Bill Dalton: Remembering Rose
"Time then is our friend but also can become our enemy if it steals the things we want to remember most."
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.
Rose died 24 years ago.
Only days before the horror of 9/11. Her death spared her from sharing the experience of watching thousands of others die. Human beings trapped in a tragic moment in time. Once here, then gone in an instant.
At this moment, all these years later, as I stand alone among the falling snow in what used to be her rose garden, I’m suddenly immobilized thinking about those wrinkles in time.
The garden is gone now. The dozens of bushes she lovingly tended replaced, after there was no one to look after them, by neglect and dying grass.
Standing on the same ground she once knelt on much of her life, feeling a strange connection with the flowers and her, even though they are now part of the faraway past. Yet, feeling acutely conscious of the present by my steady breathing and beating heart.
Time can play tricks on the mind.
Humans can forget the pain that comes with loss, a selective amnesia that soothes the terrible emotions you feel such as regret. Time then is our friend but also can become our enemy if it steals the things we want to remember most.
And then, as I stood frozen remembering Rose — my mother — on the same farmland she toiled on most of her 79 years upon this Earth, I felt something wholly unexpected: her presence.
Far away, but also near. Not spiritual, but physical. Eerie, yet comforting.
Not long ago, scientists schooled in quantum physics discovered something startling and mind-bending. For centuries, we’d assumed time moved in a straight line from past to present to future.
The past flowing behind us for eons to the beginning of time, whereas the present is merely a blink of an eye. The future — if there is one — stretching in front of us for as long as anyone can imagine.
But those scientists found surprising evidence that time might not always move forward but actually “folds” backward — a loop suggesting our present actions might shape what has been, a concept known as retrocausality. The future might have just as much influence on the past as the past does on the future.
In an article in Consciousness, it’s explained this way:
“Under controlled conditions, atomic states could be rewound — essentially making time run backward for those particles. These findings don’t mean we can rewrite history, but they do suggest that time may be more flexible than we ever imagined. Your present moment isn’t a single point trapped between “what was” and “what will be.” It’s part of a vast, interconnected web of events — a living structure that includes past, present, and future all at once. Our choices ripple not only into the future but may also reshape the story of the past — not by changing what happened, but by altering how reality fits together as a whole. In that sense, every act of awareness, kindness, or understanding might heal more than just the future. Maybe time isn’t something we travel through — maybe it’s something we create, moment by moment, with our choices, our consciousness, and our connection to everything that has ever been or will ever be.”
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If this theory proves to be true, and something inside me hopes it will, then it may mean time is almost irrelevant for the living or the dead.
It reminds me of the 1970 song “Deja Vu” by Crosby, Stills & Nash, in which there is a haunting refrain: We have all been here before … we have all been here before.
What if we’ve always been here? What if there is no past, present or future? What if they are one and the same, coexisting at the same time?
In the rose garden, when I whispered that I loved you, did it change anything in our past, present or future? Or nothing. Or everything.
Time can play tricks on the mind.
Perhaps that’s what I felt in the rose garden. Standing at the nexus of the almost forgotten past, the fleeting present, and the foreboding future.
It was only a feeling. And then it was gone.
— Bill Dalton is a former reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star and worked for several Michigan newspapers. He spends summers on the family farm near Fennville. His book “Dalton’s Bend” is available from Amazon.
