The Changing of Time

I woke up early, of course, because my body thought it was 5:30 and that’s when I always wake up, even on a Sunday morning. I lay in bed, resisting the strong urge to look at my bedside clock, but after a few minutes I finally rose up on one elbow and took a peek: Just as I had feared. It was only 4:45. I flopped back down in bed and sighed loudly, turned my back on the offensive digital numbers, and closed my eyes. An hour later, I popped awake again, the morning light warning me to get out of bed or I’d be late! Late for what? I thought angrily and punched the pillow into shape under my cheek. In her bed, June shifted and snorted, blissfully unaware of the distress that the biannual time change was causing her owner. Daylight Savings Time. An invention straight from the pits of hell, as far as I was concerned. Pet owners and parents of small children suffer the most, it seems, but after a couple of weeks of sleep-deprivation and grouchiness, everyone gets acclimated and life goes on.

 

Changing the clocks twice a year for Mom was something I’d done for the last 13 years since I moved back to Wichita. Mom was very time-conscious and got anxious if the clocks weren’t set correctly, so I tried very hard to keep her on track. There was the clock by her bed, the oversized clock on the wall, the clock over the stove, and her wristwatch. I had never known her to be without some sort of timepiece on her wrist, putting it on first thing in the morning and taking it off right before bed. As Mom aged and lost most of her eyesight due to macular degeneration, her peripheral vision remained surprisingly clear for a long time. She developed a way of looking at her watch, her eyes looking to the side, telling time by the position of the hands. It grounded her, knowing the progression of the day, the expectation of activities, and her place in the midst of it all. “Jan, I think my watch is losing time,” she said to me one afternoon, holding her arm out as evidence. “Looks like it,” I agreed, after noting the disparity between what time the watch showed and what it should be. “I’ll take it and get the battery replaced.” Reluctantly, she handed it over, while I mentally calculated how soon I could get to the battery store and back. Once there, I presented the well-worn watch like an artifact in a museum. “It just needs a new battery,” I said, somewhat sheepishly, and watched as the painfully young man behind the counter tried to figure out how to open the back. Had he ever seen a wristwatch? I thought idly, resisting the urge to snatch it back and pry it open myself. After consulting with an older co-worker, who easily popped the cover, the battery was replaced, and I could leave. “Will there be anything else?” I was asked. “Nope, that’s it!” I chirped as I paid and I hurried away, eager to get Mom’s watch back to her before she missed it too much. “Oh, I was wondering what had happened to my watch,” Mom said after I returned. Although I was startled that she didn’t remember, I feigned nonchalance as I slipped it back on her wrist. “Just needed a new battery,” I smiled. “All set!” “Thanks, hon,” she said and patted my cheek. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

 

It was her watch, and not her signature butterfly pins, or even her wedding rings, that was the last to go as she declined and got weaker and thinner. The day I realized she no longer cared whether or not she had a butterfly pin attached to her shirt or cardigan was difficult, to be sure, but worse was the day the nurses told me they had removed her wedding rings because her fingers were so thin they were afraid of them slipping off and becoming lost. They were put into a locked drawer, and I asked about her watch, which still hung loosely around her bony wrist. “Surely she doesn’t look at it anymore?” I said. “She still plays with it, though,” one nurse replied, looking to another for confirmation. “Yeah, she likes to mess with it," the other agreed. "It gives her something to do.”  But eventually, as Mom became bedridden, the watch, too, was put away.

 

I had come to clean Mom’s room after she passed, and I stood by the empty bed, door shut against the bustle of the nurses’ station, and cried. Bear watched with his benign smile from the dresser as I began the awful process of packing for the very last time. I emptied dresser drawers and collected the detritus of the last five years of Mom’s life without stopping to think about what I was shoving into boxes. Cards, glasses, hearing aid batteries, nail polish, tweezers… I blindly worked as quickly as I could, in order to get out of that stifling room and its vague vanilla/bleach smell. Then, in the top drawer by her bed, I came upon Mom’s watch, second hand still valiantly marking the progression of time, even as the owner now existed outside of such constraints. I stared at the plain, white face and the missing sections of band. It was nothing remarkable and yet it meant everything. I slipped it deep into my jeans pocket and resumed my packing.

 

Yesterday, as I was thinking about the time change, I pulled Mom’s watch out of my own dresser drawer and sat with it, watching the second hand marching steadily around the face, still marking time whether anyone was paying attention or not. One day, the battery would become weak, the hands would begin to lose time, and eventually, it would stop. Like Mom. Like me. Like all of us. I tucked it back into my dresser and shut the drawer.