On Time

Why remembering matters in an age that encourages forgetting.

Photo by Valerie Blanchett on Unsplash

When both parents are gone, time becomes something you ponder more deeply. The turning of the seasons, the pressures of the modern world, the question of where to give your energy and where to withhold it all sharpen in the mind.

Time becomes the frontline. It moves from abstraction to something deeply personal.

Finding meaning where there is now a void is probably the deepest incarnation of loss, and painful expression of love that we know. To live with a little less love in the world cannot be eased by distraction, or even by memory. Only time receives it. All the meanderings, the long hours once spent talking and sharing contented moments with those who are no longer here; knowing looks, the quiet peace of simply being in the presence of those you love most. Nothing arrives to replace what once was.

Loss sharpens your awareness of time itself. Not just the passing of days, but the deeper currents of time moving through everything around you. You begin to notice how quickly a generation disappears.

Flicking through photo albums searching for evocations of mum and dad can bring the vanishing into stark reality the moment you’re able to point to every figure in a bleached-out image and to realise they are all gone. It’s a startling moment, one that strikes hard. A tangible example of how memory fades unless someone carries it forward, how the stories that once seemed fixed begin to loosen their grip. Time stops being something measured by clocks or calendars. It becomes something human, something fragile, something that depends on what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.

Johnny, Mum, Dad and Stella - 1993. Photo by me.

Memories lush and full of colour, can quickly become overgown and dense in the mind; they must be tended to.

Stories once overheard at kitchen tables, through the steam of freshly brewed tea, stories central to a person’s existence, to their joys or their disappointments, often disappear quietly with them. Yarns that act as explanatory notes about who they were, or why they carried themselves in a certain way, can disappear just as easily when a parent or aunt or uncle is gone, and eventually when my own memory fades or is extinguished.

At a kitchen table like that, my dad once told me a story that still returns whenever I hear the opening bars of a certain song.

He had been driving home from work with his beloved boss, Geoff McLean, a proud owner of a racehorse that had just won at Warrnambool. Geoff had carefully recorded the victory on a cassette and, eager to relive the moment, slid it into the player as they drove. But instead of the race, out burst the unmistakable opening of Dire Straits’ Walk of Life replete with Mark Knopfler’s “whoo hoos”. Geoff’s son had taped over it. In dad’s telling, Geoff’s deep bushman’s voice, equal parts disbelief and fury, filled the car. Dad would laugh as he recounted it, the story growing richer each time he told it. And from that day on, whenever that song came on and we happened to hear it together, a smile would spread across his face. That smile would light up mine in return. It was a small moment, but one that held time still for a while.

Grief teaches us something in those moments: that memory does not survive on its own. It must be carried. An anecdote repeated over years until it becomes part of the family’s architecture, an explanation offered almost casually for why someone lived the way they did, all of it moves quietly from one generation to the next. And when the generation that held those memories disappears, something subtle but profound changes. Stories don’t come to us spontaneously anymore. They must be summoned, repeated and remembered deliberately.

The same is true of societies. In that sense, time becomes a frontline for nations as well, the uneasy boundary where memory meets responsibility.

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In this light, in this time, history does not preserve itself. It survives only when each generation is willing to carry forward what it has inherited. The past is not something that simply sits behind us, fixed and secure. It is fragile. It loosens its grip the moment people begin to look away from it. Left unattended, even the most defining events begin to blur at the edges, softened by time or recast to suit the needs of the present.

In that sense, every generation inherits a task as well as a past. As the political thinker Hannah Arendt once observed, “our inheritance was left to us by no testament.” The wars, injustices, triumphs and failures of those who came before us do not vanish simply because time has moved on. They remain embedded in the institutions we live within, the landscapes we inhabit and the stories we tell about ourselves. The question is not whether we inherit history, but what we choose to do with it. Whether we face it honestly, or reshape it into something easier to live with.

This is where grief and history begin to resemble one another.

Both demand a reckoning with what cannot be undone. Both ask us to live alongside absence. And both require an act of acceptance before understanding can begin. The temptation, in both cases, is to move too quickly past what is uncomfortable, to tidy away the difficult parts and pretend that time alone will resolve what remains unresolved. But time does not do that work for us. If anything, time reveals more clearly the consequences of what has been ignored.

Perhaps that is the danger of living in an age so saturated with information and immediacy. The pace of events can create the illusion that the present is all that matters. That the past is a series of distant episodes, loosely connected to the lives we lead now. Yet the opposite is true. The present is thick with the past. Every decision, every policy, every act of leadership or neglect sends its consequences forward into a future we will never fully see.

That is why history, real history in all its pain and unvarnished honesty, is a little like grief. It is something we must learn to live with.

Because sooner or later the stories come to rest with us. The memory of those who came before, the lessons written into the lives they lived, the unfinished business of the generations that shaped the world we now inhabit eventually passes into our keeping. It happens quietly. And with that comes a responsibility that stretches beyond family into the broader arc of history itself, especially in times as turbulent as these.

Time does not stop with us. It keeps moving, quietly but relentlessly, from one generation to the next, carrying forward the consequences of what each era chooses to remember or forget. And sooner or later, for all of us, time becomes the frontline.