Andrew and son Christopher (c. 1984)
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov begins his autobiography Speak, Memory with this: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five heartbeats an hour.)”
More and more since Andrew’s death I see how the present recapitulates
the time of the world before he existed: both periods are equally void of his being and
presence. In that sense, before and
after his life are indeed twinned and identical.
But from Andrew’s point of view, there was no before and no
after. There was only the time of his
life between coming into being and dying forty-seven years later. For Andrew, that’s all the time there was
(the time of his life!) and therefore those years were a kind of forever, his
own private forever. Evidently that is
what we all have to settle for, the gift of that kind of life everlasting.
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