Fall has arrived. The leaves are turning, the light goes earlier each evening, and I keep catching myself staring at the now thin calendar in bewilderment.
Nobody warns you about what children do to time. It feels like yesterday that I was cradling my newborn, all weight and warmth and eyelashes. Now her face is changing. Baby Rumi has stopped looking like a newborn and morphed into a magical little individual, someone with an infectious giggle and milky gaze that follows me across the room. I blinked, and a season went by.
Science has a few theories about why time speeds up as we age. One is simple math. When you are ten, a year is a tenth of your life, and when you are forty, it is a sliver. Another is that novelty slows the clock. A new place or a new experience lays down dense memories, while routine blurs into a smear. Some researchers argue it is partly physical, that our brains process fewer new images per second as we get older, so the world seems to move faster. None of these explanations has won out. What strikes me is that even the explanations feel like loss.
I have spent two decades in places that feel as though they teeter on the edge of the earth, where time was treated as cheap and unforgiving, and I have quietly feared how fast mine is moving. Children make that fear specific. You subsconsciously start running the numbers you never did before. How many more summers of watching bare, sandy feet swing from the stools of the ice-cream store? How many more giddy first days of school?
Each time I carry my sleeping three-year-old in from the car, the imprint of the car seat still pressed into her cheek, I wonder how many more times I will get to do this. You do it, and you do it, and then one day there is a last time, and you rarely know it when it happens. I hold my Raven a little tighter each time.
I find myself wondering how other cultures carry this as angst, or whether they carry it at all. The Western clock is almost always a straight line, forever chasing and perpetually running out. Many Indigenous traditions understand time differently: as a circle of seasons, generations and return. Aboriginal Australians speak of the Dreaming, a time that is not only past but also present and ongoing, which the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called “everywhen.”
From that lens, an elder is not someone running out of time. She is someone holding more of it. I don’t think that cures the fear, but perhaps it changes what this fear is about. Time is not only something we lose. It is something we pass on.
I have been thinking about all this while working on stories where time is the only thing at stake.
For the past few weeks, my freelance writing has kept me inside the case of Christa Pike, the only woman on death row in Tennessee. Christa was sentenced at eighteen for the 1995 torture killing of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Her boyfriend and co-murderer was seventeen and thus given life with the possibility of parole. Christa’s lawyers tell me she suffered years of abuse as a child, was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD, and is deeply remorseful. Slemmer’s mother contends she should not be spared, and her family has waited decades.
Christa’s execution was set for September 30, which would have made her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two hundred years.
I always think about these cases more than I expect to. I wonder what it is like to stare down that barrel, what runs through a mind when the date is fixed and the hours are counted.
And this case has certainly been messy. Tennessee’s execution process has been under scrutiny since May, when the state abandoned its attempt to execute Tony Carruthers after medical staff could not establish the IV lines needed to carry out a lethal injection. Christa’s lawyers argued that her small veins and a blood disorder put her at risk of the same ordeal. If a state cannot carry out its harshest punishment competently, I keep coming back to the simplest question: what are we doing? Botched executions are not new. Yet, each one leaves the same uncomfortable thought. Who holds the right to end a life, and are they even able to do it properly?
Meanwhile, I have been talking with people who are, or have at some point, contemplated going through with medical aid in dying, known as MAID. (This is different to euthanasia in that the patient adminsters the fatal medicine, as opposed to a medical professional). The law lets terminally ill adults with six months or less to live ask for medication they swallow themselves. It is legal in thirteen states plus Washington, D.C and most recently took effect in New York in August, with guardrails: two doctors have to confirm the diagnosis, the patient gets a mental health evaluation. There is also a waiting period before the prescription can be filled. Advocates see compassion, a way to keep some control over the final chapter. The Catholic Conference and many in the disability community see something dangerous, a door that does not stay as narrow as promised.
Then there is the recent child euthanasia case in the Netherlands, a case in which I sat with my babies and cried so hard. I wept for that small child, and for his or her parents and the tremendous grief that will forever linger.
In 2024, the country extended its euthanasia law to children between the ages of one and twelve, under strict conditions: unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement, parental consent, and a second doctor’s opinion. This September, a review committee examined the first case, a child of nearly two who was born at 26 weeks with severe brain damage, cerebral palsy, and seizures that medication could not control. The parents asked for the child’s life to be ended. The committee found the doctors acted with due care. Critics, however, point out that a toddler cannot consent, that the child was severely disabled, and that the report did not describe him as dying. Prosecutors are still reviewing the case.
I have read the details over and over. I have a baby in my arms, and a daughter down the hall only a little older than that child was. I cannot make the thought go away. Where is the line drawn between right and wrong?
I am not going to tell you what to conclude, because I don’t know that I could. I’m still wringing it through my head. A state looks at a woman in a cell and decides her life is forfeit. A man with months left decides he is finished with his. And in a hospital room in the Netherlands, a doctor and two parents made the choice for a child who could never say a word about it. I don’t want to flatten those into the same thing, because they aren’t. Different people, different stakes, different circumstances.
Still, I keep crashing into the same question underneath all of them: who gets to decide what a life is worth, and when? What do you believe, and why? What makes a life precious to you?
Hollie xo
PLEASE CONSIDER A PAID SUBSCRIPTION TO KEEP INDEPENDENT WRITING ALIVE xo
The giving and taking of life is not for humans to administer. It should be framed and structured accordingly.