We always think there will be more time

It’s been a bad week. The kind of week where grief arrives in layers and ordinary life keeps demanding things from you anyway. On Friday, my dad died. And somehow, in the middle of preparing for a funeral visitation, a neighbor we have barely spoken to in eight years decided this was the right moment to cut down the trees separating our properties without even discussing it with us first. The trees were ours! They sat on our property. They were old privets we inherited with the house, and one of them held an active catbird nest. What followed involved police reports, lawyers, and a surveyor who will cost another thousand dollars just to formally prove where our own land begins and ends. It all feels exhausting and absurd. Death paperwork. Property disputes. Bills that need to be paid all before grief has even had a chance to settle.

So, when I walked into a local watch shop today before heading off to cancel my dad’s phone, internet, and landline accounts, I was not expecting much from the day. My dad used to joke that we had “Pajka luck,” and to him, that mostly meant bad luck. I never really believed that. Life is hard sometimes, but I have always thought of myself as pretty lucky. I had good parents. I was loved. Even in difficult moments, things have had a way of working out even if it wasn’t necessarily the way that I thought it would. Of course, hindsight lets us reinterpret our own stories. 

My dad was 87 when he died, and despite the difficult ending, he believed he had lived a beautiful life. We said everything we needed to say to each other. That matters more than people realize until they no longer have the chance. Still, the final months were difficult. There were hospital stays, a heart valve replacement, rehab that often felt more dehumanizing than healing, and an assisted living facility that cost more than eight thousand dollars a month yet somehow still failed at the most basic responsibilities. After two falls, I found him lying on the floor after his third fall and after he had been on the floor for two hours. I pulled the emergency cord in his room and no one came. I remember standing there stunned, realizing how strange it is that people spend their entire lives preparing financially for old age only to discover that money cannot guarantee dignity, care, or safety. After another hospitalization, I arranged for him to move somewhere I hoped was better. I signed more paperwork, paid another enormous deposit, and convinced myself there would still be enough time for him to settle into a new place. But sometimes we simply run out of time. Dad moved from the hospital into the new assisted living with hospice and only lived two hours before I received a phone call. Many people had shared that Dad was probably waiting for the “right time” when I could step away and he wouldn’t have to pass in front of me. 

Near the end of his life, Dad kept repeating a phrase. We always think there will be more time. He said it casually sometimes, almost as an observation about human nature, but I think he understood it was something he was still struggling to accept. We build our lives around the assumption of later. Later we will make the trip. Later we will ask the questions. Later we will organize the papers, repair the relationship, take the photo, sit down for the conversation, wear the good watch. We move through life believing time is renewable until suddenly it isn’t.

This week, while sorting through drawers full of paperwork and photographs, I found several of my dad’s old watches tucked beneath his high school yearbook and my parents’ wedding pictures. The drawer smelled exactly like my parents’ house, like old paper and dust and time itself. One watch immediately caught my attention. It was a 1967 Bulova Accutron Astronaut, an M7. I did not know much about it except that it looked impossibly futuristic in that distinctly mid-century way. The watch had belonged to an era when people genuinely believed the future would be bright and sleek and full of possibility. Dad loved old science fiction and this watch feels a bit like that. He appreciated objects built to last.

In recent years, though, his skin had become so fragile that he could barely wear watches anymore. Even a pillowcase brushing against his arm could tear his skin. I eventually found him a cheap silicone slap-band watch that he loved because it did not hurt his wrist. At one point, he laughed and told me I had “given him a little time back.” Like so many things he said, I know he meant more than the literal words.

Dad always wore his watch with the face turned inward on his wrist, something he may have picked up while serving in the Air Force around airplanes and machinery. As a child, I thought that was simply how watches were worn. After finding the old Accutron, I decided to take it into a local watch shop to see whether anyone still carried the special battery it needed. The owner warned me not to expect much. Watches like this usually require extensive restoration before they run again, and repairs for a watch like this can cost more than fifteen hundred dollars because the parts are so rare.

Then he installed the battery and we waited. The shopkeeper smiled as the watch immediately came back to life.

The owner looked genuinely surprised. He told me he almost never sees one start working again so easily after sitting unused for years. I stood there holding this small object my father had once worn, this watch that had survived decades tucked away in a drawer, and all I could think about was Dad’s words. We always think there will be more time.

That phrase has followed me everywhere this week. I thought there would be more time for him to settle into the new assisted living place. More time to hear his stories again. More time to ask questions about the Air Force years or my grandparents or all the small details that vanish when someone dies. More time to watch him laugh and tell bad jokes. More time for ordinary afternoons that never seem important until they are gone forever.

Ever since I was little, Dad and I talked about how if one of us died first, we would somehow send signs back to the other one. A few days after he died, my reddest roses suddenly bloomed. Dad loved red! And usually, my red plants aren't quite in bloom at this time of year. 

Then, after I finished writing his obituary, I walked into my bathroom and saw that my Phal Haur Jin Princess (Phalaenopsis) orchid, which has not bloomed in five years, was flowering again. I cannot prove these are signs that meant anything, but I also cannot disprove that.

And now there was this watch. This object designed to measure time somehow becoming a reminder of how little control we actually have over it. Standing in that little shop, exhausted from grief and paperwork and all the earthly responsibilities that follow death, I found myself smiling for the first time in days because I could almost hear my father saying We always think there will be more time in the hum of the tuning fork in the piece on my wrist. I guess Dad gave me back a bit of time today. 

Astronaut Leroy Cooper wearing the Accutron Astronaut. 

During the 1963 Mercury-Atlas 9 mission, astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. wore a Bulova Accutron Astronaut aboard Faith 7 as he completed 22 orbits around Earth. When critical onboard systems failed during re-entry, Cooper relied on the Accutron’s precision timing to manually guide the capsule safely home. He later credited the watch with helping save his life, giving new meaning to the idea that just the right watch can give you more time.

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On immortality and liminal space

The Kansas City Times

Fri, Feb 08, 1935, p. 18

I used to believe liminal space was something you passed through. A hallway. A staircase. A waiting room with bad coffee and a clock that refused to tick forward. A threshold between what was and what will be. But this morning, on the other side of yesterday, I’m not so sure anymore. What if living is just a liminal space?

IMMORTALITY. 

Do not stand

   By my grave, and weep.

I am not there,

   I do not sleep—

I am the thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints in snow,

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle, autumn rain,

As you awake with morning's hush,

I am the swift, up-flinging rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight,

I am the day transcending night.

Do not stand

   By my grave, and cry—

I am not there,

   I did not die.

Clare Harner, December 1934 issue of poetry magazine The Gypsy

Clare Harner’s words have been looping in my head since I woke up. Not in a haunting way. Not in a grieving way, exactly. More like a quiet insistence. A reminder that presence isn’t as fixed as we pretend it is. That people aren’t contained by bodies or rooms or even time in the way we wish they were.

Yesterday stretched and folded in strange ways. My dad called me before surgery and told me not to come to the hospital. I went anyway. Of course I did. But before that, there was that moment the kind that doesn’t feel real until it’s already over when he said, “We’ve had a good run. I love you. I wanted to hear your voice today and remember it.” And then, “bye bye.”

It was meant to feel final, even if it wasn’t. Dad’s words were his fear donning a dramatic coat. Even if it was just him being who he’s always been, a bit theatrical and a little too aware of endings.

Still, there it was: a doorway.

I thought liminal space was supposed to be temporary. You’re not meant to live there. You’re meant to pass through, to arrive somewhere more stable, more certain, more decided. But what if it’s something completely different? What if we’re always in between, between phone calls and goodbyes, between who someone was and who will be, between the version of the future we imagine and the one that actually unfolds?

Yesterday, I sat with my dad for four hours while he lay there post-recovery, not allowed to sit up yet. I fed him Chick-fil-A like a baby bird, perhaps a cannibalistic bird but still. He had never had it before. Now he’s a fan. This is how life works, apparently: you can be on the edge of something enormous and still discover fast food for the first time.

We talked. We laughed. We made plans. And the beauty is that it doesn’t matter whether any of those plans will actually happen. That wasn’t the point. The point was that we were there together.

Harner’s poem doesn’t deny death. It just refuses to let it be a boundary. It stretches presence across everything… light, air, movement, morning.

And sitting there yesterday, it felt like that too: like life isn’t something you either have or lose. It’s something that keeps changing its shape. Something that refuses to stay in one form long enough for us to feel secure. Which is terrifying. And also, a relief. Because if living is the liminal space, then we were never meant to arrive at certainty. We were never meant to lock anything in place and say, this is it, this is safe, this is permanent.

We are meant to notice. To sit in hospital rooms and feed our dads chicken nuggets. To hear the “bye bye” and not know what it means yet. To keep going anyway.

Growing up, my dad used to say, “I hope you live forever and the last face you see is mine.” It always felt funny and ominous. My dad did not die yesterday. It feels almost too simple to write that. Like it should come with more ceremony, more explanation, more meaning attached. But maybe that’s the point. He didn’t die. Not yesterday. And so here we are, still in it. Still in the in-between. Still in the strange, shifting, unfinished middle that we keep trying to call something else.

Maybe there is no “other side” of liminal space. Maybe the other side is just realizing you never left. That this fragile, ordinary, extraordinary moment is it.

The hospital room. The laughter. The “bye bye” that didn’t end anything. The fact that he’s still here. The fact that, for now, so am I.

Liminal Space

   This weekend, I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Virginia Forum, an academic conference devoted to the study of Virginia’s past, where I will talk about liminal spaces: cemeteries, ghost stories, Deaf history, and the unstable edges of memory. But right now, my attention is elsewhere. My dad is in the hospital, with heart surgery scheduled for tomorrow, and I find myself suspended in a space that feels neither fully before nor after, but entirely in between. I am in a liminal space. 

   Growing up, Dad and I shared a quiet understanding. It was never formal, never something we treated as superstition, but more like an unspoken agreement between us. If something were to happen, if one of us crossed over to the other side, we would try, however we could, to reach back. A sign, a feeling, some small flicker of connection to let the other know. It was never about fear; it was about continuity, about the refusal to believe that connection simply ends. 

   In my work, I often describe cemeteries as liminal landscapes, places that exist at thresholds between life and death, presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Cemeteries are not just about the dead; they are about the living and how we choose to remember. They are spaces where stories remain unfinished, which is why they are so often described as haunted, not only by ghosts, but by histories that have not settled. Ghosts, in this sense, are not merely supernatural figures but narrative ones, appearing where something unresolved continues to linger. Liminal spaces are where those unresolved stories surface. 

   Right now, the hospital feels like its own kind of threshold space. Everything is paused. Time does not move normally; it stretches, loops, and holds. We sit together and talk, circling through ordinary conversations, memories, small jokes, and familiar stories, while something enormous hovers just beyond what we can name. There is a strange intimacy in this waiting, a heightened awareness, as though we are already standing at the edge of something, even though we have not crossed it. 

   In my presentation, Haunting the Dead: Liminal Landscapes, Ghostlore, and the Politics of Public Memory in Virginia, I argue that liminal spaces enable reinterpretation. Their instability, their refusal to be fixed, creates the conditions for new meanings to emerge. Cemeteries, once carefully designed landscapes that reinforced hierarchies of race, gender, and ability, now also serve as sites of tourism, storytelling, and reinterpretation. They are not static; they shift, inviting us to reconsider who is remembered and how. But liminal space is not only something I study. It is something I live. 

    As someone who exists between hearing and deafness, between spoken and signed language, between different modes of communication, I have long understood liminality as a condition of being. It is the experience of not fully belonging to one category or another, of being present but not always recognized, heard but not always understood. That experience has shaped how I approach history and storytelling, but it also shapes how I sit here now, waiting in this hospital room. 

    In my research, ghost stories function as informal archives. They preserve emotional truths that official records cannot fully contain, acknowledging presence without always granting legitimacy. They mark that something happened, even when it cannot be fully explained. Waiting feels like that, like an unfinished sentence, a story that has not yet decided what it will become. 

    This week, Dad and I have spent hours talking. Not in dramatic, last-words fashion, but in the quiet, steady rhythm of everyday conversation. There is comfort in that ordinariness, but also an undercurrent of awareness that this moment is not ordinary at all. It is a threshold moment, one that exists entirely in between what has been and what will be. 

    In one part of my talk, I describe a moment during an ASL cemetery tour when a group paused because one participant could not climb a steep hill. Instead of continuing, everyone waited. That pause became the point. It was a moment where movement stopped, and care took precedence, where being together mattered more than moving forward. That is what this feels like now, not progress, not resolution, but presence. 

    I do not know what will happen tomorrow. That is the nature of liminal space; it resists certainty. But I do know that being fully present in this moment is its own kind of work, that sitting at the threshold without turning away matters. In my talk, I say that to haunt the dead is not to romanticize loss, but to remain with what is unresolved, to refuse to let stories disappear, to stay at the edge where meaning is still being made. 

   I am not in a cemetery, but I am in a space that feels just as suspended, just as charged, just as unfinished. Perhaps that is what liminal space ultimately is, not just a place, but a way of paying attention, a way of being in the world when you do not yet know how the story ends. If something were to happen, Dad and I already know our agreement: we will try to reach across, to say something, to remain connected. But for now, we are still here, still talking, still waiting, still in the middle of it, still in liminal space.

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