The Grief of the Ephemeral
The Grief of the Ephemeral
Caroline Jane Kelly
All my life I’ve been counting down—to what, I’m not always sure, but a sense of despair and regret always lingers around the edges and the endings, even when I’m not looking for them. My dad loves to tell the story of seven-year-old me, on the first or second night of a family vacation to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks off North Carolina’s coast, working myself up into a sadness because “we only have six days left here.” That fear permeates so much of my life: We only have so much time left. A vacation, a long weekend, breaks when I was in college; all were more magical in the time before they happened, and already wilting at the edges once I was in the middle.
At the most incongruous moments throughout my life, such as sitting in a literary theory class trying (and failing) to make sense of deconstructionism, I’ve been swept up by dread without warning, like a rip current that pulls you out into dangerous water before you know what’s taken you. Fears remind me that I will grow old, that this body won’t always be young, that maybe I will be a completely different self in twenty years. I feel bound up in a constant grief of the ephemeral, counting down the minutes as the light changes instead of watching the light itself.
It was when I was driving to work on a bright morning late last summer, past harvested, stubbly tobacco fields, that the understanding of time and of age as an idol shimmered and then solidified before me. We all bury our deepest fears, surprised and humiliated when they rear up, so it must be true that the Holy Spirit can settle an understanding in our minds just as instantly. I have the Catholicism of my Irish-immigrant ancestry to thank for an inherited capacity for guilt over the so-called lost, wasted years that too often paralyze this Protestant into inaction.
You Don’t Wish to Grow Old
For the person obsessively anxious about the passing of time, guilt about squandering this one life only exponentially multiplies the original fear. It buries, it whispers and accuses, it grows insidiously in the very wounded places that never see light or scab over—because how can you admit that you don’t wish to grow old? I have a writer’s imagination, but no imaginings of myself. No images of a future life I might have, because my eyes track only the dirt below my feet as I trudge along, not noticing the glory that grows crisper and sweeter with every year I’ve lived. Yet even in tragedy, even—or most especially—in aging, I have been a witness to beauty that becomes more itself the closer we come to Christ. “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance” (Psalm 16:6). Why, then, is the eternal inheritance we are promised so difficult to trust while we walk this earth?
James WT Benn
Anxiety is a permanent boarder in my head, though only because I’ve made room for him there. He sets up shop and the machinery hums with industry and productivity as he reminds me not to forget to be afraid. What seems so clear one moment as I drive past morning fields—that I have made an idol out of time, an obsession both with time “lost” and the future that terrifies me—is the next moment suddenly murkier, swallowed back into its own obsessive pattern. In The Reason for God, Tim Keller identifies the root of sin as misplaced identities, an understanding of ourselves based in anything that isn’t the Triune God. By that definition I am already languishing in death even though my body is “young.” Anxiety leaps up and crows gleefully about my lost years and everything wasted, because it thrives on and begets regret.
My family has always been somewhat nomadic, enough that when asked where I’m from, I don’t know how to answer. It doesn’t surprise me that stories about home—true, longed-for, deep-rooted homes—are the stories I gravitate toward reading and writing. In searching for that true home in my own life, the fear that I’ve somehow missed it (and in the missing it that I have lost time I can never regain) looms large as fairytale ghosts. They follow mournfully, striking a business deal with Anxiety who never pays his rent, all of them constructed monuments to what I think I’ve wasted. But then, the deep irony that pulls me back, the protection of the Spirit—perhaps ‘Holy Ghost’ is more appropriate here—the reminding that there is no home on this earth, not before its restoration. No true fulfillment that I have lived as I believe I should live.
A Transtemporal, Transfinite Good
C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, “If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.” That traces back to Keller’s misplaced identities. Our longing for home, for more time, for the healing of regrets, are ours for a reason, indicating in Lewis-esque terms that there is something deeper within us to engender those heartaches and that the “something” came not from us. And while I believe that our God-given longings should be listened to for the true north towards which they point, they are not the true north itself, only symptoms of its lack in an unrestored world.
A slow reading through the Psalms recently brought me to Psalm 37, in which there are seven references to inheriting and dwelling on the land. As so often happens when I read Scripture, all my twisted doubts shrink away and the truth is distilled clear as a bell or as a stream of water: “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness,” reads verse three. Trust in the Lord. Do good. Dwell on and take care of the land. Be committed to faithful service. Cast in that light, the regrets and the fearful obsessions lose their potency, don’t they? In my favorite novel, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (which will be required reading for my children, if I have any), one character tells another, “It isn’t simple at all. It’s desperately complicated. But at the end there’s light.”
To the one despairingly and unwillingly enamored with endings, any reference to inheritance in Scripture is like a balm. It isn’t the health-and-wealth inheritance of prosperity gospel preachers or the surface-level positivity of self-help, boss-babe hustlers. It is abundant and beautiful, and it does not come without a cost, one at Golgotha and the other in our own crosses we take up (Luke 9:23). But it is promised, as Psalm 37 continually reminds, like a parent reassuring a fearful child over and over again—yes, it’s all true. “Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land” (v. 34). That was the command and the promise, and here is the reassurance, both proof and faith: “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread” (v. 25).
How easily I forget it all the moment anxiety begins his work. He is weaseling and small, more frightened of the light than I am of the seedling doubts he plants. The devil, as he works under the guises of anxiety and fear, doubt and paranoia, is everything that the apostle Peter affirms our inheritance through Christ is not: perishable, defiled, fading. Instead, the life kept in heaven for us is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading (1st Peter 1:4). That time cannot be lost, it cannot be altered or desecrated. Further in 1st Peter, the apostle writes that “after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore you,” (5:10)—and could any regrets, even our darkest and saddest, even the press of lost years, withstand the weight of divine restoration?
Life, Death and Regrets
In the British detective series Inspector Morse, which ended a 13-year-run in 2000, the final episode finds the title character, played by John Thaw, and his younger partner drinking pints at a local pub as the evening light turns gold around them. In a melancholy voice, Morse—who is a classical music lover—remarks, “You really should persevere with [the composer] Wagner, Lewis. It’s about important things… life and death. Regrets.” The “important things” are no different between Christians and non-Christians. All of us come up against life and death and regrets, contending with our lost time—which must ultimately end in despair for the non-believer, and I think any honest Christian would admit that he doesn’t always trust God to restore the lost years, as promised in Joel 2:25. But if I take my faith out of myself—misplaced, manifesting as sin, as guilt—and return that faith to the one who first gave it to me… well, then the light changes. It’s as clear and as true as that, though it’s by no means simple.
These are the important things. Every day I try anew to put to bed my obsession with time—both lost and future. I relax my fingers. I don’t know what the lost years will look like after the restoration, but I do see the frenetic industry of my anxiety crumbling after I’ve opened my hands. The years were never mine to begin with. Someday I’ll be able to say that once I was young, and now I am old, and never once did I see my Father forsake the restoration of those he loves.
Caroline Jane Kelly
Writer
Raised in the south and now living in New England, Caroline Kelly is a writer exploring themes of grace and home as she works on her first novel. She loves ‘70s music, flat coastlines, American literature, and the Gospel of John.
Photography by Ashley McKinney