Grief in the Days of Time Machines
In a recent interview with the BBC in 2015, Hawking seemed even more pessimistic about the likelihood of time travel. He also dismissed the possibility of an afterlife in a single sentence: “I think the afterlife is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
The afterlife. It was a part of the whole God riddle that I have spent most of my adult years trying to solve. It is a story I still long to believe. Mr. Hawking, you have certainly nailed me and my kind. Yes, I concede it. I am terrified of the dark. Aren’t most of us? Why aren’t you?
*
In the months after my father died, when I was sixteen years old, I used to write him letters and leave them out on my nightstand before I went to sleep at night. I would place a pen atop the paper as if it might be picked up, as if my father might appear from the shadowy Otherworld and write me a reply. I kept at it for far longer than made sense, but, eventually, I stopped. There was no fanfare to it. One night I simply didn’t do it anymore. Some would say I was beginning to heal from my grief. I would say instead that something faithful and hopeful within me blew out, a candle flame I could no longer find a way to light.
My mother died in 2012. Back when she was still healthy and had all of her wits together, she told my sister and me to watch for her once she was gone, that if there were any possibility of a visit from the Great Beyond, she would most assuredly make it. “Maybe I won’t be able to talk to you,” she said. “But look for me.” Her eyebrows rose in an arched and diabolical way. “And if You-Know-Who should suddenly take a tumble down a long flight of stairs, well, then, you’ll know I have been there.” The three of us laughed. We knew who she meant—and we knew that You-Know-Who had it coming.
In the few months following my mother’s death—the few months that Terri had before she learned that she was ill—my sister visited a psychic, a medium who claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the deceased. She told me about it hesitantly, knowing that I would scoff at her throwing away money she didn’t have on such a foolish undertaking.
“Mom spoke to me,” she said.
“What? You actually heard her?”
“No. I mean she spoke through this guy.”
“Uh huh. Then how do you know it was her?”
Terri ignored my question. “I wanted to know if she was mad at me,” she said. “Mad that we made her move out of her apartment and into Ruby’s place those last couple of years.”
Ruby had been my mother’s caregiver when Mom grew too frail and confused to live alone any longer.
“Well, was she? Mad?”