While listing what she misses most from Earth, Liz mentions the pocket watch her father gave her for her 13th birthday. In this sense, it symbolizes much of her former existence—not just her father’s love for her, but also the very nature of time itself as she understood it (that is, as tied to growing older).

Notably, however, this watch had stopped working roughly a month before Liz’s accident. In fact, it was because she was thinking of the watch that Liz failed to notice the taxi, as she explains: “I was thinking about my watch, how I should have brought it with me to the mall to be repaired. […] I was deciding whether I had enough time to turn around and go back for it” (124). The irony is that Liz’s preoccupation with whether she had “enough time” caused her to miss what was happening in the moment, leading her to “run out of time” altogether.   

Liz quickly learns that time doesn’t actually stop with her death; however, she does begin aging in reverse. As a result, her existence in Elsewhere is still limited by time in the same way her life on Earth was.