Time Travel by Deborah Schifter

I open my calendar to enter an appointment, and 2025 stares back at me. How did that number get so big? Yesterday it was just 2009. In the intervening years, my deceased husband has slipped away—not gone, mind you, but not immediately at hand.

Still, when I tell stories about him to new listeners, all my narrative energy is activated, even though I’ve told the stories many times before. I don’t get bored with the repetition. I am back in the scene—I return from taking our friend to the Tucson airport. After months of anger and depression in response to his developing ALS symptoms, Alan surprises me with the suggestion, “Check the web and find out where the wildflowers are in bloom. Let’s go. Take your hiking boots.” At the trailhead, he says, “I’m all set in the shade with my coffee and sandwich. Go. Enjoy yourself. I’ll be right here when you get back.” When I return, “Let’s call John and Sandy in Massachusetts,” and then, “John, it’s so beautiful here, the sun is out, the sky is blue, and I’m looking out over a vast forest of saguaro and prickly pear.” After the conversation with John and Sandy, I start to pack up our things, but Alan puts out his hand to stop me. “Let’s watch the sun set,” he says, and we admire the pastels in the sky fading into soft gray, the large milky moon becoming sharp and bright.

This evening I weep, returning to that moment of ease and connection, when we sat comfortably with who we were, as we were, illness and all, having an inkling of what lay ahead, but at that moment it didn’t matter, because we were together, just us, in the softness of a warm desert evening. Today that moment exists as an island in the flow of time, and I can return there, now as a visitor, not actually in the moment. It’s held in memory, but close, so close, it makes me weep.

Yesterday when I was telling the story about going to see the wildflowers, I felt the energy rising, my love for my husband, whom I still find endlessly fascinating. I told my friends, none of whom had known him, what had happened that had triggered Alan out of his despondency: I had gone to a conference for three days, and while I was gone, our friend, Ron, stayed with him. Ron was there to take care of Alan, but Alan took on the role of host, and whereas for the previous month since we’d arrived in Tucson Alan had refused to visit any of the places we’d enjoyed during our years of healthy hiking, he took Ron. A few days after I got home and Ron had left, Alan told me they had traveled to the Chiricahua Mountains. While Ron was hiking, Alan sat in the car looking out over the valley, and the spirit of the land reached him. “I could die here,” he said to himself, and in that moment of acknowledgment, depression lifted.

Mostly these days, I feel like I’m caught in the current of time, making my way, and my life with Alan is somewhere upstream. When I tell these stories, it’s as though some object rises to the surface and bobs there for a bit before flowing away. Recently, while members of my community were weeding a shared lawn, one of my neighbors said to me, “I like that you casually bring Alan up in conversation. It’s as though he’s living here among us.” I needed to think back to what my neighbor was referring to. When his wife told us she sneezes thirteen times every morning during ragweed season, I said, “Alan had bad spring and fall allergies. He’d say, after he started to sneeze in the spring, my first Gesundheit stood for all his sneezes for the rest of the year. One blessing per year was all he wanted.”

It comes as a relief, sitting alone this evening, to return to the long moment of watching the sunset in Arizona, the moon and stars suspended in time. I connect to Alan, but I also connect to myself, still, deep, not needing to act, not needing to distract myself.

February 23, 2005. That was the date of our trip to the wildflowers. The night before, Ron, Alan, and I had celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Ron hosting a dinner to introduce us. Tonight, that evening in the desert feels so close I can almost touch it, as though it falls out of the sequence of time. The afternoon sun is still warm on my arms.

I am here and I am there. The chill air of this November evening makes the tip of my nose cold, and I contract as I wrap myself in a shawl. I breathe deeply, and the warmth of that desert evening in February extends through my limbs, my muscles relax, and my energy expands feet beyond the surface of my skin. I am here, at my table. The begonia that flourished on my front porch all summer, now in front of me, is wondering if it will make a go of it in this new environment. And I am there, leaning my back against the railing, gazing at the trail where I found spots of red, yellow, and orange emerging from the desert floor.