The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  Mike was wheeled away. I found a chair in the enormous waiting room. At its center was a big, curved desk, staffed by humans who apparently had been trained to act as though they had never been members of our species. They were surrounded by concerned families. The difference in facial expressions between the people working and the people waiting couldn’t have been more stark. Those behind the desk looked like they were wearing masks. Those on the outside looked stripped of everything but their emotion.

  I opened my laptop and tried to lose myself in a cloud of CubeSats. We would first call ours ExoplanetSat, before we finally named it ASTERIA. CubeSats, as a species of satellite, are much cheaper than regular satellites, because they’re smaller and easier to launch; they take up a lot less room in the hold of a rocket, and it costs $10,000 to send a pound of anything into space. Unfortunately, their cheap manufacture makes them prone to failure. Many of them never work. We use the same hopeless term for them that doctors use for patients they never got the chance to save: “DOA.”

  One of our first hurdles, then, was a problem of statistics. (Every problem is a problem of statistics.) We needed to know how many satellites we would need to give us a reasonable chance of finding another Earth-size planet. Thousands of bright, sun-like stars were worth monitoring, but we wouldn’t be able to build and manage thousands of satellites. We also knew that, given the ephemeral nature of transits, the odds of an Earth-size planet transiting a sun-like star were only about 1 in 200. Some of our satellites would also no doubt fail or be lost. If we sent up only a few, we would either have to be very strategic or very lucky to find what we were looking for. There was some optimal number of satellites that, combined with a smart list of target stars, would keep our budget reasonable but still give us a good chance of success. It was, in hindsight, a strange time for me to be calculating odds.

  A few hours later—it felt like days and nights had passed—I heard my name being called over a loudspeaker. Dr. Breen came to see me. She looked tired. The surgery had been even more complicated than she had feared; Mike’s guts were a knotted-up mess. His stomachaches came when food got stuck behind the mass, backing up like a clogged drain. But Dr. Breen had performed a quick biopsy of the tumor in the room and seen no obvious signs of cancer. We wouldn’t know for sure until the lab did more tests. So far, though, so good.

  Mike’s brother, Dan, came to visit, and we took turns spending time with Mike in the hospital over the next week. I wasn’t there when Dr. Breen delivered the verdict. Mike called me, the way my father had called me that day in Chicago: He had Crohn’s disease, a painful inflammation of the digestive system. Its plague of ulcers had led to the construction of the mass. That mass was cancer. That cancer had spread to the neighboring lymph nodes. His cancer wasn’t terminal, but it was Stage 3, one level removed from hopeless.

  I hurried to the hospital. When I exploded into Mike’s room, he was almost glowing, flush with his usual optimism, as though he were waiting for his turn to run a set of rapids. He wasn’t sweating a single bead of concern. The news could have been worse, he said. Stage 3 is better than Stage 4. At least he had been given a chance.

  “I just have to get better,” he said, the way he might name a chore on his regular to-do list.

  I just have to rake the lawn.

  I just have to do the dishes.

  I just have to get better.

  Sitting next to his bed, I looked at him and marveled. What were the odds?

  * * *

  ●

  By February, Mike was back home, recovering from his surgery so that he could start chemo. He slept a lot. Diana had become devoted to our family, a permanent presence after school. But I still needed help in the early morning and in keeping the house in some kind of order. I put an ad online and found Christine, a kind woman in her fifties who professed a love for cleaning that I couldn’t fathom. I told her that I’d need her for six weeks or so, the time we thought it would take for Mike to find his feet.

  Mike didn’t always see Christine the way I did, as a necessary savior. He saw her as a replacement, and he was sometimes mean about it. Only he could keep the kitchen organized properly, shop for groceries properly, or shovel the snow off the back porch steps properly. I was still coming to realize everything that he did. I didn’t know a job even existed until it wasn’t done. And it wasn’t just what he did that had been a mystery to me, but how he did it. He had a particular way of making our morning coffee. I didn’t understand which part of the machine went where, or how much water to put into it. I had no idea how bigger instruments like furnaces worked, either.

  I spied Molly, Mike’s big fat cat, in the bathtub. She looked confused, as though she had no idea how she had ended up where she had ended up. I knew the feeling. I lifted her out of her self-made prison but kept an eye on her. She didn’t seem herself. I took her to the vet. Her liver was failing. The vet prescribed huge yellow pills that I had to stick down her throat, and now Mike and Molly shared their sickness as well as their company. It became clear that Molly, at least, wasn’t going to make it. Only a month after I’d found her in the bathtub she was thin, close to death.

  I told the boys that Molly wasn’t going to be with us for much longer. I cried while I told them. In the back of my mind, I thought that how we managed her departure might matter. I wondered whether, like my father had done for me, I could serve as my children’s principal illustrator. I wanted to show them that there was a right way to say goodbye. I told them that we needed to be generous and patient with Molly, to give her everything that she might want, love most of all. We took a lot of pictures. I told the boys that memories are important. All things live until they are forgotten.

  One early morning, Molly was so still and quiet that I knew it was nearly time. I asked the boys to come upstairs to see her. They were still in their pajamas when they came into the room, and we sat with her. She was in our hands when she took her last breath.

  Mike was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him. The fact that Molly was gone was one of the first things our boys knew before he did. They couldn’t remember Tuktu’s death; they had been too young. They were still young, but now they seemed suddenly older.

  Mike would normally take care of whatever came next. I thought we should bury Molly, but it was winter, and the ground was covered in snow and too frozen for me to break. I didn’t know what to do, so I wrapped her up and put her in the basement freezer. Like a morgue. It wasn’t the most tender of measures, but it bought me time to think. Then I took the boys to Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast—a treat, to distract them. And to distract me. I dropped them off at school afterward, and then I went back to the house and waited for Mike to wake up. A few hours later I called the school, worried that Max and Alex might have been upset.

  “No, they’re fine,” their principal said. “They just told me they’d gone to Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast.” It wasn’t until they came back home that they remembered to be sad.

  * * *

  ●

  Mike was ready to start his chemo. We went to the local hospital to meet with Dr. D., his oncologist. From the instant Mike had been diagnosed, I had done what I always did when faced with an unknown: research. I had embarked on my own course of study in rare cancers of the small intestine. I read medical review papers, following their citations to other papers, and following those papers to other experts. I emailed the country’s leading specialist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, using my MIT credentials to get his attention. Academics build vast, intricate networks of knowledge the way ants carve out their caverns. Mike’s cancer was so rare that construction had just begun, but I nosed my way down every tunnel. I ran headlong into every dead end.

  Dr. D. had not practiced the same rigor. He seemed so uninformed, so incurious, that he filled me with a combination of rage and terror. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. I wa
nted to throw a chair out the window. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

  I knew. I kept my knowledge from Mike, but I knew. The sample of people who had suffered the same cancer as Mike was small, and small sample sizes can lead to error. But the findings so far were clear. The median survival time was eighteen months; the five-year survival rate was zero. I asked Dr. D. some pointed questions. He looked alarmed and asked if I was a biology researcher, as though he realized he’d been talking to the wrong person the wrong way. I sensed the oncologist’s fear, his discomfort plain even to me. He knew that I knew more than he did. I didn’t stop pressing him. I was a scientist pursuing the facts.

  “We’ll wait and see,” Dr. D. said. “We’ll do our best.”

  He continued to speak to us as though we needed protection from the truth. Sitting across from him, staring at his implacable face, I remembered my father’s doctor, the one who had looked into his only still-open eye and told him that he was going to get better, no bullshit. When did doctors start acting like faith healers?

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Mike really liked the oncologist. He wanted only positive feedback, from as many sources as possible. He started attending group therapy, something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before he got sick. He didn’t tell me what happened there, and I didn’t ask. He was cultivating a distance between us. I was never sure who he was trying to protect.

  I tried to find my own version of positivity that summer. Not by believing that Mike would overcome his cancer, which I knew was out of our control, but by finding out how to live every day to its fullest. I became obsessed with the proverbial “bucket list.” I told Mike that he should make one, and I thought about my own. I treated its manufacture like an experiment. I asked everyone I knew: “You have one year left to live. What are the things you want to do but haven’t?” Most people gave similar answers: Spend more time with family. Pursue work that’s more obsession than job.

  I knew I had mastered only one of those.

  I watched Mike for lessons. Ravaged by cancer, with his insides turned out, he could still be so strong. Not everyone can complete aggressive chemotherapy; Mike rode his bike to his treatments. That summer, in the middle of his chemo, he wanted to go on a canoe trip. His doctor moved one of his appointments to give him a three-week break. Mike flew to Idaho with a tour group and ran big-water rivers for days. I picked him up from the airport after, and he was tanned and rugged-seeming, with a little stubble and a worn baseball cap. He looked good. We’d been together more than fifteen years by then, and we had lived so much in that time. But at the airport, he looked the way he had when we were young.

  In August, I asked him to take me and the boys on a canoe trip all our own. In my heart, I thought that it might be our last chance. I wanted Max and Alex to know Mike the way I had fallen in love with him, sitting tall on the water. Mike refused. He told me that he was spent, and the boys wouldn’t enjoy it. They had whined so much on our last trip, remember? I told him through tears how important it was to me. He shook his head.

  We did something we never would have done otherwise. We rented a town house in a ski resort in New Hampshire. It was the end of summer, so it was quiet. We drove up Mount Washington, which was dispiriting. Some people hike up one side of that mountain, while others drive up the opposite side. We had always been drawn to adventure in wild places—that’s the side where we belonged. Instead we were driving to a summit on pavement.

  The wind whipped across the crowded parking lot at the top. I was miserable, until Alex made an announcement. He was holding on to a signpost so that he wouldn’t be carried away by the wind, the red pajama bottoms he wore all the time threatening to turn into sails. “One day I’m going to hike up Mount Washington,” he said. “I’m going to set a world record.” I wanted to laugh aloud, but inside I felt an almost overwhelming gratitude toward him. He was still so hopeful. He didn’t know enough not to be. One day we would hike up Mount Washington. One day we might set a world record.

  Mike and I made a careful, searching return to each other that fall. We shared a dark sense of humor, blacker than black. Mike dug a hole for Molly as soon as the yard had thawed. Wanting to protect him from proximity to death, I retrieved her stiff corpse from my makeshift morgue before trying to bury her. Somehow there wasn’t enough earth left to fill the hole, and I had to drop a giant rock into her grave to make up the difference. “Where did the dirt go?” Mike asked, laughing.

  Now Minnie May was starting to fade. Mike dug another hole. She might hold on till winter, and he didn’t want another cat to end up in the freezer. He wanted to be prepared. He was also careful to leave the pile of loose earth right next to the hole, ready to be shoveled back into place. He wondered aloud whether he would be around to fill it or whether I might have to find another giant rock to drop on another one of our cats. Then he smiled, and I smiled back, and then one of us started laughing, and then the other one did. It had been so long since we had laughed like that, I forgot that the punchline was whether my sick husband or my sick cat would be first in the ground.

  In October, Mike had some more scans done, to see whether the chemo had worked. It had not. There were new tumors outside his small intestine, lodged in his abdominal cavity. The cancer had spread. Cancer that spreads during radiation is a killing cancer. Mike was terminal.

  It was a Friday. I was supposed to fly to Italy that Sunday for a conference. “I’ll drop everything,” I said. Mike said no, I should go. He wasn’t going to die tomorrow. We’re talking years, not months, Dr. D. had told him.

  “Years, not months,” Mike repeated to me.

  Dr. D. was either lying or ignorant. I looked at Mike and did one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I nodded.

  * * *

  ●

  I came back from Italy. The next day, a miracle: Dr. D. called to say that he’d been wrong. Mike’s cancer wasn’t terminal. He could be fixed. There were new tumors, but they weren’t cancerous. They were unrelated to the mass in his intestines. Dr. D. was going to send out the scans for more analysis, but everything was going to be okay. Whatever plans we had made, we could think about keeping them again.

  That sense of escape, the feeling of relief—I’m not sure we’d experienced anything like it since that morning on the esker. We felt changed the way the fire scare had changed us. We no longer talked about some distant, brighter future, how one day we would cross off another item on our bucket lists. We were done with waiting for better days. We talked in the present tense. We talked about how we were going to make every correction and shed every curse. We had nearly lost so much because of our inattention, and then cancer had threatened to strip away from us the fragments of our lives that remained. Now we had been given a second chance. Not just Mike—I had been given a second chance, too. We had been given a second chance. Mike and I made a new promise, this one to each other: We were going to make everything right. We were going to take fresh stock of what was important and what didn’t matter, and we were going to do that good work together.

  After ten blissful days, Dr. D. called Mike back into his office.

  He had some bad news.

  He had been right the first time.

  * * *

  ●

  By November, Mike was preparing for more chemo. He maintained his optimism, seeming genuine in his belief that if his cancer proved fatal, it would not take him for some time. I kept my facts to myself. The night before the first appointment of his second round, he wondered whether he even needed to go. Not because he was going to die anyway. Because his cancer wasn’t that bad.

  I found his denial as frustrating as it was heartbreaking. Here was the evil of deception, self-deception especially. “The truth hurts,” we’ll say in one breath, and we’ll call lies “harmless” in the next. That’s the definition of bullshit. Mike’s hope had become sinister to me. He needed to b
e thinking about how to spend the time he had left, not counting on time he would never have. I knew what his doctor was going to say when we saw him the next day. Even he wasn’t going to be able to keep lying anymore.

  “Mike,” I said. “Do you want to hear the truth from me right now, or from your doctor tomorrow?”

  “From you,” he said. “I guess.”

  “You are terminally ill. We don’t know how long you’re going to live, but you’re not going to live much longer.”

  He let out the heaviest sigh. Then he went upstairs and opened the children’s bedroom door. He watched Max and Alex sleeping. In the dark and quiet, his eyes began to fill. “My biggest regret will be not seeing them grow up,” he said.

  Your mind plays a curious trick on you when tragedy strikes you or someone you love. You spend a lot of time remembering before. Your old life plays like a movie in your head. You remember when your worries were of a different scale, and you relive slideshows of happy scenes, every frame made gauzy and melancholic by everything that came after. Before catastrophe, you look ahead to give meaning to your present. After catastrophe, you look back. Mike no longer looked forward. He remembered. He remembered staring into Max’s blue eyes for the first time. He remembered canoe trips and rocket launches. Now he knew what I knew. He looked at his sleeping boys and finally cried.

  Mike still did the chemo. He was exhausted by it. One evening, he came downstairs to join Max and Alex and me for dinner. Mike pushed his plate aside and put his head on the table. He fell asleep for ten minutes or so, then woke up confused. “My head hurts,” he said. He went back upstairs to bed. He hadn’t touched his food.