Distentio Animi
When I think about my daughter dying in utero, when I think about the day we found out something was wrong, my wife and I in the sonogram room, our twenty-week scan, concern from the technician, concern from the doctor, crying together, all the apologizes, sorry, sorry, sorry—when I think about that day and the horrible days to follow, I can’t keep track of time.
Still, nine months later, grief and shock turned everything into a blur. The follow-up meetings with specialists, an extreme case of hydrops fetalis, fluid trapped in our baby girl, our Baby Simone, family flying down to North Carolina to stay with us, the wrenching need to terminate the pregnancy, the days, weeks, months, eternity, stuck in our grief, moving and unmoving, trapped in time.
In Book Eleven of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the author can’t figure out how to measure the past and the future.
“As for past time, which doesn’t exist any longer, or future time, which does not yet exist, who can measure either—unless somebody has the gall to say he can measure what doesn’t exist?”
For pages and pages, Augustine pleads with God to explain this paradox. He writes himself, as Augustine often does, into a pretzeled frenzy.
Finally, he reaches a compromise. Yes, there are three different kinds of time. Just not the three we have learned.
“There are, in fact, in the mind a certain three kinds of time I don’t see elsewhere: the present with respect to past things, which is the memory; the present with respect to present things, which is contemplation; and the present with respect to future things, which is expectation.”
Memory, contemplation, and expectation. Three different forms of the present. The mind, at any moment, extended, or distended. Distentio animi.
As a novelist, I’ve played with this concept in all my books. Fiction is most interesting, I think, when linear time is disrupted, when our characters’ minds wander, simultaneously, in the same paragraph, chapter, or sentence, between past, present, and future. Proust’s dreamlike adventure, for example. Or, more recently, Nobel Prize-winner Jon Fosse’s Septology, where we spend hundreds of pages hypnotized in a Scandinavian winter by poetic remembrances, anchored by our protagonist’s faith and the guiding refrain of The Lord’s Prayer.
As a grieving parent, I leant on my distended mind.
There’s a small house in Chapel Hill, near a graveyard on the University of North Carolina campus, near the soccer fields, near the softball stadium, almost on a hilltop, near a highway, on Raleigh Road, a main road.
If you’re not looking, you wouldn’t notice the house from the road. You would see a parking lot like many campus parking lots, some trees, and keep driving.
In Quakerism, congregations are called meetings. The chapel or church is replaced with a modest meeting house. Members are called Friends.
Once a week, Friends gather in the meeting house and sit in silence for an hour. This form of group prayer is called “expectant waiting”.
The Chapel Hill meeting is “unprogrammed”, meaning there isn’t a sermon, there isn’t music. There is only waiting. There is only silence, occasionally interrupted when someone feels moved to speak, to share a moment of inspiration, to ask for prayers, maybe a relative is sick, maybe the speaker is sick, would you mind, please, holding us in your thoughts, holding us in The Light.
During those unprogrammed hours, in prayer, I could feel my mind distending. Three different forms of the present in my mind. There was my mother dragging me to church on Sundays. There was my wife at home, pregnant, minding the dogs before I came home. There was myself, hoping, praying, to turn into an ideal husband and father. I enjoyed the peace. The ability to let go of time, allow the hour to pass without counting the minutes. I would sit, travel between memory, contemplation, and expectation.
Soon after I started attending the Chapel Hill meeting, my wife discovered she was pregnant. I would pray for my wife’s safety, for my baby’s safety, for our puppy to behave, for the static to calm in my head, for my gratitude to outweigh my fears, for me to find understanding and grace with my coworkers, to protect everyone I’ve ever held dear.
When my wife and I learned Simone was dying, after the diagnosis, on a Wednesday, I e-mailed the Chapel Hill Friends, to see if anyone would let me sit in the pew, creak and pray.
I stood in the hallway and hugged Anne, a retired OB/GYN, who drove from home to let me in, who asked if I wanted company, if I wanted her to sit with me, in silence, in expectant waiting, both our minds distended together.
No. No. It’s okay, Anne. Thank you. I want to pray alone.
Now, the journey from my first meeting to that afternoon with Anne has transformed, through grief, into one huge single moment covered in faith and love and crying.
This past August, in Sedona, Arizona for my wife’s birthday, a too-hot celebration for a year defined by death and grief, a year impossible to measure.
I gifted her an hour-long psychic reading. She wanted to know if her upcoming year would portend less grief than her preceding year. We had the afternoon open and decided it was worth trying to reach into the spiritual realm, which, in Sedona, pulses through the red rocks.
I waited in the parking lot, surrounded by the healing desert, feeling like another planet, looking down on earth. A state of extended time. I was overcome with static.
The hour passed unprogrammed. My memories of the past year, the past three years, the pandemic, my life. My contemplation of my own changes and growth. Was I a supportive husband? Was I a good father? Was I finding time more manageable? Was I in control? Did these answers exists in the past, present, or future?
Do the answers exist now, as I write this, a year later, month-old son struggling with sleep, all of us struggling to catch time passing, looking at pictures on our phones, wondering how that was three weeks ago, two weeks, one, wondering if our improvement, our joy replaced with sadness, is somehow hurtful toward Simone, if we are betraying her with our happiness, if she feels our love, if she hears us crying, if the year passing feels like only five seconds, if she if experiencing time as we are experiencing time, if she has seen the puppy grow and mature, if she, too, has felt her father and mother grow closer in love through grief. And her? Where has she gone? Is she older now, in sped up time, five years, fifteen, off to college somewhere else, married now, divorced now, older than our son, her brother, Noah, looking at his pictures with disbelief, where has the time gone?
When my wife appeared in the passenger seat, what did I expect her to say?
The psychic spoke with Simone. My wife didn’t know if she believed it, she didn’t know what was true. The psychic said Simone was always with us, has never left us, is with us still, looking down, her spirit extended through all versions of the present, covering us. She is protecting us. She just stopped by, for twenty weeks, to say hello, to give us a hug.
Our beautiful baby girl, perpetually distended.
She hasn’t gone. We are still living in our various presents, holding our grief.
Overwhelmed, pleasantly, with time.
So beautiful Gabe. Thank you