Forever, by Gillian

Well of course there's no such thing. In human time, we'll all die someday. In historic time, we see that everything comes to an end; even in geologic time nothing is forever. Continents wander about the surface of the earth, joining and separating and pushing up mountains. Even our planet is about halfway through its lifespan. In another four and a half billion years, give or take time out for weekends and holidays, Earth as we know it will grind to a halt. As our planet cools, it will become, perhaps, rather as Mars is now; in the same way as Mars was, perhaps, once rather as Earth is now.

Nothing is forever. But it's tricky.

Via our own memories, or through education, we know a great deal about so much that has gone before; has not been forever. What is hard, is to grasp the current absences that will not remain forever, so many of which we ourselves have lived. We had, in our youth, no concept of the absence of a Ground Positioning System. We cannot grasp the lack of something we don't know will ever exist. Or that GPS would in turn would lead to a voice coming from a device in your car and giving you detailed moment by moment directions, guiding you from A to B. We did not dream that phones would not be forever attached to the wall or that in a relatively short time they would be capable of delivering to their users vast amounts of information. We never knew that someday we would say, there's an app. for that! And it's not just technology that shows so little sign of forever. Most of us, people of a certain age, did not know that life in the closet we inhabited was not forever. We could not dream that we would live to see, some incredible day, The White House alight in rainbow colors. Come to that, we had no vision of the significance which would one day become attached to those colors; that rainbow. Nor could we see our part in it.

Betsy and I, along with most of the world's population, watched the Women's Soccer World Cup. I remarked to her that the fact that there even is such a thing as women playing soccer at all, never mind a World Cup watched, in the U.S. alone, by almost 30-million people, is as completely incredible to me as the recent, amazing, legalizing, throughout the entire U.S., of same-sex marriage. It was little more than two years ago that I stated, in one of my Storytime writings, that I did believe it would arrive, some day, but not in my lifetime. Of course, in my youth, it was something I could not conceive of in the very best of my imaginings. All that existed was a void in thought, word, and deed, which I could only suppose would last forever.

One of the good things, I find, about growing old is that we really do get it. We really know that those good times will not last forever, so we enjoy them more intensely, perhaps more frequently, while at the same time managing not to feel that terrible sense of loss and regret when they are over. By the same token, we know that the bad times are not forever. We will get over it, and life will go on. Or we will not, and we will die. And quite honestly, I cannot believe that will be forever, either. Nothing else is, as far as I know, in the entire universe. So why would death be the single exception? What will follow I don't even speculate. It is simply another of those conceptual voids, like women's soccer and gay marriage once were to me, which will not last forever. Someday it will be filled. I just don't know with what.

© 13 Jul 2015 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.