I must do to absolve myself. And on days when I cannot walk, because of weather or because I am out of town, I can always return via Google Maps. Type in the address and you, too, can visit my shame. The camera affords you a 360-degree view of the scene. It won’t look like anything to you but two boring suburban streets. It looks like something very different to me.
*
When my daughters were young, I dutifully took them each weekend to Sunday School because that was the way I was raised. That was the mother I knew how to be. One winter day, I proposed to some of the church members the possibility of an adult Sunday School class that would study Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time. Such a proposal would surely have been shot down in a more traditional denomination, but ours was a fairly liberal church, made up mostly of the educated, affluent, and politically liberal residents of Northern Virginia. The others agreed. Everyone bought the book, and thus began a discussion group that ended up causing verbal battles of historic proportions and that heated up my Sundays in ways no prayer service or hymn singing ever had.
I had come to a place in which I had great difficulty believing in God. But everything that I was, everything that I had been raised to be, longed to have my doubt disputed. And so I turned to physics. Here were the legitimate governing rules of the universe. Maybe if I understood more about them, I would find a tiller at the helm of the cosmos that would make sense to me, that I could find comfort in. And maybe I would find some reason to hope in the possibility of time travel—an idea that had always held me in its sway, but never more so than in the years following my father’s death in 1973. If I could travel back in time, I could see him again. I could once again have someone to look to for the answers to all of my relentless questions. I could put down the increasingly heavy burden of having to find those answers on my own.
Hawking has frequently discussed his ideas about time travel. Although for a while he held out the glimmering chance that we might someday travel into the future, he has naysaid the possibility that we might ever journey into the past. To do so would create paradoxes: if one could return to the past and alter it—say, by shooting one’s own grandfather—then the person who did the shooting—you—would never have existed. Hawking has said that time travel to the past violates one of the fundamental rules of the universe: that causes happen before effects.