The Multiverse of Grief
Tessering well through love and loss
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Stephanie Duncan Smith
I have come to think of those who grieve as time-travelers. If one cannot be near the beloved in the present, then they will find a way, somehow. Looking to the past, love keeps every scrap and shred of memory close so that it might be preserved. Looking to the present, love enters the multiverse, keeping hold of a parallel world of what might have been—our 25th anniversary, her fifth birthday, getting to see the look on your grandmother’s face meeting her first grand. Love’s imagination never tires of ways to keep its beloved close.
I warmed to the wonder of my first pregnancy during Advent. Then, the week before Christmas, just as the world readied to celebrate the ultimate pregnancy and birth narrative, I miscarried. It was Advent’s week of joy. I soon became pregnant again, and my daughter was born one year nearly to the day later, so our December will forever hold two daughters, two very different birth stories. When she was one and a half, I lost another pregnancy—strangely, on what should have been the birthday of our first.
For those who love someone who is no longer here, time can be tricky. Days can hold the triple threat of memories past, ghost futures that should have been but aren’t, and the time-senseless present. The grief of what could have been settles into the crevices of the calendar like silt into river rock. I never wanted to be “over it.” I wanted to stay close—if not in the present or future, then in memory.
Whether you’ve lost a baby you’ve never met or a partner, parent, friend, or family member with whom you hoped to share a lifetime, in loss you confront the death of the future. This singular grief is to hold in your imagination what should have been, while reckoning with a reality you did not choose.
In the thick of grief after my first pregnancy loss, I re-read Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, following the impulse to return to old favorites. And here I found a new frame for the lengths love will travel through time.
A Wrinkle in Time follows teenage Meg, her little brother Charles Wallace, and friend Calvin in an interstellar search-and-rescue mission for their scientist father who has been captured by dark forces on another planet. The Library of America calls it “one of the most beloved and influential novels for young readers ever written.”
Perhaps because Meg Murry is all of us—feeling awkward in her skin, glasses and braces, full of faults and angsty in her self-awareness of them, yet fiercely protective of those she loves. And in the end, it is this love that has the last word, a hope that is held out to all of us.
The novel, first published in 1962, was an odd bird among young adult fiction, as it did not shy away from what might be considered more “adult” topics. L’Engle deliberately declined to dumb the narrative down for young readers, instead trusting their imagination and intelligence to grasp big ideas in physics, philosophy, and religion. Most of all, she did not shield young minds from very real forces of darkness.
It would seem L’Engle was suspect of linear thinking. “A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points,” says Mrs. Whatsit, an astral being who guides the children in their interstellar journey.
It is Mrs. Whatsit who introduces the children to tesseract time travel. In a pivotal passage, Mrs. Whatsit likens tessering to an ant crawling across a skirt. The ant can take “the long way,” marching straight across from point A to point B, or—she pinches the skirt to connect the two points—the ant could simply take a shortcut across the fabric fold. This “wrinkle” is the tesser: a shortcut.
To be alive is to move through time and space. Surely, we are constantly tessering—but not always tessering well. Mostly, we’d prefer to tesser out of unpleasant times and spaces, and tesser only into brighter, happier, more successful, more settled times. But that’s not how life works. Life holds a startlingly diverse array of experiences, and we do not get to choose the time we’re in.
Some define the conventional advice of “Time heals all wounds,” or “This, too, shall pass,” as spiritual bypassing, overcomer culture, or toxic positivity, but by whatever name, we’ve all heard the scripts. The language of bright-siding and brave-facing all presumes a linear mindset; the assumption that personal progress is the reward for those who just push through, that we can make a clean getaway from past pain by simply hopping “over” it like a track hurdle. That the ideal life traces the pattern of the hero’s journey—sure, you might face some setbacks, but from there, the only way forward is up. And maybe worst of all, this mindset ratifies the expectation that if your life is not a bright line rising steady to the right, you’re doing it wrong.
Within this straight-line mindset so favored in the modern Western world, resilience is often presented as putting as much A-to-B distance between oneself and past pain as possible. But no one should have to hustle for their own healing. A straight-line-to-the-top is too simplistic for the complex creatures that we are, and I dare not believe that our healing is so cleanly predictable that it can be charted on graph paper.
The cycle of the seasons, of both the earth and the sacred year, shows us there is no clean, straight line. There is only the slow-gathered accumulation of wisdom through the circle as we move through the seasons high and low, dignifying each through honest witness. If time is not linear but cyclical, authentic resilience is cultivated through braving the bend again and again, deepening with every new orbit. The strength we need most is sourced not in bouncing back or powering through or even fighting forward, but in holding in tension the highs and lows of the human experience. True resilience will never be a project of denial, but rather one of open witness. We become more human when we choose not to make less of our pain. This is precisely the way God became human: never to minimize our pain as overcomer hustlers are quick to prescribe, but rather to take on human skin and scars himself with us.
“Over it”—what an empty place to be, where nothing can touch you. I hope I’m never over the realness of loving another, even if this means enduring loss. I hope I’m never over the depths and empathy that love through loss has awakened in me. I hope I’m never over it because if you dim one set of colors in the color wheel of human experience, you will desaturate them all.
Contrary to the hero’s journey, which suggests time is only well spent toward rising success, the Scriptures say otherwise. There is a time for everything, we are told, a season for everything under the sun: “a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot” (Ecclesiastes 3:2). A time to weep, laugh, mourn, and dance. “A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them” (Ecclesiastes 3:5).
And so the circle turns, again and again and again. It seems to me that tessering might be simply the way we move around the circle of time, as it is expressed in the Christian liturgical year. Maybe this is the essence of taking on the risks of life and love: accepting that there is a time for everything, and trusting that God is with us, around the circle, in every time. God with us in the birthing, the dying, the weeping, the gathering. God with us in mothers wailing and prophets rejoicing. God who is never “over it”—far-removed and distant from human pain, but profoundly with us in every experience of love, loss, and liminality.
Maybe the invitation is not to get over our loss, but to go around the circle ever deepening and drawing closer to the beating heart of love Itself. Maybe this is what it means to tesser well: braving the multiverse, trusting that God is with us in every time.
Sacred time is the tesseract by which divine love breaks into our here and now, wrinkling the hem of eternity to be with us, traveling through space and time to be with the beloved. The liturgical year is not about memorializing the past; it’s a living remembrance that reaches into our present, as if to take our hand and say: Here, trace the pattern. Feel the deep grooves of motion across time, the center that will hold, the pattern that will not break.
L’Engle describes tessering as traveling at faster than the speed of light. One might say that tessering is traveling at the speed of love—a love that never lets go, no matter what dimension we find ourselves in.
Adapted from Even After Everything by Stephanie Duncan Smith. Copyright © 2024 by Stephanie Duncan Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Stephanie Duncan Smith
Author & Editor
Stephanie Duncan Smith is a senior editor at HarperOne, the creator of the Substack newsletter Slant Letter for writers, and the author of the October 2024 release Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway.
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Wow wow wow. This really blessed me. There are real depths to plumb here.🥹
I loved it