The time machine fantasy

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I have a recurring daydream. The details and logistics vary but the core fantasy is the same: time travel exists. Sometimes it’s a new scientific discovery like a time machine that people can opt to use within set parameters.  Sometimes it’s a secret ability that only I access for some mysterious reason like in Back to the Future. Always my goal is to prevent my daughter’s death. 

My sci-fi fantasy may sound childish and ridiculous, but I know I can’t be alone among bereaved parents. I can’t seem to give up on my quest to find a way out of this reality, the one where I watched my firstborn child die. I still ask, what if?... I still want a chance to be with her, if only in my mind, only for a moment.

Beyond the small detail that time travel doesn’t exist, the place where my fantasy most often hits a snag is when I start to imagine life after that moment where Olivia survives birth and we take her home from the hospital. That’s when I have to start defining the structure of my fantasy world, which always leads to some tough questions. I am a detail-oriented person, so I need to know: Does the version of me who goes home with her know about the other timeline where she dies? Did this version of me experience the years of deep grief and the appreciation for life that came with that, or is she pre-loss me, thinking that colic or lack of sleep is the worst thing to ever happen? Does my partner know? And what kind of dad would he have been if we never experienced loss? It’s almost too painful to contemplate. 

I wonder what kind of mom I would be to her. Would the naïve, carefree version of me who was taking natural birthing classes be kind of a whiny, short-tempered mom without the perspective I gained by being completely shattered and then painstakingly rebuilt as a different person? 

If the course of events in my life was altered, would I still have my beautiful, delightful son who was born two years later? 

Ultimately, the fantasy is never fully satisfying because I inevitably arrive, over and over, at the frustrating conclusion that death can’t be undone. All the threads of my family’s past and present are so irrevocably knotted with Olivia’s death and its aftermath that it’s impossible to rewrite the past without unraveling the present, until it’s just a bunch of loose ends and questions. The beautiful moments that we have today are tightly woven together with the painful ones that I wish I could change. If I try to undo the past, I also undo parts of the present that I don’t wish to lose. 

I go round and round with these questions until the daydream ends and I come back to reality, back to the complicated, imperfect tapestry that is my life. 

Do you have this same daydream of time travel? How does yours go?