A Cairn for Space
On taking my grief to the planetarium
TW: Grief, Loss
In her poem Antidotes to Fear of Death, astronomer Rebecca Elson says “Sometimes as an antidote / to fear of death, / I eat the stars.”
When grief overwhelms me, I go to the planetarium and dine.
It started by accident, shortly after the death of my father. I took my then-5 year old son to the local science museum, one of our favorite places to visit together.
My son’s obsession with the planetarium mirrors my own in my youth. At his age I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. By middle school, after attending an assembly where the guest speaker detailed scientists’ goal to one day colonize the moon, decisions about my adult living situation were firmly set in place. By high school, I was strapping on my denim overalls, unstrapping one strap (if you know you know) and pulling on my doc martens to watch laser shows at the planetarium timed to the music of my very favorite grunge bands.
Ah, ‘twas the 90s.
Sharing my love of space with my son is one of my life’s many treasures. Sitting in the dark, just before the show started, I felt like I was a kid again—sitting with my best friend, awaiting a 3D journey through the unknown.
The show was Dark Universe, a film about “the breakthroughs that have led astronomers to confront two great cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy” — both being all the matter we cannot (yet) detect and have yet to make sense of in space.
As the lights dimmed, hundreds of thousands of small dots of light appeared across the 75-foot diameter of the planetarium’s dome. The dulcet tones of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s voice filled the room, explaining that what we were looking at were thousands upon thousands of galaxies. Not just stars, but entire planetary systems.
Much to my surprise, I wept.
My father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in the summer of 2022. For the six months nestled between his diagnosis and his death, I had the bittersweet opportunity to tell my father everything I wanted him to know before he died. I told him that I loved him mightily. I told him that he was the best father I could have asked for. I told him that so much of how I showed up for my own children was rooted in how loved I felt by him as a child growing up. And over and over again I told him with urgency: when you go, I will still look for you. I will look up at the night sky as if speaking to the stars and I will ask for your guidance. I will ask for your presence. I will call out for you.
“Whether you can hear me or not,” he told me, his voice no more than a whisper in his final months, “I will always, always answer.”
The full field captured by NASA’s James Webb Telescope, the breadth of what we have been able to see into the universe, is said to amount to the size of a mere grain of sand held at arm's length. In that infinitesimal piece of the sky alone there are trillions of stars and planetary systems in billions of galaxies. To imagine that speck multiplied exponentially—which is to say, to imagine the true vastness of the universe—feels as magical as it does unfathomable.
There, in that planetarium, the small gripping hand of my awe-struck 5 year old in mine, I sat pulsing with the immediate, insistent feeling that my father was simultaneously with me and yet also infinitely everywhere else.
How could I possibly feel anything but alone in this vast universe? And yet: in spite of all of this infinite, my father and I got to be on this one planet together and we got to be loved by each other.
A year after my dad died, I took my son back to the planetarium. This time my search for comfort was intentional. We saw Spark: The Universe in Us—a film about how major celestial events, like the super novas of stars, create the elements that make up life on Earth.
“Are we really made up of stars?” my son asked me as the film ended and we filed out of the planetarium.
“Yes!” I replied. “When a star dies, all the stuff that made up that star goes on to make new things, like new stars, and new planets, and even you and me.”
How much a six year old can comprehend this, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I really do. But it doesn’t matter. I hold it close as I step back out into the world, searching for the traces of my father wherever I can find them: in the books he would have loved, in the faces of my sweet children, on a rare clear and bright night sky. And as always I will be ready—my eyes closed, my voice quiet, my heart patiently awaiting my father’s reply.
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The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
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Beautiful ♥️