The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  Jerry thought Mike had days left. Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into more than a month. One July afternoon, Jerry took me aside and spoke in whispers: “I’ve never seen anyone resist the way Mike is resisting,” he said. Mike really wanted to keep living. His fitness before he got sick was one reason; his mental toughness was another. But Jerry thought Mike was refusing to die because he was worried I wouldn’t be able to manage. “You have to stop asking Mike how to do things around the house,” Jerry said. I had been barraging him with endless questions about how to do his chores. Now I did my best to stop, but then I realized that I didn’t know how to get his canoe rack off his car. I asked Mike, knowing that it was a challenge even for him, and maybe there was a special wrench somewhere…

  “It’s too complicated to explain,” Mike said. He fell back to sleep.

  Like my father before him, Mike hung on. He was confined to his bed and rarely awake, but his heart still beat. I watched him for signs of pain and dropped liquid morphine inside his cheek several times a day. I worried constantly about his suffering. We wouldn’t let an animal linger that way.

  It was almost my birthday. Mike and I didn’t usually acknowledge each other’s birthdays, but I saw an opportunity. I went upstairs. Mike was sleeping. I lay down in bed beside him, waiting for him to wake. Eventually he stirred.

  “I’m turning forty soon,” I said. “The big four-oh.”

  “You know I’m not very good at remembering those things,” he said. He said it so sweetly.

  I shook my head. I was trying my hardest not to cry. I wasn’t going to be okay when he died, but I wanted him to believe that I would be.

  “Mike, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. We have been so lucky to have such a great life together. But I’m going to be okay. The boys are going to be okay.”

  Mike stayed quiet.

  “Mike,” I said. “For my birthday, as your last present to me, I need you to let go.”

  I turned forty. Two days later, Mike died in his hospital bed in our home, with me by his side. There wasn’t a single tube to remove. It was the first time I’d helped build something beautiful by putting down my tools, and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder. Mike left the world the way he had entered it. That was my gift to him.

  His last breath was his own.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Widow for One Month

  There have been lessons I have chosen not to teach. Not all knowledge is power; not all things are worth knowing. Max and Alex never saw Mike’s body. They did not see him leave the house.

  It was late when Mike died. Max and Alex hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, but they knew he was still upstairs in his bed. I wanted to shelter them from Mike’s actual death, because I didn’t want them to remember their father as a corpse. Mike’s mother and his brother, Dan, were in Concord for the end of his life, and now I asked Dan to take the boys to the park. They had never been to the park in the dark. They had the place to themselves, and I think they felt a little bigger somehow, like they had been let in on a secret.

  I kept my own secrets. I called the funeral directors, who arrived in their hearse wearing suits and ties. I had called them too early, it turned out. Before they could take him away, we had to wait for a hospice nurse to arrive to pronounce Mike dead. After she did, the funeral directors put Mike in a special body bag that’s designed to slide down stairs. They carried him out of the house, onto the front porch, down the front steps, and into the hearse. They moved slowly, carefully. They offered no apologies, but they started the car as though trying to will the engine to be quieter than it was.

  I had already ordered the box that would contain Mike’s ashes. Dave, one of the funeral directors, had brought out some samples—and could tell that I didn’t like any of them. Some were too plain and simple, almost slapped together. Others were too fancy, elaborate assemblies of turned mahogany. Dave asked me to tell him more about Mike. “He has simple tastes,” I said. “I have simple tastes, too, but not as simple.” I didn’t really know; I had never given a lot of thought to the box that would hold my husband. I knew there was one right box, the perfect box, but I couldn’t find the words to describe it. Not too cheap, but not too dramatic. Elegant but not precious.

  “Leave it to me,” Dave said.

  Now I sat in my empty house and wondered what Dave had built. What box was sitting over there at the funeral home, waiting for what would be left of Mike?

  The boys were still playing at the park. Dan didn’t have a cellphone, so there was no way for me to let him know that the job was done. He had to stay out until he decided enough time must have passed. When they all finally came back, the boys were like fireflies. I tucked them into bed and could see their light through the sheets. I decided to wait until the next morning to tell them that Mike was gone, giving them a good night’s sleep before they received their life-changing news. For tonight, they could believe that Uncle Dan had decided it was a perfect time to go to the park, and that their father was still upstairs, in the deepest of sleeps, rather than bound for a box I couldn’t picture.

  * * *

  ●

  The neighbors knew Mike had died because the street in front of our house grew quiet. Mike’s mother and brother left, and Jerry didn’t need to come by anymore. Neither did the nurse’s aide I had hired, or the attendant who had bathed Mike. The medical equipment company picked up Mike’s bed. I got rid of the last of his pills and the rest of the apparatus from our war against cancer. There was a feeling of emptiness in the house, like how I imagine a battlefield must feel after the shelling has stopped. Part of me couldn’t believe the damage that had been done. I almost couldn’t take account of the loss. Another part of me felt liberated by the end of the fight. It was over, and I was still here.

  Jessica took the boys to her family’s house. I wanted them to be around her parents and sisters—a full, loving home—for a couple of days. When they came back they were never more than an arm’s length away. They had been confused by the language of death: “Why do people keep saying we lost him? He’s not lost. He’s dead. Why do people say they’re sorry? It’s not their fault.” They needed answers to hard questions. They even followed me to the third-floor bathroom in unspoken need. “Um, guys,” I said. “I kind of have to use the toilet.” But I needed to be close to them, too. Their room had bunk beds and another twin bed. Max slept in the twin, Alex slept in the bottom bunk, and I took over the top. There were five empty bedrooms in the house, but the three of us slept in one room, as though we were camping indoors.

  I hadn’t always spent enough time with my boys. As much as I loved Max and Alex, the same pushes and pulls that could keep me away from Mike also kept me away from them. Losing Mike made me want to close whatever distance had grown between us. I liked that I didn’t think very much about anything else when I was with them. Young children especially can seem selfish, or at least self-interested. Their concerns don’t go much beyond the immediate. That almost forces you to think on their terms—they demand that you keep them in view. Max was thoughtful, serene, with an incisive sense of humor. Alex was more attention-grabbing, often on the verge of saying or doing something outlandish. In their own ways they had both always been presences in a room.

  After the boys came home from camp one perfect summer’s afternoon, I asked Max if he wanted to play tennis, our principal shared interest. Alex could spend time with Diana. We didn’t have to be home anymore, and I hoped that Max wanted what I wanted: to get outside, to luxuriate in our freedom from the machinations of sickness. I was excited when he agreed to hit the ball around. We got our things and began walking to the courts. We chatted away—Max wasn’t usually so chatty—talking about nothing in particular, but talking to each other, and that was good. Max went silent for a little bit. It was such a beautiful day. Not too hot, not too cold. The Goldilocks zone.

  “You know, M
om,” Max said. “It’s better to have a dad who is dead than a dad who is sick.”

  Hearing your eight-year-old say something like that stops you. It’s like hearing them swear for the first time: You’re shocked into an awareness that they’ve been taking in more of the world than you knew. I wanted to ask Max why he felt that way. Before I did, I realized that I already knew the answer. I understood what he was trying to say. By a boy’s measure, he had lost Mike a long time ago. He had also lost me, especially near the end. Now Mike was gone, but I was back. For Max, that seemed like a fair trade. One was better than none.

  I felt almost guilty for sharing Max’s feeling—for savoring the strange relief that came with the end of anxiety, of uncertainty. I have always been a clear and focused thinker, but my thinking was never as clear and focused as it was in the weeks and months after Mike died. I don’t know why. Grief had a way of crystallizing things, of pushing out every stupid thought about everything that didn’t matter. When I went into my office that summer, the rest of the world disappeared even more completely than it normally did. There was just me and my work and an unbroken string of revelations.

  One of my students was studying mini-Neptunes, planets smaller than Neptune but larger than Earth. We don’t have any counterpart in our solar system, but Kepler was finding that they were the most common kind of planet in the galaxy. That drove home our need to think beyond our own experience in our search for other life. Another student worked to determine not just how we might calculate the composition of giant exoplanet atmospheres, but also how to use data from Hubble or Spitzer to measure in what quantities those gases exist. How much sodium? How much water vapor? It wasn’t easy, but together we found a way, using the atmospheres in our solar system as stepping-stones and forming the foundation of what would be called “exoplanet atmosphere retrieval.” It was a strangely gorgeous time of thinking. Mike’s death had somehow made even the stars more luminous.

  And yet: Spend more time with family. That was the answer everyone had given when I’d asked what they would do with one more year to live. My work was my passion, but I had never found the necessary gaps between my responsibilities to balance the other side of the equation. I hadn’t been able to keep my promise to Mike. I would keep it with my sons.

  * * *

  ●

  I wrote emails to friends and colleagues. The subject line was The End of a Long Journey. To some, I extended invitations to Mike’s memorial service. To others, I passed along my eulogy or wrote more personal notes. To a rare few, I made a request. I wrote one of those special notes to Riccardo, an MIT alumnus and someone I had gravitated toward after the death of my father. I was drawn more and more to mentors who talked to me the way my father had, the way John Bahcall had, with no motive beyond their wanting the best for me, for my life to be good—which is to say, as though I were their daughter. I am gradually turning my attention to new beginnings, and I am really hoping you will play some part in this. The replies poured in, and I couldn’t bring myself to read many of them, but I made sure to read Riccardo’s. I and all your friends continue to be alongside you, he wrote, for the rest of your life.

  I wanted to teach my kids that not only does life go on: It can still be an adventure. There were still so many unknown places to go, so many unseen things to see. I wanted us to go to Egypt and visit the Great Pyramids. Unfortunately, the new reality of my being a working single mother, along with the tumult of the Arab Spring, meant that Egypt wasn’t in the cards. We could only manage a couple of days in New Hampshire.

  We stayed at the Indian Head Resort, named for the face of the Native American that people claim to see in the contours of a nearby mountain. The boys loved it there. There were pools, an arcade, and endless hiking trails winding through the trees. I felt relief at this vacation from the sadness of home. But I looked worn, close to strung out, and other guests stared at me.

  It didn’t help when I had a meltdown in the resort restaurant. I’d gone to make a dinner reservation, and I approached a young woman who stood behind a book of what I assumed were names and times. “I’d like to make a reservation for six o’clock,” I said. She shook her head and said they didn’t take reservations; it was first come, first served. The boys had gone down to the arcade, and I was anxious to join them. “That makes no sense,” I said. I imagined us showing up and having to wait, hungry and tired. “Why don’t you take reservations?” My desire to return to a scheduled life ran hard against my current inability to function in polite society. I had lost whatever limited talents I had for pretending that I belonged, and I became unglued. That poor woman looked terrified of me. She called for the manager, who ended up looking nearly as scared.

  It was still a getaway, and I tried not to feel guilty for reveling in our strange feeling of release. The boys seemed equally weightless. The hikes we took reminded Alex of his pledge to climb Mount Washington. Earlier that spring, we had done some hard hikes in the White Mountains, encouraged and accompanied by Brice, a Swiss postdoc on my team at MIT; he’d carried Alex over the most challenging downhill sections of the trail. Now, Alex and I began stealing days here and there to train, using nearby Mount Monadnock and the Wapack Range for practice runs. By August, nearly a year after we’d driven up the one side of Mount Washington with Mike, we were ready to climb the other side, just the two of us.

  We made the three-hour drive the day before our planned hike and checked into a nearby hotel. The pool was filled with perfect families, splashing in the water: fathers, mothers, and their children, playing together with an abandon that my boys and I would never know again. I felt another meltdown coming, but I didn’t want Alex to witness one up close—not there, not then. I fought to keep my anger from spilling over. I hate you, I remember thinking about those splashing families. I hate you and your happiness. They kept splashing away.

  Luckily I had Alex and a summit to attempt. We woke up early the next day and wolfed down stacks of pancakes. Then we drove to the base of the mountain. The sky was cloudless. The sun was high. We bathed in infrared.

  We decided to go up the shortest, steepest path, four miles long with a nearly 4,000-foot gain to the summit. It followed a creek. Alex was practically running from the start—he hadn’t forgotten his pledge to set a world record, either. I almost couldn’t keep up. We passed hiker after hiker, bolting our way up the slope. Alex was acting as though he was on the biggest adventure of his life, which he was. After a couple of hours, we reached a hut where climbers could stay overnight if they needed to break up their journey. We stayed for an hour or so, just to catch our breath and enjoy some hot chocolate. Alex was still only six years old, and his little legs must have been burning. But we kept going, hiking for another hour past the treeline, onto the rocky shoulders of the mountain. The view was magnificent. We could see a hundred miles, and soon the summit was within reach. Alex stopped not far from it and looked out at the country that we had won.

  “Live your dreams, face your fears, and pay attention to your surroundings,” he said.

  To this day, I have no idea where he got that from. And he has no idea what he did for me. Mike’s death was so many terrible things, but in the most unexpected way, watching him go had made me want to live the biggest, best life I could. I told Mike as much before he died: I told him his death would inspire me, that in his name and the pain of his loss I would never waste a single day. I would fight to do amazing things. I would be even more determined to find another Earth, my hope more like a mission, and I would help my boys find the same sense of purpose.

  Now here were Alex and I, nearly at the top of a mountain. We practically ran the rest of the way. He didn’t set a world record, but I was proud of him, and I was proud of myself. Maybe we weren’t a perfect family anymore. We were still a family, and we could still make happy memories. We took a train down the mountain and drove back to Concord. That night I slept in the top bunk with the boys,
more deeply than I had slept in years.

  * * *

  ●

  Jessica had transferred to a school closer to home, and she agreed to move in with Max and Alex and me. I needed her help with the house and the boys, but I also needed to fill the adult-size hole that Mike had left behind. She wouldn’t pay rent; I wanted our home to feel like her home. I set about making her a suite on the second floor. She chose lavender for her bedroom color, and I hired contractors to convert the laundry room into a bathroom that would be just for her. A fresh start.

  The contractors brought in a Dumpster, and it sat in the driveway during the demolition. For some reason seeing it sparked another meltdown. These were the strangest episodes, coming almost always without warning. Sometimes I was alone when I became overwhelmed with emotion; sometimes I had an audience of horrified faces around me. The only commonality was my powerlessness to stop them. My voice would rise into shouting, screams that came out of me like steam until my hair clung to my tear-damp face.

  This time I was mad at Mike. Not long before he died, we had spoken about which of us had been given the worse end of a horrible deal. The one who gets sick and faces an early death? Or the one who endures the trauma of watching someone she loves suffer and die and then is left to pick up the pieces? I didn’t know the answer, but suddenly it felt as though Mike had abandoned the boys and me, as though he had decided that death was preferable to living the rest of his life with us. I wasn’t being rational or reasonable. Mike didn’t choose to go. He had fought so hard to stay. But now he was gone, and my grief surfaced in another rage.