back in time: dragonflies, deloreans, and prolonged grief disorder

A dragonfly fights for its life in Murray Hill (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Grief can suddenly hit you at any time, unexpectedly, at the oddest of moments.

The other day, I was walking up the street to pick up my lunch when I came upon a dragonfly on the sidewalk. At first I thought it might be dead, but then it started to move, slowly and awkwardly. It inched forward, then backward. It flipped over one way, then the other. It tried to flap its wings, with no success.

As I watched it struggle, a few people passed by, paying no attention to the weird guy filming the sidewalk.

I’m not a big crier, but I started tearing up. I wasn’t ready for another death, especially if there was some way I could help prevent it.

My eyes continued to water and I wracked my brain about what I should do.

In July 1985, right after my college graduation, I was traveling around Europe with my friend Steve. One night in Paris, we decided to see a movie, Pink Floyd: The Wall, an adaptation of the 1979 album, not the most French thing we could do. I was not a Pink Floyd fan at the time, but Steve was eager, so I agreed. In the film, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats plays a rock star named Pink who is haunted by his father’s death in WWII, when Pink was just a baby, and he builds an actual and metaphorical wall of bricks to protect himself from the real world.

I couldn’t help but think what I would do if my father wasn’t around anymore; it was a devastating proposition that I prayed would never happen, or at least not for a long time.

The next afternoon, I made my weekly phone call to my father at the family’s tire and auto repair shop in Brooklyn to check in. My uncle Paul answered and said, in a somber voice, that he would put my brother, Billy, on. Billy told me that our father had died of an apparent heart attack a few days before — my parents were on vacation in Mexico while I was in Europe and my brother and sister, Susan, were on Long Island — and they had been trying to find me. They were delaying the funeral until I got home.

I went to a café on the Champs-Élysées, ordered a bottle of Pernod — the drink of choice in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which is set in Paris — and proceeded to write a eulogy for my father.  I had to have my friend Marc read it at the service because I was too distraught.

I hate insects.

I particularly hate anything that can sting me or suck my blood. I don’t care how necessary they might be for the environment; if they are buzzing around me, they are the enemy. And I really hate dragonflies, which look like WWII dive bombers. As far as I remember, I’ve never suffered any kind of serious bug bite, but I freak out if any flying insect is near. Meanwhile, my much calmer wife has petted bumblebees. I’m not kidding.

But I felt an immediate attachment to the dragonfly as it continued to squirm on the sidewalk. I desperately wanted it to right itself and fly away; I needed it to right itself and fly away.

A few weeks after my father’s funeral, someone, I can’t remember who, talked me into going to the movies, to see this new flick called Back to the Future. In it, Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a high school teenager who, by accident, takes a DeLorean outfitted as a time-travel machine by his mentor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) thirty years into the past, to 1955. There, he meets the two people who will become his parents, ultimate nerd George (Crispin Glover) and hot-to-trot Lorraine (Lea Thompson). Marty unknowingly causes a rift in the space-time continuum that he must fix if he ever wants George and Lorraine to meet, fall in love, get married, and produce him and his two siblings (Marc McClure and Wendie Jo Sperber).

In his May 14, 2009, Discover article, “Rules for Time Travelers,” Sean Carroll explains, in Rule 6, “If something happened, it happened. What people want to do with time machines is to go into the past and change it. You can’t. The past already happened, and it can’t un-happen.”

He also points out that “the least realistic time-travel movie of all time might be Back to the Future. . . . When Marty McFly changes the past (violating Rule 6), the future ‘instantaneously’ changes. What the hell is that supposed to mean? . . . Your brain is not going to change to remember things differently, nor will any other record-keeping device such as diaries or photographs or embarrassing sex tapes.”

While watching the movie, I thought about what I would do if I could return to the past. I didn’t have to go back to 1955 — one of my father’s favorite years, when his beloved Bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers, won their only World Series, trouncing the despised Yankees — but only a few months. I would encourage my father, who was in excellent health as far as anyone knew, to go to the doctor and get whatever tests they could do on his heart.

I would also cancel the tennis match we had just before I left for Europe, when I beat him for the first time. He was a solid player, able to hit with both hands, but I remember him tripping over a ball and nearly falling over. I still wonder if that game had any impact on his death, that I was somehow, in some way, to blame. In fact, when I was in Rome, I had thrown three coins into the Trevi Fountain and wished for everyone in my family to be healthy and happy. I have not tossed a coin into a fountain or wishing well since. 

When one of our previous cats got sick, I worried that it was my fault because I had inadvertently fed him human food with onions, not knowing that onions are poison to felines. When my mother first started complaining about health problems — she was never one for going to doctors — I didn’t push her hard enough to go to a specialist. By the time she was ultimately diagnosed with stage four lung cancer (she was not a smoker), it was too late to stop it. When she did pass in 2017 at the age of seventy-six — the illness lasted about four months — I wasn’t with her when she died; my sister called me to their apartment, but my mother was already gone. I hugged her body nonetheless.

In his August 2023 Aeon essay “When Grief Doesn’t End: Suffering the Sudden Death of a Loved Person Leaves Some Survivors Stuck in Grief. Can They Win Their Lives Back — and How,” Italian science journalist Martin W. Angler describes the undiagnosed persistent grief he and his mother experienced for decades after his older sister was killed in a car accident in 1992, when he was ten. He writes, “Back in the day, even professional psychologists lacked an official diagnosis for persisting grief. That changed in March 2022, when the condition my mom most likely suffered from was added as ‘prolonged grief disorder’ to the latest revision of the psychologists’ diagnostic manual, the DSM-5-TR.

“The diagnosis hinges on two factors. The first is denial: mourners cannot accept the death of the person they lost. This, in turn, causes symptoms like sadness, anger, or guilt that last for more than twelve months. That persistence separates normal from prolonged grief. While the former is like a wave that occasionally flares up and then ebbs away, the latter runs like a horizontal line. Prolonged grief traps its sufferers in continuous rumination. This causes the second diagnostic factor: impairment. Some sufferers quit their jobs; others avoid people and places that remind them of their loss. Avoidance is just one of many hallmarks of this disorder. While guilt, self-blame, and anger rank high, one of the most prominent symptoms of pathological grief is the loss of meaning in life. People who get stuck in prolonged grief often see no point in living without the person they lost.”

While Carroll writes that time travel isn’t going to make your brain change, Angler points out, “Grief alters the brain’s size. . . . Grief shrinks the brain area indirectly, as a result of too much stress.”

I spent two years mired in the loss of meaning in life, but my mother, who was intensely strong, kicked my ass until I finally moved forward. However, I am still a master of avoidance, and the prolonged grief continues, whatever size my brain is.

After several minutes, I took a video of the dragonfly’s struggle, hoping that it would move forward with its existence. It tried and tried but kept failing. As soon as I stopped the video, a woman squeezed by and unknowingly stepped on the dragonfly’s tail. I let out a howl, as if I had been stepped on. The woman just kept walking, oblivious to it all.

I went to the Italian restaurant to get my lunch, all the while thinking about what I could do to help the insect. I was too afraid of getting stung if I picked it up with my fingers, so I decided I would come back and use plastic utensils to move it to the cordoned-off tree while it hopefully healed.

Earlier this month, I wrote about our amazing cat Taeko, who died after a short illness. My wife was with her when she peacefully passed; she called to me and I ran in from the living room. Taeko was dead but was still warm, reminding me of when I had hugged my mother.

About two weeks after Taeko left us, my wife and I went to see Back to the Future: The Musical at the Winter Garden on Broadway. (We already had the tickets.) The show has a book by Bob Gale, who cocreated, cowrote, and coproduced the original film; the music and lyrics are by Alan Silvestri, who composed the soundtrack for the movie.

The story adheres so closely to the film that the changes stick out like sore thumbs. As Angler writes, “You can’t change what already happened; every event in spacetime is characterized by certain things occurring, and those things are fixed once and for all once they happen.”

I’m not suggesting that Gale shouldn’t make any updates whatsoever, just that the changes make sense, staying true to the spirit of the movie. The Libyan terrorists are gone, replaced by Marty McFly (Casey Likes) going back in time to prevent Doc Brown (Roger Bart) from dying because his radiation suit doesn’t fit. He can turn a DeLorean into a time machine but is a lousy tailor. Marty hops in the car to speed off to the hospital, but when he hits eighty-eight miles per hour, 1.21 gigawatts of power jettison him to 1955. Having just lost a pet, I was extremely disappointed that they excised Einstein, Doc Brown’s shaggy dog and the first time traveler, completely from the show.

In 1955, Marty meets his father, George (Hugh Coles), and mother, Lorraine (Liana Hunt), upsets the space-time continuum, and has to do whatever he can to make sure they kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance or else he and his brother (Daryl Tofa) and sister (Amber Ardolino) won’t be born. Lorraine would rather kiss Marty, who she has fallen in love with; she assumes his name is Calvin Klein because that’s what’s written on his underwear. In a song called “Pretty Baby,” Lorraine, coquettishly sidling up to Marty, sings, “Pretty baby / Got this funny feelin’ / Pretty baby / I might need some healin’ / It’s getting hotter / And it’s giving me the chills / I think I’d better rest here for a while.”

The song made me think of Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby, in which twelve-year-old Brooke Shields plays a prostitute in a 1917 New Orleans brothel. In 1980, Shields became the spokesperson for Calvin Klein, famously declaring in a television commercial, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

In 1983, on an episode of the popular sitcom Family Ties called “Sweet Lorraine,” Fox, playing seventeen-year-old conservative Republican Alex P. Keaton — a role that earned him three consecutive Emmys from 1986 to 1988, immediately after Back to the Future — falls in love with a woman named Lorraine (Carolyn Seymour), who is thirty-nine. Fox and Thompson are the same age in real life; Hunt is fourteen years older than Likes. Right after my father died, I sought solace in the arms of an older woman; I was twenty-two, she was forty-four. It didn’t work out. Her name was not Lorraine, although one of my mother’s best friends was (and still is) a lovely woman named Lorraine.

Back to the Future is now a Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman, 2023)

To sum up the show, Bart is fabulous as Doc Brown, and the special effects are spectacular — just wait till you see what they do with the DeLorean, especially at the end — but the songs are drab, the characters more cardboard than in the film, and the plot changes baffling. (What, and no Chuck Berry joke?!) I suggest the producers go back in a time machine to fix the far-too-many flaws.

Back in Murray Hill, I pick up my lunch and prepare a plastic knife and lid container to move the dragonfly out of harm’s way, all the while praying it’s okay.

It’s gone.

I go to the exact spot where it was, and there’s no sign of it. I look around to see if it made it to the tree or somewhere else. Nothing. I tear up again.

I see a man with a large trash bag walking into the service entrance of the building the dragonfly was in front of. Please, don’t let him have killed it and is now disposing of it, I think to myself. I consider asking him but decide not to. It’s better not to know — avoidance, like I said earlier.

Instead, I prefer to believe that it activated its own flux capacitor and was able to (Mc)fly away, like the DeLorean, off on a new adventure. (Only later did I discover that the average life span of a dragonfly is between one and two weeks, although some can live six to eight weeks. Taeko had been given two weeks to live but stayed with us more than two months.)

In the show and movie, Doc Brown proposes going thirty years into the future, when Marty would be forty-seven, the age my father was when he died.

If I could go back in time, would I? What would I change?

In his opening narration to the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “Back There,” in which Russell Johnson (later to gain fame as the Professor on Gilligan’s Island) plays an engineer who is sent back to 1865 — where he tries to prevent the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln — writer and creator Rod Serling says, “Witness a theoretical argument, Washington, DC, the present. Four intelligent men talking about an improbable thing like going back in time. A friendly debate revolving around a simple issue: Could a human being change what has happened before? Interesting and theoretical, because who ever heard of a man going back in time?”

In the 1959 TZ episode “No Time Like the Past,” Paul Driscoll (Dana Andrews) and his colleague Harvey (Robert F. Simon) build a time machine in which Driscoll, according to Serling’s opening narration, “puts to a test a complicated theorem of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further, or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present, one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.”

In his closing narration, Serling talks about “clocks and calendars,” which are prevalent throughout Back to the Future, the movie and the musical. (As a bonus fact, Back to the Future was filmed on MGM’s Courthouse Square set, where the first episode of The Twilight Zone, “Where Is Everybody?”, about potential human space travel, was filmed, with the addition of the clock tower.)

Everything I’ve ever done, everything that has ever happened to me, the good, the bad, and the indifferent, has brought me to this exact moment in time, in this exact space, making me who I am.

Prolonged grief disorder and all, I don’t think I’d change a thing.

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