When time stands still

Society6

The breakneck pace with which 2014 has been galloping has been exhausting, to say the least.  It’s felt like everything this year has rushed by, and I’m caught looking at things in the rearview mirror.  My desperate attempt at slowing things down, for myself, has been to adjust life to my speed where I can but that doesn’t mean that everything else isn’t continuing to charge forward.  However, this week, life has hit the pause button.  My mom’s father passed away in the early hours of Monday morning and all of a sudden, it’s as though time is standing still.  Although it was not completely unexpected, his passing caught us all off guard.  With the recent onset of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's, he had become too much to handle at home, even with a full-time caregiver, and was recently moved to hospice.  The doctors had told us that, with good care, he would have another 6 months, which we heard just this past weekend.

Everyone, myself included, is still trying to gather themselves, to respond in the way that is the most appropriate to his memory and helpful to the extended family.  It seems eerie how time seems to crawl to a snail’s pace at times like this.  Time is now frozen as a windowpane that has just been shattered, on the shards spinning and twinkling in mid-air.  Whether they fall harmlessly or with a slicing, dicing crash is yet to be seen.  Frozen time, with its slogging thaw, has us all captive, and I am tired and weary of it all already.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that time has paused, for us to find our sense of closure.  My emotionally-stunted, robotic self is always unsure what to do in times and situations like these, how to react to others and how to express sympathy and grief.  Tears are something that have never seemed adequate to me, shed over frustration instead of sadness.  I promise I’m not a sociopath; during this pause, I intend to use my frozen time to figure out what his life meant to me and how to celebrate it.