The Strange Elasticity of Time

Photo by Theodor Vasile on Unsplash

A close friend of mine passed away last week. He was 66. The cause was complications from a massive stroke—unexpected and sudden, though in hindsight, perhaps not entirely surprising. He was not a model of health; regardless, his death unsettled me more than I expected.

Being recently retired—and like many who step away from a long career—I find myself looking backward almost as often as I look forward. When I do, I notice something odd: the past isn’t behaving the way it’s supposed to. It doesn't stretch out behind me like a long road I’ve walked. Instead, decades compress into single moments. I can still see myself in design studio at the University of Oregon, pushing lead across tracing paper, certain that everything lay ahead. I can just as easily recall the day I met my wife—forty-four years ago, though it feels as recent as last week. These memories haven’t faded; they’ve grown more vivid, even as time continues its slow erasure of detail.

There’s something deeply disorienting about that.

The death of a contemporary—a friend since we were in high school—brings this strange elasticity of time into sharper focus. We assume age brings perspective, and it does. But it also brings the realization that the boundaries between youth and old age, beginning and end, are not as firm as we imagined. It’s not that life is short, exactly. It’s that we’re not built to feel its length. Time, as we live it, is all compression and dilation.

I have no lesson to offer. No tidy maxim about seizing the day. Those may be true, but repetition dulls their edge. Here's what I can say: we’re often startled by how fast it all moves—not because we weren’t paying attention, but rather because we were.

Perhaps that’s the part I’m reckoning with. That attention is not a safeguard against impermanence. That no amount of care, love, effort, or presence will anchor a moment in place.

I will miss my friend. I’ll miss the shared shorthand of a friendship more than a half-century long. I’ll miss the fact that there will be no more conversations, no more updates, no more additions to the long story we’ve been telling one another since we were teenagers. 

Still, I carry that story with me. It’s part of the architecture of my life. Like many things I once drew by hand, it is indelible—even as the paper yellows and curls at the edges. And though time bends and stretches, that story holds its shape, a quiet defiance of transience.