The Time Traveller's Wife

I confess I haven't seen the film or read the book, but I was fascinated by the idea of a man who travelled in time (involuntarily), and met his wife at various stages in her life. I've been time-travelling back to 1990, Jen's first year in Canberra (my second), through the medium of letters and tapes that Jen has kept. It's the first part of my effort to organise our photos and memories into a chronological order, so I can write a narrative for the boys (rather than just leaving them with anecdotes about their mother).

The tapes were made to send to her best friend back in Sydney, and it's so strange at a distance of 20 years to hear Jen talk for an hour per tape about what she's been doing and thinking. Her voice sounds somewhat different - higher in pitch perhaps - which could be an artifact of the tape. In March 1990 she's desperately missing her friends and family back in Sydney, struggling to have enough energy to study (still being in the early stages of recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), but also starting to meet friends who will be with her for many years.

So for me it's like meeting Jen before I knew her. Our paths crossed in the middle of 1990, but only as members of a crowd. We were both then involved in other relationships, and it wasn't until the middle of 1992 that we became involved with each other. Travelling back at the start of our Canberra years, I have a sense of looking into the seeds of time (Macbeth's words to the witches)

If you can look into the seeds of time,
and say which will grow and which will not,
speak then to me.

Everything could have turned out another way (unless one thinks of God's sovereignty as including every detail in advance, which I don't). Our other relationships might have continued, we might not have joined the same Christian student group. So our marriage and our children might never have existed, and I wouldn't be living with this grief.

While Jen was still alive, I thought about this question: if you had told me at the start what would happen if I married Jen, that she would die a couple of months before her 41st birthday from breast cancer, would I still have wanted to go on? Every time I think about it, the answer is immediately yes. We had the privilege of 15 great years together - not free of stress or difficulty, but full of love - and our two boys. I never found the right opportunity to tell Jen that truth - those years were indeed a gift of grace, and I don't regret them for a moment. Marrying Jen was one of the best choices I've ever made, better than I knew at the time. That's not to ignore the hard daily work of making a relationship function, but we became in a way moulded or adapted to each other's lives.

At the end of the book, his wife, coming to the end of her life, is waiting and hoping that her time-travelling husband will show up once more before she dies. Now for me the situation is inverted. My Christian hope includes the promise of a renewed creation, in which I can meet Jen again, though we both may be transformed. So I travel impatiently forward through time at the standard rate, towards that meeting, knowing that it could be decades away. To paraphrase Nicholas Wolterstorff's words in "Lament for a Son", when I say my first words to Jen, God's kingdom will be here.