My family has a church meeting on the Gross Family Cemetery every year. My paternal grandfather is buried there; I wasn’t really thinking much about it until my aunt, who is a songwriter, sang a song she wrote about him. After the first verse the tears started coming. I had thought after his passing being so long ago that I wouldn’t have felt that pain anymore. But it still hurt, and it brought to mind the old saying “time heals all wounds.” But does it really? Because grandfather has been gone for six years now, so why does it still hurt?
My thought is this, time does not, in fact, heal all wounds. The only thing that time does is make it hurt less. But when someone you love so much leaves this world, it makes a wound that is never going to be healed.
I think a lot about my grandfather. He was a Baptist Preacher since he was nineteen years old, and lived well into his eighties. He was a kind caring man, who would do anything he could to help anyone in need. He was strong in his faith and strong in his spirit. I watched time beat him down from a stout pillar of a man who could lift hay bales over his head and throw them around like they weighed nothing, to a frail old man who needed help just getting out of his chair. But his spirit shone in him like a fire, I watched him overcome prostate cancer, and through his strong faith be healed of Alzheimer’s. This is the same disease that my maternal grandmother died of.
I go back to my point; time can do nothing to take these wounds away. The quote should be revised to say “time heals some wounds.” Time will take away the pain from breaking up with a boyfriend, and the passing of a beloved family pet, but not the passing of a human being close to you, and whom you love so much.
Time has a strange way about her; it can pass by so fleeting and so quickly, and stroll by so slowly you feel one minute might last a thousand years. But one thing is certain; on a universal scale we don’t have a lot of it. I now understand what my mother meant when she always told me not to wish for tomorrow, I was wishing my life away. And in a way I was, when you wish for time to skip foreword, you are taking moments and events away from yourself. I see time differently now, and is something that I have taken for granted.
Perhaps we all need to think about time differently, because there are some things time can’t make go away.
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