My prompt this week was loss, and I thought of the most unimaginable loss for a parent: the death of a child, no matter what the age…
New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow would be a new year. A year without her in it. A year I’d have to face without her in my life. How could such a year exist? It couldn’t. Not in my lifetime.
Parent’s aren’t supposed to outlive their children.
I puttered around her workspace in the laboratory, picking up one object after another. The large room was empty, my footsteps echoed against white tile floors, bounced off sparkling windows and featureless white walls. I was alone, as I had been since her death. Who else would be in the lab on New Year’s Eve? Who but a daughterless mother seeking some remnant of her child’s spirit?
Gleaming chrome countertops supported complex instruments that stood silent sentry; waiting. Waiting for their masters to set them new tasks, new experiments to assess. The air smelled of disinfectant, reminding me sharply of the hospital where we’d spent too much time this last year.
Last year. Her last year.
I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want to remember her struggling to breathe, eyes filled with pain. I wanted to see her here, working on a theory, her lovely brow furrowed with thought, tapping a pencil against her chin. Remember the joy and excitement in her expression when an experiment had borne out a supposition.
Straightening the notebooks where she’d inscribed her last thoughts on various theories, my fingers lingered over a page of her neat, square handwriting, gloried in the slight indentations left by the pressure her hand had exerted on the pen. Her living fingers had touched that paper. Those words and equations were the final manifestation of the ephemeral, unexplainable phenomena of conscious thought. Her conscious thought.
We’d been so lucky. Mother and daughter, scientists, working side by side at the National Laboratory for Temporal and Spatial Research. Her team had specialized in time; mine in the interconnectedness of objects in space.
Now time moved forward without her, and I’d lost my ability, or desire, to connect to the people and objects surrounding me.
2025 had been a hellish year. It had seen my beautiful, brilliant daughter waste away until the wreck of her body could no longer sustain life. And yet…and yet her spirit had remained strong. Her consciousness had still sparkled within its pain-wracked physical shell.
2025 had known her. 2026 never would.
I couldn’t face a year without Sophia.
With effort, I pulled my thoughts from their downward spiral and forced myself to concentrate on her journal. To look past the agonizingly familiar handwriting and find meaning in the words she had written.
As understanding penetrated the fog of my grief, I gasped. Weak-kneed with surprise, I stumbled to a chair, clutching the journal to my breast. A few steadying breaths later I was ready to reread the passage.
A slow smile spread across my face, the first in too many months. If I was following the line of her thoughts, and I was sure I was, she’d done it. She’d found her way through the maze of quantum mechanics and various theories of physics into the continuity of the time stream.
My brilliant daughter had solved the riddle of time travel.