ON: Grief and Time Travel

What if you could change the past?

Song of the Week: “The Scientist,” by Coldplay - “Nobody said it was easy / No one ever said it would be so hard / I’m going back to the start”¹

Ronald Mallett’s hero was his dad. 

As a Black kid growing up in 1950s New York City, Ron faced a lot of prejudice and discrimination. He didn’t have many prominent role models in popular culture, nor did he receive messages from society that he could do whatever he put his mind to. But he didn’t need them - he idolized his father, an electrician who used technology to work magic.

Ron’s dad helped install the wiring in the United Nations building Manhattan. When the family threw parties, Ron’s dad set up a prank where music would play when someone lifted the toilet seat in the bathroom. He rewired his sons’ train set to respond to voice commands. 

As Ron grew older, he started to follow in his dad’s footsteps. His father took apart a television with him and taught him how all the pieces worked. It was the beginning, they both hoped, of a mentorship that would result in him becoming an electrician and inventor like his dad. 

And then, on the night of his parents’ 11th wedding anniversary, when Ron was just ten years old, his father died of a heart attack. 

“It’s so hard to describe the feeling of anguish and total loss that I felt, even then,” Ron remembers in an episode of This American Life. “It was just like he was the most important thing in my life. He was the center of my universe.” 

Devastated by the loss of his father, Ron became deeply depressed. He started failing his classes at school, withdrew from his friends, and buried himself in books. He especially loved Classics Illustrated, a series of comic book adaptations of classic literature that his father had introduced him to before he died. There was one in particular that he fixated on: The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. 

I mean, that hit me so hard. I knew immediately what that would have to mean, that if you had a machine that could travel forward in time and backward in time, then, with that machine, I could go back in time, when my father was still alive. I have to say, that was the defining moment, besides my father's death, of my life, was seeing that comic. And I remember getting it and reading it cover to cover again and again and again. And I felt, this is it. This is it. This is the key. This is the thing that I have to do. I have to find a way of building a time machine. And that became my goal. It became my total obsession.

Ron built his first secret time machine in the basement a few weeks later. Using materials salvaged from the junkyard and his father’s old leftover equipment, he built the closest visual replica he could to the time machine pictured in his comic book. It didn’t work, of course. 

But where most kids would have given up, Ron Mallett only got more serious.²

He started spending all of his money on any book that seemed remotely relevant: other works of science fiction, including the original Wells novel, but also non-fiction works about electronics and physics. After high school he enlisted in the Air Force so that he could go to the college on the G. I. Bill, where he studied electrical engineering. Then he realized that he would need to understand quantum physics to invent time travel, so he got his PhD in physics and became a professor at the University of Connecticut. 

Through it all, he kept his driving mania a secret, telling his wife but none of his colleagues. Afraid that admitting he was trying to invent time travel would make him the laughingstock of his peers - a particularly precarious prospect as one of the few Black physicists working at the time - he specialized in black holes. Even though he published and did successful research, however, he once again became depressed. He felt like he wasn’t getting any closer to his goal of inventing a time machine - and if he didn’t invent a time machine, what was the point? He started withdrawing from the people around him. His marriage ended. 

Again and again, he imagined traveling back to his father, years before he died. If he was lucky, he could warn him to give up smoking, and maybe he wouldn’t die of a heart attack. But at the very least, he would get to see his dad again. 

Forty years after his research began, Mallett finally completed theoretical physics research that supported the possibility of time travel. After decades of hiding his project from his colleagues, he published the research, and to his surprise, it was wildly popular. He ended up on the cover of New Scientist magazine. His colleagues didn’t make fun of him.

Mallett remembers how, at a conference presenting his findings, he was finally able to come to terms with his father’s death, and the career he had built since then. 

Mallett presented his equations to a crowd of his colleagues that included Bryce DeWitt, a renowned quantum physicist and contemporary of Albert Einstein. During the Q&A after his talk, DeWitt asked about the motivation behind the work, and Mallett told him about the loss of his father when he was a boy. DeWitt thought about this. “I don’t know whether you’ll ever see your father again,” he said, “but he would have been proud of you.”

Living in the Past

While time travel - at least, traveling back in time to save a loved one or erase a regret - may be against the laws of physics, it is an immensely popular subject in fiction. Writers have used time travel to explore numerous topics, including history and our attitudes towards it, fate and free will, and the limits of space and time. 

Few subjects, however, appear more frequently in time travel narratives than grief and loss. Who doesn’t have something in their life that they regret? Who doesn’t wish that they could go back in time and warn a loved one to drive a different route, to go in for a check up, to be careful? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to spend one more hour with someone they’ve lost? 

The connection between grief and time travel is as old as the genre itself: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), often called the first modern time travel narrative, is all about Ebenezer Scrooge’s regret over the people he lost and the person he became. 

[Warning: spoilers ahead for a whole host of other time travel narratives.  Proceed with caution if you don’t want to know what the future holds.]

The 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed features a protagonist who is not too different from Ron Mallett. Kenneth Calloway is a small-town grocery clerk who places an unusual classified ad in the local paper:

Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.

Ken’s ad catches the attention of a team of journalists at Seattle Magazine, including Darius, a cynical and depressed intern played by Aubrey Plaza. When they decide to investigate the classified ad as a comedic story, Darius finds a strange kinship with Ken, and gradually convinces him to trust her as his partner in time travel. 

Ken, Darius discovers, has a singular motivation for wanting to invent a time machine: to travel back to 2001 and prevent his girlfriend from dying in a hit-and-run. Darius, for her part, has her own great regret: her mother was murdered in a random act of violence when she was fourteen years old. Though she is cynical about the world, in the eccentric Kenneth and his promise of time travel she finds something she never expected to: hope.

In Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), Denise Riley writes about how the death of her son disrupted her experience of time. Before his death, she reflects, her internal sense of time had neatly corresponded to the way that time flowed outside of her. After his death, however, she had “this curious sense of being pulled right outside of time, as if beached in a clear light” (3). A major part of her was forever frozen in the past, in the time when she still had a living son, and they were together.

Displaced

When the British-Cambodian writer Kailiane Bradley read Riley’s memoir, she thought of her own mother, who was a refugee from Cambodia. Many of her mother’s friends and relatives had been murdered during the Khmer Rouge, and her memories were of a world that no longer existed. Reading Riley’s memoir, Bradley recalls in an interview, “I was also thinking about the idea of a lost home that exists only in memory or stories, like Victorian Britain or pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Even when those places are no longer ‘here,’ they are always just ‘there,’ in retelling, just out of reach.” 

Bradley combined that consideration of grief, loss, and her mother’s refugee status with her own fascination with the Victorian era of polar exploration, and the result was The Ministry of Time (2024). 

The Ministry of Time follows a British-Cambodian translator and government agent who gets a job in the top-secret, newly-formed Ministry of Time department as a “bridge” - a kind of cultural attaché and companion for historical people that the government has rescued from certain death and brought forward to the present. The protagonist is assigned to the arctic explorer Graham Gore, a member of the doomed Franklin Expedition to the Northwest Passage, which claimed the lives of all 129 of its participants. 

What begins as a riotously funny fish-out-of water comedy (the historical figures must learn about everything from germ theory to Tinder) gradually becomes equal parts romance novel, spy thriller, and - yes - meditation on grief. Though the protagonist tends to think of Graham Gore as a visitor from a strange land, a kind of tourist, in reality he is not so different from her own refugee mother: someone who has lost everything and everyone he has ever known or loved, and cannot return to the past. 

The Ministry of Time’s Graham Gore is displaced by time travel, taken without his consent on a one-way trip along steps he cannot retrace. His experience of time travel, however, is still relatively linear: there is a then, and there is a now. 

For Henry DeTamble, the protagonist of Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, however, time travel is even more disorienting. Henry has a unique genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time, without warning and against his will. He cannot control where he will go, nor when: he arrives naked, disoriented, and defenseless against threats both natural and human. 

On one occasion, however, time travel saves Henry’s life. On Christmas Eve, when he is six years old, he and his mother are in a horrific car accident. His mother is killed instantly, but Henry time travels away just in the knick of time and reappears on a snowbank next to the road ten minutes and forty-seven seconds later. 

His mother’s death, Henry tells his wife Claire years later, exerts a kind of gravitational force on the rest of his life:

My mother dying…it’s the pivotal thing…everything else goes around and around it…I dream about it, and I also - time travel to it. Over and over. If you could be there, and could hover over the scene of the accident, and you could see every detail of it, all the people, cars, trees, snowdrifts - if you had enough time to really look at everything, you would see me. I am in cars, behind bushes on the bridge, in a tree. I have seen it from every angle. I am even a participant in the aftermath: I called the airport from a nearby gas station to page my father with the message to come immediately to the hospital. I sat in the hospital waiting room and watched my father walk through on his way to find me. He looks gray and ravaged. I walked along the shoulder of the road, waiting for my young self to appear, and I put a blanket around my thin shoulders. (114-5)

Like anyone who has experienced a life-altering tragedy, Henry returns again and again to the moment that he lost his mother. Unlike most of us, however, his return is literal. 

Despite his continuing presence at the scene of the accident, however, Henry is never able to save his mother. He is doomed to live in the past, but he cannot change it. 

Hindsight

But what if you could? What if you had control over how you traveled through time? What if you could undo your mistakes, have a second chance, make the right decision when everything was on the line?

That’s the central conceit of Life Is Strange (2017), a video game in which you play as Max Caufield, an 18-year-old photography student returning to her hometown to attend a prestigious arts high school. One day, Max witnesses a classmate shoot and kill her former best friend Chloe - and discovers in that moment that she has the ability to rewind time by a few minutes, allowing her to intervene and save Chloe’s life. 

From there, these miniature rewinds are the game’s central mechanic, allowing you to complete puzzles, learn information, and solve the mystery of Max’s classmate Rachel’s disappearance a year earlier. 

There are limits, however, to these time-traveling abilities. In one scenario, Max’s depressed classmate threatens suicide; the player’s previous actions and knowledge affect the outcome, and there is no going back one way or another. At other points, Max’s attempts to change time only lead to new tragedies: when she tries to go further back in time, for example, and prevent her friend Chloe’s dad from dying in an accident when she was a kid, she accidentally creates an alternate timeline where Chloe’s dad is alive but Chloe is now paralyzed from the neck down. 

By the end of the game, no matter what path the player follows, you are faced with a terrible choice. You cannot get everything right, and Max cannot save everyone. 

Tim, the protagonist of the romantic comedy About Time (2013), has similar powers to Max’s: he can time travel backwards, at will, within his own life.

For Tim, the impact of this power is less intense than for Max: at first, he mostly uses it to undo minor social gaffes, like saying something embarrassing at a party. His ability to travel through time, however, also connects him to his wry, funny, father, who shares the ability.³

As Tim goes through life, his father helps him understand the benefits - and limits - of his powers. The biggest one? He must not travel back further than the birth of his children. 

When his sister Kit gets into a drunken car accident on the way to Tim’s daughter’s first birthday party because she’s been fighting with her abusive boyfriend, his first instinct is to travel back to the night she met that boyfriend years earlier and set her on a different path. When Tim smugly travels forward in time, however, he discovers to his horror that his daughter Posy has been replaced by an unfamiliar son. 

Changing anything prior to the birth of his children, his father tells him, will change who they are. Tim frantically undoes the change he made, setting his sister back on the path towards her ruinous choices but restoring his daughter and the life he knows. 

This dilemma leads Tim to his first revelation: he cannot use time travel to force someone to change their life. He has to help his sister grow and change the same way anyone else would: through tough love, work, and continuous support. 

The emotional climax of the film, however, comes when Tim discovers that his father is dying of terminal cancer. His father, it turns out, was able to use his knowledge of his cancer diagnosis to revisit his middle aged years, retire at 50 and spend more time with his family, but he could not prevent himself from getting cancer altogether. His terminal cancer was caused by the cigarettes he smoked as a young man, long before his own children were born.⁴

 “I never said we could fix things,” he tells Tim ruefully. “I specifically never said that. Life’s a mixed bag, no matter who you are.” 

Tim’s father dies of cancer only a few weeks after he reveals his diagnosis to his children, but thanks to his powers, Tim is given a gift: for a little while, he can still go back to a time when his father was alive, and visit him for a few quiet minutes, to read Dickens together or play ping pong or get advice. He can vacation in his own memories. 

And then Tim’s wife Mary tells him she wants to have a third child, and Tim faces a terrible choice: if he has another baby, he will never be able to go back and see his dad again. “It was the toughest decision of my life,” he reflects. “Saying ‘yes’ to the future meant saying ‘goodbye’ to my dad - forever.” 

Ultimately, Tim does what none of the other protagonists of the works in today’s newsletter are able to do: he heals. He says goodbye to his father, and chooses the possibility of new life. And, as he grieves his father and learns to live without him, he decides to stop time traveling altogether. “The truth is I now don't travel back at all, not even for the day,” he concludes:

I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life. We’re all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.

When it comes to grief and time travel, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. The music video for “The Scientist” takes place in reverse, as Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin moves backward through time along a road and through the woods. At the end of the video (the beginning chronologically), we discover that he was just in a car crash that is implied to have killed his girlfriend.

2. Ron’s little brother Keith, who was six when their father died, poured his grief into a different kind of project: he became a successful artist.

3. In About Time, time travel is genetic, and all the men in the paternal family line have the ability. Notably, neither of them tell their wives, a conceit that enables much of the film’s humor but has deeply troubling implications if you think about it for too long. I love About Time, but the movie works only as a fable, not as a piece of science fiction.

4. If you take one lesson from this week’s syllabus, it should be to avoid smoking. It doesn’t take a time machine to realize that cigarettes are a bad idea.