The Time Machine Monologue

Driving home from soccer today, my daughter began a conversation that she's had many times before. Actually, it's more of a monologue. A fugue, almost. Variations on an eternal theme.

How, if she could have any power, the power she'd like would be time travel.

How she'd use it to go back in time to find David just before he hopped in the plane.

How she'd warn him not to hop in the plane.

And she rehearses this plan over and over.

Then she began to wonder how he actually died. And because my daughter can be very young sometimes, she actually wondered whether people die in plane crashes because they are trapped in the plane and starve to death. No, sweetheart. And I tried to put it into as simple and non-graphic words as possible. Because I have read the autopsy report, and those words are burned into me forever, and I don't want them burned into her. So I just explained that his lungs were damaged in the crash and so he died.

Could people ever just get new lungs if their lungs were broken?

Well, incredibly, yes, if they happened to be in a world-class fabulous hospital at the moment that their lungs broke, but, well, he wasn't. He was in the remote wasteland that is Sudan. So, he died.

And suddenly I found myself wondering how I had managed to go seven years without ever really thinking about how he died. It was bad enough that he had died, that he was gone, that he missed out on so much life. Practically his kids' whole lives he had missed. He had never met any of my children. This was the big bad part, and the small matter of how he died was just one thing too much to think about. But here I was, seven years later, thinking about it while I drove along the road. And B------- Road has yellow lines painted practically all the way up it, so I was driving along, looking for a place to stop, because my eyes were all swimmy with tears, and I didn't want to be driving any more.

Finally we stopped. My daughter who is a sweet little soul felt pretty bad about "making mummy cry", so she asked if she could undo her seatbelt and come and hug me, and she did. And of course, sitting in my lap in the driver's seat, she began again, planning, how she is going to grow up, invent a time machine, go back in time, and warn David not to get on the plane.

How many of these conversations (monologues) have I endured? Right at that moment I did not want to endure a single one more, so I pointed out to her the obvious fact that she is never going to succeed in building her time machine, because if she had, David would never have died, and I wouldn't be sitting her crying right now.

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that The Time Travel Paradox is completely beyond my seven year old daughter. I don't know if this makes her particularly stupid, or I am expecting too much of a seven year old, or perhaps her profound optimism prevents her from seeing the truth, but in her mind, going back and rescuing David before he gets on the plane is something that will happen in the future, and so, she still believes it might happen, and eventually she pretty much told me to stop trying to explain, because she'll just have to figure it out for herself one day, and she could see it was upsetting me that she didn't understand.

So that was it. I drove to the cafe where we always have breakfast (second breakfast in fact) with the male portion of the family, and hand over the car key to them so they can go off to rugby. I cried again in the cafe, upsetting the rest of my family in the meantime. The boys were particularly confused as to how I could be more upset on this day, which was not even David's birthday nor any special day, than I had been on the seventh anniversary of his death, which was a fortnight ago. As if it doesn't suck enough to be as sad as can be, and as horrified as if I had just found out, that my brother's lungs filled up with blood so that he could not breathe, as if I had heard and read these words and never allowed myself to listen to them or to see them before, I also realised that I was making my daughter feel terrible for making mummy cry and my sons feel confused and anxious because you never know when mum is going to start crying.

What else is there to do? There is not space enough in this world both for me to give vent to my grief and for me to raise the family I want to have. If I could act just for myself, I would fill the house with tears, I would tattoo my sorrow all over my body, I would change my name to Grief and close all the curtains and just look at photos all day. But there is so little space for sorrow in a child's life. Just a tiny piece now and again still threatens to be too much. There are lakes of tears that I have held back and still I have cried too much.

She is in her bedroom now, playing with her fairies, and I will never know if she is there because she doesn't want to be with me, or because she senses (with her lovely sensibility) that I want to be alone, or because, just perhaps, she really wants to play with her fairies. Soon I must go to her and show her I am OK now. I suppose I will never hear the interminable Time Machine Rescue monologue again. I suppose that is what I wanted. But I do know that I stuffed this one up.