Time is Eternity

by Colin Jones in February 2012 - What on Earth?

Time, it is said, is an illusion. I’ve never quite understood what that meant until I started writing regular articles.

All the contributing writers to this magazine have a month in advance deadline to meet which means that this article was written at the end of December. It’s now February and December already seems like a long time ago. Much of import may have happened between my writing and your reading. At the time of writing, on the eve of the New Year, when people here and everywhere stopped for a moment to reflect of the past year and place their faith and hopes in the year to come and made, yet again, optimistic resolutions, I found myself pondering the meaning of time and of life.

For some time, on New Year’s Eve morning, while shoppers went about replenishing supplies for the festivities ushering in another year and while Capetonians and visitors to our city enjoyed the wonderful summer weather, an untimely tragedy was playing itself out on Table Mountain.

A young medical doctor fell to his death while hiking on Platteklip Gorge that morning. The mountain I have known and loved all my life claimed the life of a young man my family had come to know and love for he was a friend and colleague of our daughter.

At the time of writing, there was very little information available about the circumstances of this tragic accident. The news of his death spread rapidly amongst the community who knew him. We were shocked and distraught. Our daughter and his other colleagues deal with life and death every day in their work as doctors. They are bound together in their common struggle against disease and death in a special fellowship in which they, somehow, manage to remain free of cynicism and apathy. They commit a lifetime to this endeavour.

Dr. Nazier Khan was among the brightest and best. Studious, diligent, dedicated and zealous, he was on the verge of becoming a cardio-pulmonary specialist. I have no doubt that he would have been one of the finest. He was humble about his achievements. They meant only that he would be of better service. He cared deeply about those close to him, especially for his young daughter upon whom he doted and for his family and friends. He cared about me and my wife. He cared passionately about his patients. A loving, caring, dedicated doctor, father and friend who had all the time in the world for all of us, came to a premature end on New Year’s Eve on Table Mountain.

The news of the death of a loved one makes time stand still for an immeasurable moment. The days that follow do not obey the laws of time. Each second, minute, hour and day drags on so as to defy measure. For those of us who live on, it holds something of the experience of eternity. At the moment of such an untimely death, time indeed seems to become illusionary.

But life is real. And so is death. To paraphrase the writer of the Ecclesiastes, there is a time for living and a time for dying, a time for celebrating and a time for grieving. Since sitting down to write this, the year quietly passed from 2011 to 2012. The moment passed me by at my desk in my study. There was no countdown, no popping of champagne to mark the transition.

And now it’s the second month of the new year. We will have had some answers to what happened back on New Year’s Eve. The raw edge will have been taken off our grief. We will have only our sense of loss and our many fond memories of Nazier to remind us that he was real and for a time here with us.

But time is not a measure of duration. For as Henry Van Dyke put so eloquently put it:

“Time is too slow for those who wait;

Too swift for those who feast;

Too long for those who grieve;

Too short for those who rejoice;

But for those who love,

Time is eternity.”

Table Mountain is one of the world’s oldest mountains. It has been here for time immemorial. I have loved it all my life and it holds much personal significance. I was born and raised in its shadow. I have left it behind, travelling to distant lands with my family and it has welcomed us back on our return. It has always been linked to my life and long connection with the Mother City. But now it is also linked with the memory of Nazier Khan, a memory of a life cut short.

We were at the home of friends later that afternoon on the day of the tragedy. On a wall in their living room hung a large photograph of Table Mountain taken from across the bay at Milnerton. I pointed out Platteklip Gorge to them. They had known Nazier, as their son was also a colleague, but were unfamiliar with the geography of the mountain having never climbed it. As I looked at the image of the mountain, I reflected on the fact that it had recently been declared one of the seven new natural wonders of the world and that it would retain that honour for the next two-and- a-half thousand years.

In that moment, I was overcome by a sense of resentment and anger. Would there ever again be a time when I would be able to look at Table Mountain with love and respect let alone want to wander up Platteklip Gorge or climb India Venster knowing that Nazier had died there?

Only time will tell. One thing I do know. And that is that time, like Dr. Nazier Khan once was, is a great healer.