What can we do with such solitary experiences of violently new and hitherto unsuspected states of temporal perception; what sense can we try to make of them? To show what I mean about ‘time lived but without its flow’, I’d have needed to do yet more reporting on the visceral state of being thrown outside time for a period of years. That state may sound unreal, implausible. Our customary intuitions of time strongly suggest that it would be both perceptually impossible and practically unliveable. Yet it’s surely a state that’s common enough, and is indeed manageable. Inside their senses of arrested time, millions must live today, and have lived. The deaths of their children are apt to induce profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive. They are thrown into ‘timeless time’. However, despite the fact that such human losses occur constantly, this ensuing state of a-temporality seems largely to escape recorded notice.
For to outlive a sudden death makes it evident that your ordinary time, which had once ‘flowed’, had never been much like a clear stream, or a fluid held in glass. That old kind of lived time was no simple medium, and nothing finely transcendent. It had always been thick. It must have been another aspect of ‘the flesh of the world’; active, changeable, and formative.2 Now, though, your distinct sensation of a newly halted time – or rather, of a non-time – has blown away that unremarked thickness, and instead has dropped you down in its own still landscape of brilliant clarity. Perhaps yours might be cited as a version of akinetopsia, that rare condition in which you mislay your perception of motion, like the patient who found pouring a cup of tea difficult ‘because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier’.3 Nevertheless you find that you survive perfectly well in this new non-time of sheer stasis. Rather than being just a temporal swerve, it’s more of a stepping-outside the entire sheltering sky of temporality itself – into a not unpleasant state of tremendous simplicity, of easy candour and bright emptiness.
You’ve slipped into a state of a-chronicity. From its serene perspective you realize, to your astonishment, that to dwell inside a time that had the property of ‘flowing’ was merely one of a range of possible temporal perceptions. For your time can pause, and you with it – though you’re left sharply alive within its stopping. Your apprehension of sequence itself is halted. Where you have no impression of any succession of events, there is no linkage between them, and no cause. Anything at all might follow on from any one instant. You are tensed for anything – or, equally, are poised for nothing. No plans can be entertained seriously, although you keep up an outward show of doing so. Where induction itself has failed, so does your capacity for confident anticipation. So your task now is to inhabit the only place left to you – the present instant – with equanimity, and in as much good heart as you can contrive. For one moment will not, now, carry you onward to the next.
This vivid new sensation of a-temporality differs from some more readily comprehended ‘distorting’ of time, for it has no traces of the old familiar temporal shapes, and it resists intelligible description. Sharply different, it’s a physical perception. Not a reflective state of mind, or an act of introspection leaning on an exhausted figure of speech, but a perception as bodily immediate, as inescapable, as a feeling of thirst. The irony is that this strong experience resurrects the life in the dead metaphor of ‘time stopped’ – while the occasion for this linguistic reanimation, the formerly living child, stays stubbornly dead.
*
Still, I find myself wanting to claim time’s standstill as an ordinary enough phenomenon – if not inevitable, then perfectly to be expected in the wake of a sudden death. As a condition not to be quickly categorized as ‘pathological’ and then consigned to an isolating silence, but rather to be recognized as common enough and capable of being openly discussed. How, then, can I struggle to convey this distinctive experience of living inside a new non-time – while in the same breath I want to save it from being treated as unapproachable, and exceptional? That, straightforwardly enough, might be a matter of allowing the myriad specificities of different losses their differing temporal impacts. A chronic or a terminal illness, for example, may force on its sufferer a vehemently transformed kind of time. That will possess its own particular charge, not to be flattened into a false equivalence with other kinds of changed temporalities.
Occasioned by the unexpected death, your enormous shift away from your old grasp of time is far removed from your predictable meditations on the fragility of life, from your wistful philosophizing, or from your crushed expectations. Your altered temporality is not to do with any kind of taking thought. It is prior to that, and supremely indifferent to lament and to cogitation alike. Instead it feels foundational: to do with a change in the entire structure of cognition. An unanticipated and irrevocable vanishing smashes through your habitual cognitive assumption that objects and people will continue to exist, to reappear. The person who says, ‘I keep expecting to hear his key in the door any moment,’ isn’t merely falling back on a well-worn trope. She’s issuing a factual report. Once so ferociously shaken up, cognition can’t readily regroup its forces to reassemble with its old anticipation intact. The entire stance inside which you’d previously lived is changed. Not by any disfiguring melancholia on your part, or even by simple reflective sadness – but by an upheaval of that pre-conscious topography through which your old apprehension of the world had once quietly moved. So those who lose a child will go out with the lost one into their timelessness. Into ‘timeless time’. This experience, as I reflected, must be the time of the dead. Or it’s as near as you can get to entering into that time, or that non-time.
‘So to speak’ comes the quick qualification here. Your own changed perception of time, so hard to describe aloud convincingly, is echoed in the stumbling ordinary language about the being of the dead. The very grammar of discussing a death falters in its conviction – in the same breath that the focus of talk, the formerly living person, himself disintegrates. Even the plainest ‘He died’ is a strange sentence, since there’s no longer a human subject to sustain that ‘he’. And what of the phrase ‘his body’, once there’s no surviving ‘he’ to animate it? Lydia Davis has a lovely piece on this, a darkly light and plaintive speculation that she calls ‘Grammar Questions’:
When he is dead, everything to do with him will be in the past tense. Or rather, the sentence “He is dead” will be in the present tense, and also questions such as “Where are they taking him?” or “Where is he now?”
But then I won’t know if the words he and him are correct, in the present tense. Is he, once he is dead, still “he”, and if so, for how long is he still “he”?4
It’s as if any death causes the collapse of the simplest referring syntax. As if the grammatical subject of the sentence and the human subject have been felled together by the one blow. Yet at the same time, the continuing possibilities for discussing the no longer existing person induce a curious linguistic quasi-resurrection.5 Perhaps language, at least, possesses a belief in spirit. No wonder that the puzzles of lost animation, and reanimation, become a driving preoccupation for those left alive. Those gibbering souls of Orphic myth might suggest that the scattering of the anima is also a syntactical taking flight, while even the most secular mind may find it hard to conceive of a death without a continuation, some variant of a released soul. And this has its linguistic reasons. No subject can easily be conceived as extinguished, because language itself doesn’t want to allow that thought; its trajectory is always to lean forward into life, to push it along, to propel the dead onward among the living.
Such daily curios of expression as ‘she’s died’ are readily shuffled along with. They’re pragmatic. Far more linguistically intractable, though, is the effort to show the condition of stopped time. Again you’ll try to convey your discovery that everyday acts of telling and describing assume the speaker’s awareness of passing time with each use of an implicit ‘next’. But once there’s no longer any element of sequence, because that usual intuition of flowing time has been halted, narration itself can’t proceed. Any attempt at descriptive writing soon reaches an impasse, for it could normally have relied, tacitly, on its own unfolding. Not so now. A life of no time can’t be recounted. Your very condition militates against narrative.
Maybe only the cinema could show it. Not by means of any cinematic plot, certainly, but through the camerawork itself.6 Still, here we are on the printed page, with what there is to hand.
*
Looping around, I repeat myself, yet am compelled to keep trying to say it: to live on after a death, yet to live without inhabiting any temporal tense yourself, presents you with serious problems of what’s describable. This may explain the paucity of accounts of arrested time. To struggle to narrate becomes not only an unenticing prospect, but structurally impossible. Not because, as other people might reasonably assume, you are ‘too shocked’ to wish to write a word, or because you are ‘in denial’ – but because, as the movement of time halts for you, so do all those customary ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ that underpin narration. A sentence slopes forward into its own future, as had your former intuition of a mobile time. But now your newly stopped time is stripped of that direction. Or rather, the whole notion of directedness has gone.
It was only when a familiar intuition of sequence eventually and spontaneously restored itself, having ‘taken its time’ over the passage of about three years, that I could begin to sort out my fragmented notes, and to start on these paragraphs.
*
While many philosophies of time have argued, for instance, over how atomized instants of perception may be felt as a unified streaming, this other feeling of ‘timelessness’ seems not to be mentioned. This lacuna must be due to the fact that the experience of a-temporality systematically undercuts its own articulation. Here it can’t speak itself, because the usual articulations of syntax, in its continuities, are snapped. Perhaps this is why so very little seems to have been published about the effects of a child’s sudden death on the experienced time of those left living.7 While through the usual memorial outlets, most published expressions of sentiment tend to be highly convention-bound. Neither this descriptive silence nor this sweetened overlay is surprising, if you think of the impassable structural barriers to telling. When, thrown into your freshly timeless condition, you can no longer have the least anticipation of your own future or take any interest in it, so implausible does its arrival seem, your usual language of narrating is curtailed in the same blow. Your very will to tell your violently novel state of timelessness is sapped, because you sense that your most determined efforts can’t reach others; you come to feel that syntax itself is set against you here, because it must rely on conventional temporality to function at all.
If your time as a child had once thrown you into language, now you discover that narrative language had sustained you across time. Its ‘thens’ and ‘nexts’ had once unfolded themselves placidly. But now that time has abruptly gone away from you, your language of telling has left with it. For now an unsuspected scenario has enfolded you in its blinding illumination. You are time. You are saturated with it, rather than standing apart from it as a previously completed being who was free to move in it.8 In your old unremarked inclination towards the future, there was something that had also shaped your apprehension of yourself. As in Merleau-Ponty’s observation, ‘It is of the essence of time to be not only actual time, or time which flows, but also time which is aware of itself, for the explosion or dehiscence of the present towards a future is the archetype of the relationship of self to self, and it traces out an interiority or an ipseity’.9 So it would follow that both time and your own being, in their mutual implication, had formerly leant out and forward to the world. Your interior ‘revelation of self to self’ was also ‘the hollow in which time is formed.’10
Then – to follow the spirit and the logic of these reflections – whatever happens once you’re thrown entirely outside of time’s motion and you find yourself abruptly divorced from this mutual implication? Do you now say that you have stopped? Admittedly something still goes on; you walk about, you sleep a bit, you do your best to work, you get older. Yet in essence you have stopped. You’re held in a crystalline suspension. Your impression of your own interiority has utterly drained away, and you are pure skin stretched tightly out over vacancy. You abide.11
Nevertheless your search for any evidence of fellow feeling is restless, almost comically so. You’re paralysed and not, as far as you know, temporarily (for this condition feels eternal) but temporally. And yet some longing drives you onward to comb through any writing that might carry the reassurance that this cessation of your time is both well known and fully recorded. At times of great tension, we may well find ourselves hunting for some published resonances in literature of what we’ve come to feel. I realize that this might quickly be condemned as a sentimental search for ‘identification’, for the cosiness of finding one’s own situation mirrored in print. Still, I think we can save it from that withering assessment. Instead we might reconsider the possibility of a literature of consolation, what that could be or what it might do.
Wherever is the literature – for it must exist, it’s needed – that deals closely with this strange arresting of time? Certainly there’s a seventeenth-century poetry of temporal distortion. Impossible, here, to embark on a survey. But to light on just one fine example, the elegist Henry King writes of how, after his young wife’s death, his time slowed and its sequences went into reverse.
[. . .] For thee, loved clay,
I languish out, not live, the day,
Using no other exercise
But what I practise with mine eyes;
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
To one that mourns; this, only this,
My exercise and business is.
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolved into showers.
Nor wonder if my time go thus
Backward and most preposterous.12
However, this much we have heard of, or we already know as the sad distortion of the mourner’s time. Whereas Wordsworth’s heavily analysed quatrains of 1798 seem in their very construction to enact that temporal fall from mobility into stillness:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force:
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
Between these two stanzas, there’s a silent heavy crash of altered time. Now the natural historical past has snapped into a timeless present tense. And the second stanza also happens to carry the feeling of the one who lives on, but as if also lacking motion and force, in an uninflected present.
I’ll leap on like a grasshopper in search of a rare but steadying blade of grass: for the radical stasis of time, one decisive note is Emily Dickinson’s, in about 1864. This had first struck me in my notes above. Here’s the piece in full:
I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of sound
Like balls upon a floor.13
An earlier version of this poem had the line ‘But sequence raveled out of reach’. The initial choice of ‘reach’ was easier and more obvious than the intense resonances of the noun ‘sound’ on which Emily Dickinson finally settled. (She didn’t need to use ‘sound’ for the purposes of rhyming, since it falls at the end of a line that’s structurally unrhymed within the quatrain. So ‘sound’ was her unconstrained revision, picked purely for its meaning.) Her eventual adoption of ‘sequence raveled out of sound’ implies that sound is the natural ally or shelter of the sequential or consecutive. There’s an obvious association of sounds and sequences; with a passage of music or simply a scale, one note implies the coming of a next.14 A first sound will lean towards a second sound, anticipating and promising it, even if to say so relies on retrospect. Even the harshest concatenation of discordant notes is still a sequence, in the sense of a succession pulled together on the ear.
But in Dickinson’s poem her ‘sequence’ has been abstracted, so that now it is standing as a noun, a thing. And this new thing has scrambled itself clean away from sound, has gone shooting off across the floor like dropped balls of knitting wool. So far so good: sound, embodied as a vessel that would usually hold sequence, is divorced from it.
Yet without making unduly heavy weather of Emily Dickinson’s eventual selection of this counter-intuitive ‘sound’, we could reflect a bit further. Sound is sustained on the ear by its repetition, and by the expectation that another sound will follow on. But now we hear that ‘Sequence raveled out of sound’. What, though, would sound itself become, if the possibility of succession were to abandon it? This wholesale scrambling or ‘raveling’ of sequence in Dickinson’s poem seems to imply something radical for temporal as well as for aural cognition. If sequence were truly to fall apart from sound, then the hearer could no longer expect any future unrolling, or could discern any principle of successive sounding. Each element of sound and sequence would, through this split, be rendered unintelligible in and by its new separateness. And their dissociation would sever our whole intuition of normally experienced time, which relies on extension, anticipation, and consequence. The separation of sound from sequence would chip away at consecutive thinking, and so at the whole principle of induction. And this is exactly what can happen in the aftermath of a sudden death. Or at least I found it to be so.
Dickinson’s poem asserts that an associative chain may snap and scatter all its elements. If, in conjunction with this, we take Hegel’s idea of sound as apt to grip and secure you by means of its sequences of notes, then such a break in continuity could bring about a corresponding change to your being. (Which indeed is what you sense happening, once you arrive in stopped time.) If, as he proposes, your perceptions of a train of vanishing sounds are germane to your self-sensing, then a disruption of your grasp of their sequence would alter your own presence to yourself. Again, this is what can happen in the wake of a sudden death. No longer are you unconsciously sustained by that pulsating instant-upon-instant intuition of yourself in time, which buoys you up; and which does so, even as each successive tick of the present will naturally obliterate the preceding one.
The self itself, declares Hegel, belongs to time, and coincides with time as it moves to and fro between its self-immediacy and its self-separation. Time is the being of the self. So much so that sound’s own time, including its vanishing succession of myriad instants, ‘sets the self in motion’.15 You are, in effect, founded and sustained in the sequence of rhythm. So to be abruptly inside the experience of a-temporality, which must be without any sounding rhythm and without any confident expectation of futurity, would mean that you lived a kind of prolonged suspension. That condition is what’s being shown in Emily Dickinson’s poem as ‘sequence raveled out of sound’ – and discovering her taut description comes as a relief.
Could we find anything more to consider about the possibility of a ‘literature of consolation’ – or is that almost a repugnant thought? Perhaps it’s a question of a way of starting again, but a recommencing which doesn’t entail an imagined restoration or a smoothing-over of what is lost. When someone close to you has died suddenly and unexpectedly, it’s likely that at least one benign person will tell you to re-read Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. But less prescriptive, and more sympathetic, than that essay is the older Freud’s remark in his letter to a friend, written after the death of his daughter Sophie: ‘Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute, no matter what may fill the gap; even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be [. . .] it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.’16
So the gap will still remain detectable. It hangs on, as ‘something else’. It’s noticeable precisely as a filled gap, where the act of replacing keeps prominent. Which is as good as it gets. Here I’ll make what may sound like a strange leap – to suggest that the same kind of ‘preservation through replacement’ happens in rhymed or metrical verse, and its paused and then resumed internal time: you stop, you repeat, you continue, you repeat but differently, you stop, you go ahead. Much like a version of Samuel Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Or his ‘something is taking its course’. But a variant: ‘something is being carried on’. The familiar but then the differing, in the next breath. Which is exactly what happens both in rhyme, and in your own gradual ‘reanimation’, so to speak, after you’ve been very near to a death. Nothing has changed, and yet it all has. You are returned after your brush with another’s death, a brush that seemed to have stopped you, too – and you’ve been returned differently. You return, knowing more.
It’s true to the nature of a return, including your own return from your proximity to another’s death, that often it won’t be an arrival at the same place. And you yourself will not be the same. But something, nevertheless, stays: recognition as re-cognition; to know again, but because of the interval, to know a bit differently. Not through a replacement or a restoration of the lost object or word, for any new rhyme must embody a slight shift yet preserve the trace of the original, holding an outline of a gap that, even after it has been ‘filled in’, remains in a listening ear. Rhyme and rhythm keep their forms in, and through, echo’s work; this reiterating sonic alteration isn’t any melancholic shortcoming but part of the architecture of the poem. Like Freud’s letter: ‘no matter what may fill the gap; even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be.’
A poem may well be carried by oscillation, a to-and-fro, rather than by some forward-leaning chronological drive. It both sanctions and enacts an experience of time which is not linear. And your own time, in the immediate wake of someone’s unexpected death, isn’t linear. That might sound like a capricious comparison – between the workings of rhyme, and living through another’s death, where you were very close to that person. Where you loved that person. But my guess is that rhyme may do its minute work of holding time together; making a chain of varied sound-stitches across time, a link to represent that feeling of sequence which may have been lost when the writer’s or reader’s usual temporal ‘flow’ has been cut by another’s abrupt death.
Yet the sheer contingency of what in any particular language rhymes with what is never far away. There’s an obvious impersonality about rhyme (its sound resemblances aren’t resemblances of meaning – or not habitually); while rhyme, as well as rhythm, is in the same breath deeply personal in its indwelling in the mind’s ear. Like a marriage of the material and the ideal. Of the stuff of words and their thought. It’s a happy and a curious accident of the English language that the word ‘rhyme’ does itself rhyme with the word ‘time’. And indeed, that both of these rhyme with ‘chime’, which itself means – a sounding repetition. Time suffers severance and is potentially joined again by rhyme. But I’m not claiming a ‘therapeutics’ or a curative aspect for rhyme. It can’t mend the split between the usual forward movement of time and its stasis in the person caught at a standstill. Although memorial poems which are both strongly metrical and rhymed are what people seem ‘instinctively’ to turn to when in search of what to read at a funeral, there’s scarcely consolation for loss in a formally structured poem. Still, such a poem may, to use an old-fashioned word, work as an emblem. A sounding emblem.
Emblematic of what? Of a loss at the moment when it’s imperceptibly starting to shift; of the fact that there is change – you have been changed yourself, by your proximity to the death of an intimate – but also a return. This return is not to the same. As a rhyme is close but not identical, not an immaculate substitution but a recollection, while its sounding anticipates what’s to come. This pulsating alteration-in-recognition comes close to the experience of a stopped time which is now unobtrusively, hesitantly – even reluctantly – finding a first breath of its future.
In contemporary fiction, a state of changed cognition after an unexpected death, and a porous sense of your own edges, is – to my limited knowledge – rarely shown. But Don DeLillo, in his 2001 novel The Body Artist, offers a kind of ghost, an unsettled and unsettling male presence who seems to speak from some a-temporal realm. He is, in effect, an occasional mouthpiece for the heroine’s newly dead husband. She reflects on the condition of this disquieting visitor in her house:
Time is supposed to pass, she thought. But maybe he is living in another state. It is a kind of time that is simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, un-occurring, and he lacks the inborn ability to receive this condition. What ability? There is nothing he can do to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, happening – the world happens, it has to, we feel it – with names and dates and distinctions. His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible, perhaps, if only in his mind.17
This passage is an extraordinarily precise account of the feeling of a life that continues, but does so outside any perceived changing time. DeLillo’s suddenly widowed heroine, too, appears to have suffered an altered temporal sense of her own, since eventually – and what she reports here recalls Hegel’s meditations – she comes to want to find again ‘the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was’.18
Yet this unpredictable point of your re-entry to a communicable social life and its familiar chronology will usher in its own great sadness. If it’s your ‘restoration’ to the usual world, it’s certainly not a restoration that you can celebrate. The cost of recovering your conventional apprehension of flowing time is intolerably high. The dead slip away, as we realize that we have unwillingly left them behind us in their timelessness. Much like Eurydice, who slid back from Orpheus’ grasp just as he was on the threshold of re-entering the upper world with her. You would not have wanted this second, now final, loss. (Still, your own wanting is neither here nor there; you have also learnt this.)
Some part of you may still remain in the underworld, so to speak. The loss of your child continues to undo the separate singularity of your body and to refashion your sense of its edges. Not as a female biology of cyclical repetition, but a very different phenomenon. This isn’t at all cyclical, and it’s not felt as purely interior to the singular body. Rather, it’s a historical time; the times of the child are contained and sheltered within your own. Fanny Howe’s poem has voiced the start of this process as a temporal-spatial disruption:
Yet whether they envisage a doubled containing, or a crashing through the neatness of an earlier time into a new dimension, all such reflections raise some tentative notion of a ‘maternal temporality’. But could that be entertained in a way that wouldn’t sink it into an all-engulfing and bodily-based maternalism? Arguably there’s an understanding of the idea of a maternal temporality that wouldn’t make such grandiose universal claims, but instead would spring from a particular affective history. In effect, it’s a temporality of love – if the affection between the living and the now dead had been strong enough. (Or it might even be a temporality of hate – while we might assume that a history of indifference would leave little mark.)
This affective history will extend your usual scope of felt time well beyond your own skin. In the past you had sensed your living child’s time, including the physically interior time of its gestation as well as its early growing and independent life, as if it were internal to your own. You had aged in tandem with it. But now the time of the vanished child has been cut away from your impression of your interior time. As I’d noted, it’s as if, from a set of nested Russian wooden dolls, the innermost ones had fallen out.
Emily Dickinson described as a state of ‘dear retrospect’ that act of looking back over the course of another’s extinguished life, as if you shared it. This retrospect may well occur acutely after a child’s death. For your purchase on your own lifetime would always have included that child’s time as well as yours, however brief or however long its life. After its sudden disappearance, your temporal intuition becomes violently altered by the scooping away of that doubled sense of time that you’d lived in before, if without always being aware of it. Yet in this same moment of subtraction, the dead one, although now sheared away from your old conjoined temporality, now comes to re-inhabit your newly arrested time vividly, as an incorporated presence. In a shared a-temporality.
Although you’re now turned intently toward the death, as you must be, your sentiments are not remotely melancholic. In your new perception of time, there’s this fresh kind of ‘carrying forward’. Your previous history has been reshaped, as your being in time has now become demarcated differently yet again. Its boundaries are extended by and then after the death, as they had once been by and then after the birth. Half bitten away by the child’s disappearance, your time is nevertheless augmented – for the time of the dead is, from now on, freshly contained within your own.
How to think historically about all those myriad lived temporalities that find themselves increasingly resonant and densely layered, precisely because they’ve come to include the times of others? Any nominally single life, be it female or male, may in practice be thickened with the work of carrying and preserving the times of its dead, while it may also be holding the times of its still-living children. Such generational temporalities may sustain – or may erode – their bearers. As these several temporalities are intermingled within each person, they’ll also run across and between people, so to speak, and they will become transpersonal. Multiplied, they can extend their legacies of apathy or of tranquil resignation; of despair or of furious energy; of bitterness or of a withdrawn indifference to the public world.
All this whirring on the page in the name of taking thought – and still the stubborn dead don’t return to put it straight. A suggestion, then, in response to the question of what may characterize the experience of a time suspended, but nevertheless lived, after the death of a child: perhaps it’s just this elaborate, dynamic, silent temporal abundance, even as this is also an abundance in loss. For such a maternal temporality owns its distinctive kinds of erosion, containment, paralysis, and augmentation in its overlapping of the living with the living, and of the living with the dead.