The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  One of the Widows who had lost her husband to cancer had found the strength to go through more of his things. We agreed that the materials of a lost life could be hard to handle. It’s incalculable, the heartache that can come from shoes at the door or a toothbrush by the sink or a hole in the backyard. Some of the Widows kept everything. Some threw everything away. I fell somewhere in between. I had filled that Dumpster, but a few of Mike’s things were impossible for me to discard. His boats were the hardest, logistically and emotionally. He had given one away to a friend before he died, and I had tossed the broken ones. But then there were the Old Town Tripper, and my Dagger Rival, and the Royalite Swift Yukon that Mike had outfitted with four seats, a boat fit for a family. I didn’t have the strength to look at them, let alone part with them.

  This Widow had sat down at her husband’s desk and begun sorting through the bottomless piles of papers, trying to answer the same question we all had to tackle over and over: What’s still important, and what doesn’t matter anymore? In between the tax documents and insurance claims, she had uncovered four plane tickets to Paris. It took her a minute or two to realize what she had found.

  Her husband had bought them the day before he had started his chemotherapy, placing an optimistic bet against cancer. It had been a very private wager. He hadn’t whispered anything about his plans to anybody. The plane had taken off with four empty seats the day after he had died. Those four unused plane tickets represented all the hope that was now lost, all the adventures that would never be had.

  That’s where we Widows found ourselves in our weakest moments: We were each trying to look forward, but too often we were given reason to believe that the best of our life was behind us.

  The children were still off playing, and we could hear their distant laughter. They were just far enough away. They didn’t see that Paris was in full flood.

  * * *

  ●

  A lot of widows move out of the house they once shared with their spouse; there are too many fingerprints, too many echoes in the halls. I had thought about it and decided to stay. I liked our pretty yellow house, and the boys had experienced enough change. I wanted them to have what I had only dreamed of as a child: one roof. The Widows were supportive of my choice, but they told me that I couldn’t think of the house as Mike’s and mine anymore. I couldn’t think of it as ours; otherwise I would never be free of my sadness, as though I’d invited an emotional vampire through the front door. I had to make a clean psychic break. I had to make it mine. I had started making that transition almost accidentally, on the day I filled the Dumpster. I’d continued the process when I had Jessica’s room painted lavender. But it was a big house. There was still so much work to do.

  I had to make my bedroom my own. I decided to stay in the rainbow room across the hall from the boys. I wanted to be able to hear them if they woke up, and I didn’t want to return to the bedroom that Mike and I had shared. I was scared of what dreams might come to me there.

  Mike had continued appearing to me in my sleep; he was always returning from a long time away, another trip, another coma. He always arrived on the steps of the house, on the outside looking in. In the shock of his arrival, I struggled to collect my thoughts and find something to say, and before I could say much, he always disappeared. Sometimes the dreams were so vivid that after I woke up, I had to scan through my memories like files in a cabinet, remembering that I did watch him die.

  I hired a decorator to take the hard but necessary decisions out of my hands. I found Bob. My tastes were becoming more feminine in the absence of Mike, and Bob seemed to understand what I needed. He stood in the room and announced that he wanted to see it painted a deep antique pink. I had a piece of pine furniture that I wanted to keep; he would find a four-poster bed to match. He would also find a loveseat, cream-colored and frilly, and he already knew which polished lamps he would bring in to complete the space. It would be indisputably mine, a palace fit for a princess. I smiled at him and nodded: Let’s do it.

  Not long after, the painters arrived with their drop cloths and rollers. I showed them into the room, empty now except for Max’s yellow walls and Mike’s rainbow. I stood and watched while the painters pried open the cans and poured the thick pink paint into their trays. Their rollers soon ran over the walls with quick, practiced strokes. It had taken Mike hours to paint his rainbow. Now it vanished in seconds.

  The tears ran down my face in steady streams. I knew, intellectually, that the Widows were right. I needed to make forward progress. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life drowning in grief. I had to kick my way back to shore. But when you lose someone, you don’t lose them all at once, and their dying doesn’t stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals.

  * * *

  ●

  The Widows told me that I wouldn’t hold the last funeral until I had starting dating again. Near the one-year anniversary of Mike’s death, Melissa came over to my house. She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again. Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete. I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing. I needed to see what else was out there.

  I knew what was out there. Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of stars.

  Melissa shook her head. Other men, she said. Lots of other men. “Now,” she said, in a whisper that wasn’t much louder than the hum of the refrigerator. “Even though you can’t get pregnant anymore, you can still get STDs. You’ll need to take precautions.”

  I just about fell over. I have no idea how old Melissa thought I was, but I was only forty. “Melissa, I can still get pregnant!” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say much more. I wasn’t a teenager. I didn’t need lessons in the dangers of unsafe sex. I didn’t need to think about sex at all. How would I even find a man to go out with me? Who would want to date a widow prone to public displays of rage and crying fits in libraries and grocery stores? Just the idea of getting to know someone new, and letting them get to know me, was repulsive. I could barely look after myself and my boys. Melissa might as well have told me to find a unicorn, or an alien.

  “You’re not looking for perfection,” Melissa said. “You’re not looking for a husband. You’re looking for some guy to take you out for dinner and then to bed.”

  I told Melissa how hard I had cried when the painters had covered up Mike’s rainbow. How was I going to react to a new set of lips?

  “That’s exactly why you need to start dating,” she said. I had to reclaim my heart the way I was reclaiming my house.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Melissa said. “It never works out with the first guy.”

  You’re right about that, I thought. The first guy had died.

  * * *

  ●

  On good days I could see what I had, not what I had lost. Max and Alex were my principal vessels of optimism, and I continued to keep them close, like talismans to ward off evil, to shield me from my next wave of grief. I still had overwhelming anxieties about my travels, but not traveling wasn’t really an option for me. I had to go to conferences and meetings. The stars won’t come to us, and rockets don’t launch from Massachusetts. Jessica or Diana could handle overnights, but anything longer asked too much of everyone, including me. The only solution remained taking Max and Alex with me.

  In July 2012, I was speaking at two separate conferences in Europe, and I decided to use them to justify an epic three-week journey for us. The boys and I took along several of our usual coterie: Jessica and a rotating gaggle of students and postdocs, including Mary Knapp and Leslie Rogers, a former grad student who focused on the composition of mini-Neptunes. Sometimes I wondered whether I was making exc
uses to travel with so much company—before Mike’s death, I didn’t have any friends; after his death, I collected people the way a black hole swallows up any star that gets near it. Maybe it was some subconscious holdover from my childhood, from the ever-changing cast of babysitters that my father employed, or those nights when three of us slept together in a room at my mother’s house. Maybe it was a natural aftereffect of the loss of someone who had once been so close. Whatever the reason, I liked being with people I could call friends. My students often presented their own work at the conferences, and I hoped that they got their share out of the experience. But mostly those trips were for me. I needed the world to feel smaller and its spaces less empty.

  We started out in London. Jessica got terribly lost one afternoon because she didn’t know how to pronounce “Leicester Square,” where we were crashing in tired heaps at a colleague’s apartment. Then we went to Paris for a couple of days. I stared at The Thinker by Rodin; the boys preferred playing with the pigeons outside the Louvre. We needed to make four different train transfers to reach Heidelberg, Germany, for one of the conferences. Given the size of our pack—there were seven of us just then—it felt like a more complicated exercise than a rocket launch.

  In Switzerland, we were hosted by postdoc Brice; he was kind enough to bring us to the top of the Alps, near the windmills of Saint-Luc. The François-Xavier Bagnoud Observatory, striking with its shining silver dome, sits on the shoulder of a high mountain. The view of Earth from there is impressive enough: Rivers of green spill between rows of peaks like shark’s teeth. At that altitude, the panorama is literally breathtaking.

  Something called the Planet Path sits not far below. It’s a scale model of the solar system (old enough to include poor, demoted Pluto), with a winding dirt trail between the planets. Every meter of trail accounts for one million kilometers of space. Even given that significant reduction in scale, the walk from the surface of the sun to the far side of Pluto is six kilometers long, or a little less than four miles. Leaping across hundreds of thousands of kilometers really gives you a sense of the size of space. The Planet Path encompasses only our immediate neighborhood, and it still takes stamina to cover.

  Brice had once worked at the small observatory, sleeping each night inside its hopeful confines. There was a time when astronomers were like lighthouse keepers. They would climb up their mountains and look at the stars by themselves for months at a time. Now most small telescopes are automated, with robots programmed to find and examine certain stars on our behalf. But Brice had looked out from his mountaintop and watched stars like ships.

  He had made an important discovery. Using the Transit Technique, he had seen passages of a planet that’s known today as GJ 436 b. The signal he’d found was later confirmed by a larger Israeli telescope, but Brice was the first human to see a special place. GJ 436 b is about the size of Neptune—at the time, it was the smallest exoplanet yet discovered—and it follows an orbit that’s almost impossibly close to its star. (GJ 436 b is fourteen times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun, making its version of a year less than three days long.) It also orbits its star on a perpendicular path: a polar orbit. We now know of a few planets that climb over and fall under their stars rather than taking a more equatorial path, but GJ 436 b was something of a revelation. As though it weren’t different enough, GJ 436 b also has what appears to be a comet-like tail, an exosphere that makes it look as though its atmosphere has sprung a leak. GJ 436 b is nothing like Earth, except that it’s a planet, orbiting a star.

  There we all were, vacationing in a stunning sculpture of a place, where my postdoc and friend had found a planet so different from ours that it almost defies illustration. The Romans believed in a sky god named Jupiter. The Egyptians believed that when their kings died, their souls became stars. Brice had used an elegant assembly of glass and mirrors to see something no one had imagined. The lesson of his find is the lesson of every discovery, and standing in those same mountains, I made a promise to myself never to forget it. He had needed only to be quiet, and still, and to keep his eyes open. He had stayed in one place, but he had seen another. Through his window was a brand-new world.

  * * *

  ●

  The carefully curated list of Death Days was emailed out not long after our first gathering at Gail’s. We decided that we would be together for all of them, too. Those anniversaries were a way to mark our small victories and the passage of time. It was also crucial for us not to be alone on them. They could be a portal to suffering, to reliving our losses. They could take us back as easily as they could help us move forward. We penciled seven more gatherings onto our calendars.

  On July 23, we gathered to mark the date of Mike’s death. I couldn’t believe it was a year since he had left. I couldn’t believe that it had been only a year.

  It was a sweet summer evening. Melissa took us all outside, where the kids squeezed together on the steps on my tiny backyard porch, and she made a little speech. She was speaking to Max, Alex, and me, but she was also speaking to the group. “You all know why we’re here,” she said. The kids knew what was coming; they fidgeted in discomfort, pretending the problem was the heat. “We want to help Max and Alex mark their first year without their dad. And although none of your dads is here anymore, we hope—we know—that they will still be guiding lights in all of your lives.”

  We had all started sniffling in the deepening dusk. Melissa wasn’t finished.

  “So we’re all going to light sparklers!” she said.

  She had brought forty sparklers for each child—an enormous number. (She had asked another Widow to bring some down from her vacation in Maine, and “some” had become “hundreds.”) The kids were kids again. They raced up and down the driveway, lighting the wands two at a time. They had fistfuls of light, and whenever theirs went out, they lit up new sparklers off one another’s still-burning flames. The air became thick with the unmistakable smell of sulfur, and a cloud of smoke filled the driveway and drifted down the street. Someone worried aloud that the fire department might show up. Someone else hoped they might; some beefy fireman eye candy would be a nice way to wrap up the evening.

  That’s how it always went, still. Up and down, backward and forward. There is nothing remotely linear about recovery. All of the Widows had setbacks, low moments when it felt as though we’d lost all the progress we had made. They could still come at the most unexpected times. One day I texted one of the Widows that I was actually feeling good for a change. “Just wait till the rain comes,” she wrote back. “You’ll feel terrible again.” Sometimes they came at obvious times. Chris went on a date with a man who looked a little too much like her lost husband. She had to cough and sneeze and hide behind the menu to cover up her perpetually brimming eyes. She was still the only Widow who had joined after me, and I tried to pay forward the advice I’d received from the others. I told her that it was too soon for her to date; she’d know she was finally ready when she found men to be good-looking again. She’d reacted angrily—“I am ready, Sara,” she said—but I knew the difference between wanting to feel something and actually feeling it. I had so many days when I woke up believing I had nearly made it, but there was a black spot still in me, and it took only the slightest knock or careless moment for it to become an awful, spreading stain.

  I needed to find the boys a new school. Their Montessori school’s enrollment was declining and its debt climbing, and it became painfully clear that it was about to go under. I followed Mike’s directions in the Guide to Life on Earth, and arranged for an admissions interview at the school he had recommended. I hated that feeling of being in between stations, the uncertainty of one of those rare things that should be certain. You should know where your children go to school. I so badly needed things to work out.

  Thankfully, the kids liked the look of the new school, and it was ready to welcome them with open arms. Our transition would be manageable aft
er all. I had solved a major problem in our collective lives, and I had solved it mostly on my own. I had a physical response to the resolution. I stood up a little straighter. My eyes felt clearer. I took the boys back to their current school to finish that day’s classes. It was sunny and warm that afternoon, and the world seemed to me to be bursting with green.

  I don’t usually like driving, but after I dropped off the boys, I really lost myself on the road. I rolled down my windows and turned up the radio. There was no traffic. My hair blew back, and for the first time in what seemed like years, I felt a genuine smile surface. I don’t know how to explain that sensation, but my smile felt almost like a crack in my face, like muscles coming out of atrophy: a peel of thunder after a long drought, the first calm morning after a terrible storm.

  I put my foot down. There is a road heading into Concord that widens before crossing over the river. I imagined it was a runway, and I was preparing for launch. I lifted out of my seat.

  That’s when I saw the flashing lights of a police car.

  I looked down at my speedometer. I was going 70.

  In a 35 mph zone.

  I pulled over. I turned off my engine and looked at myself in my rearview mirror. Every drop of good feeling drained from my body. My smile disappeared. My atrophy returned.