Reversals

Back when I was still teaching, I used to begin a unit on Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development by distinguishing between reversible and irreversible processes. Examples of reversible processes are freezing water and turning it into ice (if you change your mind, you can melt the ice and turn it back into liquid water), or setting something down and then picking it up again (which you can do repeatedly at will). Examples of irreversible processes are baking a cake (it’s impossible to unbake it again) and shattering a glass (you can’t unshatter it, though you can try to glue the pieces back together).

I then asked students why some processes are irreversible, and obtained a sea of blank stares in return, which happens to me a lot for some odd reason. The answer has to do with entropy, which involves the fact that physical systems inherently tend toward increasing disorder. You have to expend energy to clean your house, as I’ve been doing this week, but you don’t have to do anything to unclean it; it uncleans itself, and becomes less and less ordered if you do nothing.

Sadly, this is why time flows in only one direction. You can age, but you can’t youthen. You can reach the future (though you can’t accelerate the pace at which you’ll get there), but you can’t get back to the past. Physically speaking, death results from entropy; the body parts apart, losing its functionality, and mere mortals can’t reverse that.

But in our minds, we can do the physically impossible with ease. I can imagine unbaking a cake, unsmashing a glass, getting younger every day, returning to the halcyon days of 1985 (when Diane and I were married). These things can’t be made to happen in the outer, physical world. But they seem feasible to the imagination; and in one sense, grief is about trying to reverse or undo the death of a loved one, and though it can’t be done literally (not yet), it can be done metaphorically.

This is why I was utterly obsessed with finding and digitizing and collating pictures of Diane, and saving them to the cloud, in the early days after her death. I gloriously found over 650 pictures of her, from her baby picture to the last picture I took of her the day before she died. They are precious to me now, and when I can do so without tears, I look at them, and remember the glory of ordinary days that we shared. They were ordinary because they were ordered; the two words come from the same root.

My red rose has turned to white now, and my awesomely cute former cheerleader is in Heaven now, where I can’t (yet) reach her. But I still buy her love tokens, and do other romantic things for her, not knowing whether or not she is allowed to see them (I hope she sometimes can). Today, I bought her a book of illustrated love poems (suitable for a child, but lovers are like children to one another), such as, “You’re my special spelling bee, it’s you that I adore. I’ll spell it out, without a doubt: I couldn’t love you more” (with an accompanying picture of two bees looking adoringly at one another). Overly sentimental, I know, but that’s what I need now at times.

These things don’t bring Diane back physically, but they return her to me metaphorically. They help me to feel that she’s still with me in spirit, and then I don’t feel quite so alone. It’s lonely, being a sad widower; the days are better than they were a year ago, but they can still pass slowly, and I have to be careful not to let them devolve into purposelessness, the entropy of the heart.

Cleaning the house, my vain attempt to hold back the inevitability of entropy, has occupied my attention during the past week. I finally felt emotionally able to do this, and it’s been a whirlwind tour of activity. But the house is finally in order again, for the most part, except for the basement, where I keep the most entropic of our possessions. Old holiday decorations are there, and mementoes from the past that will eventually be displayed in some way (a display cabinet is currently on back order), and other things she loved and valued that I’ll never discard. I am slowly figuring out how to arrange the things of value, and I’ve discarded a lot of detritus that has no emotional or practical significance, and which didn’t spark joy at all, but rather a sneezing fit as I swept up the dust that permeates the nether regions.

Symbolically, this is all a form of what Freud would call undoing, I suppose. If I get the house in perfect order, will Diane come back? Well, no, but it feels as if getting my physical environment in order is a metaphor for getting my life in order. I can’t eliminate my loneliness, but I can organize the pantry. I can’t bid love return, but I can alphabetize my books. It’s a sort of holding pattern, but it’s one I need.

The cat, who joyfully adds to the overall level of entropy in the house by kicking litter out of the box each day, is sleeping beside me as I write these words. She doesn’t really worry about the inevitable heat death of the cosmos, though sometimes it bothers me. But I believe that there will be a new heaven and a new earth; the great reversal, the glorious eucatastrophe, will arrive at last, when all things will be made new. There will be no more unwanted dust, and our hopes and our glasses won’t get shattered any more. I’ll see my beautiful Diane once more, and in our duplex mansion, everything will be self-cleaning, world without end. Until then, I sweep, and I weep.