Their names were Paul - after his grandfather, who gets about six months at the beginning each time and never met his junior - and Heather and Jason and Nicole. We can still remember these names easier than any but the most recent ones: they're the names we'd obviously agree on, the first time around. The names we expected to outlive us.
We haven't forgotten any of the others. We add all the new names to a song, towards the end, every time, and memorize it, and write it down again as soon as we flash back. We pick names just to make the song scan, sometimes. It's as good a tiebreaker as any.
The thing is, forty-six years is a long time. Wars break out, and end. (Our Cal was in one, and we lost him early.) Technology changes. (Valerie was an engineer and we think of her whenever we get on a train.) Laws turn over like compost. (Noah was mayor of his town for a while.)
Kids have time to grow up.
We have had some rather intense debates with our friends and neighbors over the years about this, but we are not having babies who are doomed to die when they're five years old. (We are not particularly judging people who do this. We have had grandchildren like that, more than once, and James and Winter and Lily and Wendy and Paul III were precious babies, and we remember all their names. But it isn't what we are doing.) Our kids will live to their forties, since we have them quick - once or twice we have had kids who only got to their late thirties, if we were going for an especially big family. That is plenty of time.
We didn't have children the second time around. Someone else got to it first - lots of someones. We weren't due to get married for another couple of years, and Paul came along after that. By that time we knew: if you try to conceive with the same partner, on the same day? No. Not only are you not guaranteed to get pregnant at all at the exact time you had in mind, even replicating as closely as you can remember that honeymoon or that barcrawl or that clinical attempt at tracking your cervical mucus, but if you do get pregnant, you will have a different baby. Half of them were the opposite sex; you get sibling amounts of difference in eye color, in hair curl, in birthmark. Nobody had pictures, but some people have a great memory for faces, and they confirmed: this baby might meet the same description as the one I had last time, but this is not that baby. Paul Jr. was gone. Heather and Jason and Nicole, gone.
We didn't have children the third time, either. We got together right away, that time. (The first flashback there was such a flurry of confusion that we actually didn't find each other for a year, who memorizes a forty-six-year-old phone number? one's spouse's old address?) But no children. We spent the six available months of Paul, Sr.'s life catching him up on what he'd missed after his second death, and we helped our friends whose flashbacks put them in bad situations get where they needed to be instead. It had been something of a joke. "If it happens again," we'd giggle to each other. Laughing, because this time we had nothing we'd lose, nothing important - art projects that had been learned from and moved past, careers we were about ready to retire from. But no children. The instructions were, however unseriously, exchanged: "Get me away from my mother." "Send me plane tickets, I'll pay you back in three months, they'll rehire me for sure." "Let's buy that big house next time." We had the phone numbers, and we were loaning all our money and calling in favors for all our loved ones, day one, the third time it was that afternoon. And that set the tone going forward.
There are different things people do with the first day back. Mourn, obviously, lots of that. Get underway on what we sometimes call "modernizing". Of course at first we didn't know anyone in central Africa, but how many centuries do you think it could possibly take before that changed, before the biggest emergency on day one would be our pal Kalongwe's medical maladies and missed meals? It didn't even take us three. Kalongwe lives down the street from us nowadays. He always redoes the tile in his house in different patterns. Immigration's relaxed a lot and we can sponsor him in every time, no further red tape. His accent's almost gone now. We get Priscilla out of China, though she's optimistic that one of these days we won't have to. We see Luke's sister Jenny off to India where she and her husband live most of the time.
Migration isn't the only thing that changed. There was a mass walkout of schoolchildren - school"children" - even in the very first flashback. They weren't children any more, they were fiftysomethings, with baby siblings to grieve, friends to find, and no interest in getting hooked on phonics. There were a lot of car crashes the first time, but now most people who flash back into the driver's seat can handle that, unless they tend to die in their wreck, can't be saved by quick-acting people nearby, and therefore don't have a moment to plan for the next one. Commerce mostly goes on as usual, with people you don't know (we've had plenty of time to get to know Kalongwe, but there are still billions of people out there we've never met) - but there are shortcuts, with people you do know. We don't have to buy our house any more. We notify the bank that we've got a standing arrangement, for their records, and Christina who works there remembers us well enough to confirm that that sounds right or if she's having an off-day she calls the owner on record to double-check, and we move in. (Jenny comes by with a moving truck, because her flight usually doesn't leave till late at night and she happens to start near where the UHauls are.)
And of course the march of progress looks completely different.
Everybody's notes, papers still mid-peer-review, fancy electronic equipment, knockout mice, test tubes, longitudinal studies years in the making, all their colleagues who were younger than forty-six - gone. Things went faster in some ways, with dead ends avoided and bureaucracy even then embarrassed into slimming down a bit. But slower, in others. Those colleagues who were younger than forty-six didn't come back and neither did any science that was only in their heads - the next generation was tiny and the educational system had a time recovering from its years of hiatus once the small crop of genuine kindergarteners was ready. Nobody showed up with context on the lecture they were attending, the experiment they were conducting, the petri dishes they were on vacation from. A lot of balls were dropped. What scientific drive there was, was in many cases directed toward figuring out what had just happened.
They didn't figure it out. Still haven't. We would have stopped it, by now. Or we'd have had a vicious fight about whether to do that or not - some people like living forever. Some people never had children, never lost children - or aren't very good parents. They think this is pretty keen and anybody trying to get the next generation a chance to live to fifty would be killing them, after a fashion. But it'd be a live question, at least.
They're improving at lots of things. Both the engineers who want to save the environment and the ones who want to move fast and break it are emboldened by the flashbacks, and their detente keeps improving both in terms of the climate and the consumer products, plus the environmentalists now know exactly where to find the last handful of whichever frog they're worried about going extinct. (Connor was so proud of his frogs.) The last few times around the doctors (Phoebe and Kyle were both doctors) have attempted an aggressive surgery on Paul Sr.'s cancer, to be followed by other measures as soon as the equipment can come off the lines of speedrun-repurposed factories. We haven't kept him any longer than usual yet, but they're working on it. Sometimes people who get a terminal disease mid-loop just kill themselves and show up again at the beginning to get a recap from whoever stuck out the whole thing. It frees up lots of oncologist energy to focus on people like my father-in-law. And the economists (Jason was an economist) say that things are smoothing out in all kinds of interesting ways because of the higher trust environment and the predictability of certain features of the markets, and they fret about whether we'll be in a dreadful state if we ever get out of the loop.
Anyway. We decided - after a good long time to mourn our first family - to have children.
It doesn't look like the people who are looping with us are going to figure this out. A Nobel physicist who'd seemed to be close gave up, retired ten loops ago, and just goes scuba diving and stuff now. (Erica used to scuba dive a lot, though I don't think she ever met him.) But maybe the right one in a billion genius will be able to do it. Forty-six years is plenty of time to have a scientific career in. One of these millennia, the right person will come along, and save some of our family. And every one of our children who doesn't is still our child and we love every one so much.
Does that answer your question, my precious one?