Back to the future

It’s a staple of science fiction that one could travel through time to the future as though it were a place like any other, experience the outcomes of present choices, and then return. The ‘Back to the Future’ films of the later 1980’s explore the resultant time travel paradoxes through the character of Marty McFly. The Dr Who series, old and new, constantly play around with causation, and the perils of altering the future (or the past).

On the day of Jen’s diagnosis our imagined future together started crumbling away. A first it seemed like 10 years might be possible, but then three weeks later with discovery of secondaries, Jen’s median survival shrank to less than 18 months. In that final blur of July 2009, we went from months to days to minutes. Of course the expectation of long life is a first world problem, bolstered by the remarkable advances of medical science, but the shattering of that illusion forever changes how the world appears. We were spared the brutal impact of sudden death, but the endpoint was the same: life was much less certain than we had assumed.

In the last three years, I’ve lived with very few plans for the future, beyond the necessities of the boys’ education. I’ve tried to keep the basic structures much the same – work, church, school – and made slow changes as demanded by circumstances. The horizon has been short – the activities of a school term, or the planning of a year’s worth of holidays. Having experienced the fragility of life, the future seems not so much a place as an aspiration. As Woody Allen said ‘How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans for the future’.

Another aspect of the uncertainty is singleness. While I might continue to be single for the rest of my life, there’s the possibility of my re-marrying one day, with all the consequent changes that would be involved. This year I did take the plunge and enter a new relationship, and suddenly the future came back in the encounter with another person’s hopes and expectations. It was both daunting and invigorating to imagine another great adventure, a life together. Let springtime bloom across the land.

Yet it was quite different to 1992, when I got involved with Jen. Then my research career was at the very beginning. Travel seemed likely, but we didn’t know when we’d settle for more than a couple of years, or where. We wanted to have children, but didn’t know how Jen’s health would cope. The adventure of those seventeen years ended with Jen’s death. Breast cancer took away the many more years that we hoped might lie ahead, the new directions that Jen might have taken as the boys grew up. It was such a waste.

Now I’m closer to the middle of my career, and I have many commitments and constraints to consider. I am solely responsible for my two sons and I often need to put their needs ahead of my own. There are many possibilities still, but not quite the same sense of wide horizons, imagining fifty years together. Someone who gets involved with me now is accepting the limitations as well as the possibilities.

But twenty years on there are also the lessons of grief. I found myself inserting grim qualifiers into my future projections – ‘that is, if I don’t get a horrible disease, or fall off a ladder, or die in a car accident’. I’m not always sure if this is realism or pessimism, or whether it indicates insufficient trust in God’s providence. At the same time it lends an intensity to life and to love. Each time you meet could still be the last.

The end of a relationship, however it happens, closes off a possible future. As a Christian, I recognize that I need to retain an ultimate focus on the enduring love of God, which is at best only faintly echoed in the love between people. There’s a contemporary Christian song that begins with the line ‘We belong to the day, to the day that is to come’. My ultimate belonging is not to Jen or to any human being, but to the One who is the fulfillment of love. That is the future I need to come back to each day.