by Sara Seager
I looked at the boys. I wanted to try to see their dad the way they saw him.
“So,” I said. “Is your dad sick, or is he normal?”
They looked at each other, trying to confirm that they had the right answer before they gave it. They didn’t say anything to each other. They only looked.
“Normal,” they both said at the same time. Sick Mike had become the only dad they could remember.
* * *
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Shortly after Christmas, we heard from Mike’s doctor. The second round of chemo hadn’t helped much. The new tumors weren’t growing, but they weren’t getting any smaller, either. Mike’s cancer wouldn’t be gone until he was gone with it.
On New Year’s Eve, I put the boys to bed and sat with Mike at the kitchen table. We were different kinds of tired, and we had come to spend a lot of time like that: not speaking, just looking. I suppose we always had. The lights were mostly off, and the rest of the house was silent. There had been a lot of snow that winter, falling in reflective blankets of white. In the middle of the night, there seemed more light in our yard than there was in our kitchen.
“Wow,” I said. “This was the worst year ever.”
Mike looked at me the way he’d looked during the fire on the esker, forgetting to conceal his fears.
“Next year will be worse,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
The Death of a Star
Everybody dies instantly. It’s the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time. Mike spent a long time dying: eighteen months separated his diagnosis and his death. He was the perfect statistical norm; he followed the predicted schedule almost to the day. That meant he also conformed to every trope and stereotype that people use to describe a cancer sufferer’s losing fight. In the ledgers of causes of death, Mike’s would be filed under “long battle,” not “instantly.” For some reason we use “instantly” only when we’re talking about someone who’s been killed, usually in an accident. Sometimes the idea of “instantly” is used to underscore the tragedy of a situation: He didn’t know that today would be the last day of his life. He was taken so soon. We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Other times it’s used as an expression of comfort: At least he didn’t suffer. He died doing what he loved. He didn’t even know what hit him.
I understand, intellectually, the need for the distinction. A car accident and cancer are two different strains of death. It’s the difference between dying as a whole, all at once, and dying piece by lost piece. It’s the difference between a building that’s demolished and a building that’s left to ruin. Either way, the building ends up gone, but the way it vanishes isn’t the same, and we need a word to make clear the difference in process.
It still felt to me as though Mike died instantly. Yes, we knew his death was coming. We could get his “affairs in order,” whatever hollow comfort that is supposed to bring, as though the most important thing when you die is that you die with a tidy desk. At least we could be considerate of the lawyers and accountants he would be leaving behind.
Though I recognize that his strength was a gift, there was also a special agony in how long it took for Mike to die, especially for him. It’s never been one or the other for me, always both: We were unlucky to lose him; we were lucky to have him for as long as we did. I had one big regret, the promise I wasn’t able to keep—the promise of our spending more time together—but at least I didn’t have any of the small regrets that might haunt the family of someone who died without warning. We didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do, but we got to say everything we wanted to say. I hate that. I am grateful for that.
The dying time that Mike and I shared didn’t make his death any less of a horror, and it didn’t make my loss feel any less sudden. Mike took a breath, and then he didn’t. He was alive, and then he wasn’t. In one moment I was a wife. In the next I was a widow.
* * *
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One day in January, Mike approached me. “Sara,” he said, waiting to make sure that I had looked up at him. “The doctor said I shouldn’t die at home, because we have small children here.” We had vowed to be honest in our conversations about death, and we had talked about where Mike should be when he died. Those weren’t easy conversations, and I usually ended up in tears, but I had learned a lot from the way my father had wanted to die. I had been given a trial run at holding vigils; now I saw death the way I saw birth. Nobody’s ashamed of talking about how they want to bring their children into the world, and I don’t think anybody should be ashamed to talk about how they want to leave it. Mike and I had long agreed that, like my father, he should die in his own home—in our pretty yellow Victorian, with the boys and me. Now his doctor was trying to sow seeds of doubt in him. It felt as though we were about to start our death conversations all over.
“What?” I said. I could feel a white-hot anger coming to the surface. “What kind of lesson would that teach our children? That we dump sick people at the hospital to die? That’s ridiculous. The doctor should know better.”
Mike was silent. I knew he agreed with me. I started to cry; it was all so awful. I just wanted Mike to be home with us. I wanted to try to make him dinner and for him to sit up with the boys and for the last days of his life to be free from the buzzing of fluorescent lights and the hallway chatter of nurses. “We are going to teach Max and Alex that we will love you and take care of you until the day you die,” I said. That was the last we spoke of where. All we had left to know was when.
Mike started a third round of chemo. I told him that he shouldn’t, but he wanted to take any chance to survive. No part of him wanted to die. The chemo had no history of success, and the third round would be an attacking, experimental treatment that would kill Mike to give him a few more weeks of life. How dare Dr. D. do this to Mike? I protested, desperate to stop it. Even if it worked, what sort of life would Mike be leading? If he was going to die, I wanted him to have one last chance to feel strong, not defeated. I wanted us to spend time outside, the way we always had, or at least the way we had at the start of our lives together. The snow kept falling that winter, in feet rather than inches, and I wanted to go cross-country skiing with my bear of a husband, the sound of our poles finding the same familiar rhythms that our paddles once did. I wanted our last hours together to be like our first. The chemo would make that impossible. But Mike wanted to try. He always wanted to try.
That third round of chemo nearly finished him. He had to stop the treatment. Dr. D. had compared Mike’s strength and determination to that of Marines and war veterans, but the pain was too much even for him, and it drained most of what was left of his spirit. I was so angry. There were nights when I thought about Mike’s suffering and feared I might go blind with rage.
The snow continued to fall, January into February, February into March. If Mike wanted to do something remotely active, he knew that he’d have to spend the next however many hours laid out. He budgeted his energy, deciding whether something was “worth it.” He had always wanted to go to the Galapagos Islands, the last in-reach item on his own bucket list. He saved up his reserves, and then he took a two-week trip with the help of his best friend, Pete. Not long after Mike came home, we held Alex’s sixth birthday party at a gymnastics center. I have a picture of them playing together, tossing foam blocks at each other for five or ten minutes. Mike had to spend the next twenty-four hours in bed. It was worth it.
It seemed to rain every day when that spring finally arrived. What had turned into a record snowfall had melted, but the ground was still frozen, and the melt and the rain had nowhere to go. Concord locals called it a 100-year flood, the rivers overflowing their banks, closing roads and turning the low-lying parts of town into ponds. It was hard not to see the rising waters as a metaphor: We were powerless to stop what was coming. Mike had been relieved of the last of his denial. In the first week of May, he took one last trip wit
h his canoe club to New Hampshire, but he came home spooked. He shouldn’t have been driving. He had a hard time concentrating. He had always been so focused, but now a blurring fog had begun its descent.
There were still flashes of our dark humor. We continued to wonder whether he’d bury Minnie May in the hole that he’d dug in the yard or whether Minnie May would bury him. They were locked in a morbid race. I made a joke that at least I’d be able to have more kids after he died. “Sara,” he said, “you need a baby like you need a hole in your head.” I burst out laughing—my desire to have more children never really faded, but the chaos of our reality made Mike’s assessment hard to deny. In a moment of sincerity, I told Mike that I’d wear only black after he died, the way Queen Victoria did after she lost Albert. Mike pointed out that it wasn’t much of a pledge. I only wore black anyway.
* * *
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I made up a new law: “The Law of the Conservation of Happiness.” Conservation laws are fundamental to physics. The conservation of mass. The conservation of energy. The conservation of angular momentum. It’s rare that something truly disappears. It might go missing, but it’s still out there somewhere, in some new and hidden form. Whenever anyone asked me about Mike, I would turn away from the trauma. “You really need to savor every minute,” I would say. “Life is short.” Sometimes I said these things to a mirror.
I was still working hard, mostly on ASTERIA and biosignature gases. I was constantly torn in two, always some form of distracted. I checked in with Mike a few times each day—something I’d rarely done before he got sick—and came home early as often as I could. I was lucky to have a great group of graduate students and postdocs, and I leaned on them and their less complicated lives. I set one to work on ASTERIA’s optics, another on precision pointing, a third on communications. Others continued to work on exoplanet atmospheres. I told them I wouldn’t be around as much as I might have been otherwise. I stood outside in the cold with an engineering student and told him that my husband was dying. He said what people usually said: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I heard those words differently than I once had. I took them as a genuine offer.
I resolved to build new bridges. Christine was in the house in the mornings, and Diana came after school, and I tried to treat them more like company than help. Jessica still came to see Max and Alex on weekends, too, sometimes taking them to her house for a visit. They always came back excited about the adventures they’d had, visiting a home without shadows. I wondered whether she might take a trip with the boys and me. I felt strange asking—it was a big leap to go from hanging out at the house to boarding a plane together for a family vacation—but she said yes. And so, while Pete visited Mike, the rest of us—Jessica, Max, Alex, and I—flew to Bermuda for a few days in the sun and on the sand. It felt like the start of building something new, the first glimpse of what our lives might look like afterward.
I was going to turn forty that summer. Mindful of the Law of Conservation of Happiness, I decided to host a one-day symposium in May: “The Next Forty Years of Exoplanets.” A lot of scientists have a similar gathering at the end of their career, but why wait? It might have seemed a little self-involved, but I needed reasons to hope. I needed to think about the future and feel something other than dread. For a mission statement, I wrote: We want to show our children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews a dark sky, point to a star visible with the naked eye, and tell them that star has a planet like Earth. We will make this possible in the next forty years. I wasn’t the sort of person to host a party, but making it about the future of space exploration rather than about me made it more palatable. Plus, I thought people would be more inclined to come.
I sent invitations to a select group of colleagues. One by one, they accepted. Each RSVP was a burst of good feeling. Natalie Batalha from Kepler. Matt Mountain, then the director of Hubble. Lisa Kaltenegger, now the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell. Dimitar Sasselov, my former adviser from Harvard. John Grunsfeld, a retired astronaut. Drake Deming from NASA.
Geoff Marcy—the codiscoverer of seventy of the first hundred exoplanets—was one of the star attractions. I had asked our speakers to be provocative, and he took my request seriously. (I was appalled when he was later accused of sexually harassing graduate students and resigned from his position at UC Berkeley.) At the symposium, he climbed onto the stage and railed at the lack of investment in our imagination. “I’m unhappy about the last ten years, and the next ten years,” he said. Despite the early success of Kepler—by then it had found more than a thousand candidate planets, waiting to be confirmed—the cancellation of the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, back when I was at Carnegie, had demoralized all of us hoping to find an interplanetary twin. He declaimed against the lack of cohesion within our community, the infighting among astrophysicists that had so often stalled our progress. It was hard to move forward when we couldn’t agree how to move forward.
Members of the audience jumped to their feet and started raising their voices back at him. At first, I watched with alarm: The last thing I needed to hear was another unkind truth. But over the course of the day, as speaker after speaker ministered with such passion, yearning toward discovery the way climbers talk about conquering mountains, I experienced a buoyancy so long-forgotten that it felt new.
Afterward, we gathered together on the roof of MIT’s Green Building and made a champagne toast to each other. It was a beautiful early-summer evening, the spectacular Boston skyline just flickering to life in the twilight. The sky and the Charles River were the same shade of blue. For the first moment in what seemed like forever, I felt as though there was plenty of time.
* * *
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I’d almost missed my own party, because Mike had been in the emergency room not long before. He was in cancer’s final stages. He was in crushing pain, and I didn’t know how to help him. We learned that he was eligible for home hospice. We were assigned Jerry, an older male nurse and one of my life’s true saints. A hospital-style bed was delivered, and together we made Mike comfortable in the guest room upstairs.
I told the boys the absolute truth about their dad. They needed to know, but they hadn’t needed to know until they needed to know. Every unburdened day I’d given them felt like a tiny victory, but it was time. We were on a train, going to spend the day at the zoo in Rhode Island. We were seated by ourselves in a little booth, a table the only thing between us. My heart was pounding, but I tried to look calm. I measured my breathing. I had been practicing this speech for months.
“Max, Alex,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”
I took a pause. They were listening.
“Well, it’s not good news. Someone in our family is really sick. The medicine isn’t working.”
Another pause. I was looking into two sets of the widest eyes.
“I’m sorry I have to tell you about this.”
Now the longest pause.
“Your dad isn’t going to make it. He is going to die.”
Alex almost screamed. “WHAT?” he said. “I thought you were talking about Minnie May!”
I got up and gave each a big hug and held their hands.
“I already knew,” Max said.
We sat quietly for a long time. Nobody cried, but it felt like we were riding in a funeral procession. The train car was almost empty. The air was summer heavy. We rocked and lurched with every bump in the track, on our way to the zoo, practicing being a family of three.
* * *
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Over those last few weeks, Mike got more and more confused. Sometimes he made sense. Sometimes he didn’t. He had run the snack committee at the boys’ school, and now he tried to work on the spreadsheet for parental assignments. He’d forgotten that he’d already handed the job off to somebody else, and school was over. Another night he woke up and went downstairs. I followed him in
to the kitchen. He grabbed a bunch of knives by their blades, as if to reorganize a kitchen drawer, and then he tried to cut something with one of their handles. He poured beer into the coffee maker. I was in a full panic, pleading with him to stop, when he finally stood still and announced: “I have no idea how to get back upstairs.”
Jerry had told me about something called “terminal delirium.” The brain starts to follow the body’s lead toward failure. Jerry had seen it countless times. He told me that Mike would soon complain about strange things, like his feet being cold. Mike would likely seem completely lost until the moment before death took him. Then he would go crystal clear.
I didn’t want the boys to see Mike that way. “Do you remember what we did for Molly?” I asked them near the end. “Do you remember how we took such good care of her and then we said goodbye? It’s time to say goodbye.” Alex covered his ears with his hands and ran out of the room whenever I tried to talk to him about Mike, but Max was ready.
He and I crept together into Mike’s room. Mike summoned the last of his strength and sat up in his bed. He gave Max the biggest hug. “How was school today?” he asked. He had forgotten again that it was summer. He might not even have known. Max looked at Mike, and Mike looked at Max. It was so primal, it reminded me of the day Max was born, when father and son had first stared at each other with the same blue eyes. Now they looked at each other again, both smiling. They gave each other another hug. No tears. I’m not sure either of them knew that it really was goodbye.
Mike and I said our own goodbyes so many times. One time I was heading downstairs when he grabbed my arm. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. The weight of his confession made my lungs empty. Another time, before he was confined to his bed, he asked me to sit down. He had something important to say. It took him a little while to form the words. I was silent, waiting for him to find his courage. “Sara,” he said finally. “Sara, I know you will get married again.” Mike seemed to want to say more, but he couldn’t get another sentence out. The way you feel a change in the wind, I sensed that he wanted to give me permission to move on. I was floored, not least because new love was the farthest possible thing from my mind. I told Mike that even if I’d somehow known the outcome of our lives together, “I would want to live these years all over again.” I would go canoeing with him on the Humber River, and I would go back to his place to warm up.
