Death came early for Christmas. My father-in-law, in hospital, had assessed his chances and agreed with the professionals: no resuscitation, please. Midwinter’s eve he spoke on the telephone to his son, my husband. He promised another visit, tomorrow; an hour later his heart stopped, giving up at 18 years since the heart attack he’d had 18 years before. Solstice came; then to register his death, register that there would not be another Christmas meal eaten as our tradition mid-December, register the slipperiness of time, overlaying already the loss in March of his separated wife, my husband’s mother. The enfolding nature of grief. Through exhaustion memory leaps jagged as hilltops; meetings shine beacon bright, telephone wire carries us like tesseracts over the dark valleys between. Was that a month ago or six? The year circles, will become another, another six. Now though there is nothing. After long days visiting and hoping there’s nothing now can happen; the funeral is fixed and we pause time on its axis.

Time is a thing we order – a theory at best. Carlo Rovelli writes about the ideas we hold of time, the quanta slipping like individual particles of sand, grains flowing discontinuously through an hourglass. Or of time’s arrow, where time flows in a direction, becoming more disordered as it flows. The trajectory of death’s disorder has this week made time surreal; crying through editing a Morrison’s order, my husband helping my father-in-law cancel a Christmas delivery he won’t be home for.  Times we’d hoped for will not be. This multitude of times is in my head always, and on archaeological sites where the layers can lie thickly, brings an impression of numinosity, traces of so many past lives still in the present. Another trick of time’s arrow.  This sense of slipping and continuing between points in time is as sad and comforting as ghosts, as Lucy Boston wrote in her ethereal tale of a Christmas so gently haunted by the past:  

“The sound came from Mrs Oldknow’s room, which opened out of the music room. A woman’s voice began to sing very softly a cradle song that Tolly had learnt and dearly loved:

Lully Lulla, Thou tiny little child
By by, Lully Lullay
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling
For whom we sing
By by, Lully Lullay

‘Who is it?’ he whispered.
‘It’s the grandmother rocking the cradle,’ said Mrs Oldknow, and her eyes were full of tears.
‘Why are you crying, Granny? It’s lovely.’
‘It is lovely, only it is such a long time ago. I don’t know why that should be sad, but sometimes it seems so.’
The singing began again.
‘Granny,’ whispered Tolly again with his arm through hers, ‘whose cradle is it? Linnet is as big as I am.’
‘My darling, this voice is much older than that. I hardly know whose it is. I heard it once before at Christmas.’
It was queer to hear the baby’s sleepy whimper only in the next room, now, and so long ago. ‘Come, we’ll sing it too,’ said Mrs Oldknow, going to the spinet. She played, but it was Tolly who sang alone, while, four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.”

As I write dark has already fallen, this short day has been got through. We ate the cockerel we carried home from the farm up the road and opened the presents that we wrapped before. Friends will visit soon, and better times must come.