The stars have long enthralled me. For reasons I cannot completely fathom, those stars reach deep inside me, settle nicely in my soul and greatly comfort me.
In the beach or any open-air field that gives me an unobstructed view of the night sky, I lie on my back for hours.
I fight sleep off because hours of gazing at the heavens aren’t enough. My husband, our kids and our dogs, Jack and Lily would be off in dreamland, taking turns snoring and there I’d be, still gazing in deep awe at the glorious spectacle before me. Then when sleep overtakes me, I dream of the stars. Then something inside me nudges me awake and forces my eyes open so that I can gaze a million times more at the night sky. I am insatiable.
I feel, in equal measure, my insignificance and my significance.
The stars tell me I am mere speck of a speck of a speck to the nth power.
And yet I am made of the same material that those glorious stars are made of. The iron in my blood, the calcium in my bones, carbon that is in all of me, born from exploding galaxies and colliding stars.
I feel eternal.
I am dust but STAR dust.
The day I found out that the stars that so moved me no longer existed and hadn’t existed for millenia but that their light reached me where I stood in the here and now was the day I was blown away.
Until that moment, I had thought of time as linear–like neatly lined up tiny toy soldiers with the future marching at the front, the present right behind it and the past bringing in the rear.
My mind was blown away.
I was looking at phantom images from the past in the present moment. Like my mother crossing dimensions and smiling down on me and touching my face even though linearly, she had died when I was 6. My daughter, who is a geek, added, depending where you are situated in the Universe, you can see Earth when dinosaurs walked it. (My mind wildly extrapolated. The things I could see again! They’re gone from where I was in our solar system but at some solar system, they continue to exist!)
So for the first time I understood Einstein when he said. “People like us who believe in physics know that the only distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
In other words, time is an illusion.
So my papa died about a month ago.
I feel like I inhabit a strange, grey planet these days where I cannot find my papa.
I find myself gazing even more intensely at the heavens. And I’ve gotten a bit obsessive about the James Webb Space Telescope–that cosmic workhorse of a telescope that NASA built and was launched in space on Christmas day 2021–thus far the most powerful space telescope that the human race has ever created and that is now hurtling through space in never-before explored regions of our universe AND taking snapshots of, basically—hold your breath–the history of our universe and therefore OUR STORY–from its origin, the Big Bang to the cosmic formation of thousands upon thousands of solar systems to the evolution of our very own solar system.
The images the JSWT bounced back to earth have been nothing short of astounding, leaving humanity clutching their collective chest and gasping for air at the intensity, the majesty before them. Its grandeur terrifying some in the process
So last night, I turned on Netflix to watch the documentary on the JWST that I bookmarked so it went straight to those unspeakably magnificent images that the JWST beamed back to us on planet Earth. And once again, I looked. And looked. And held my breath as I did so.
Stephan’s Quintet that’s 290 million light years away, the Pillars of Creation (6500 light years), the Phantom Galaxy (32 million LY), the Carina Nebula (7600 LY away). Galaxies being created and dying stars breathing their last. The brilliance, the scintillating swirl of colors of gases!
I cannot help myself. I am so moved and tears come unbidden. This is our story, I tell myself. Our story.
And yet there is something else I am searching for when I squint and when I round my eyes in quick succession.
Papa.
Because I’ve been looking for him for over a month now. And I cannot find him.
Except when I close my eyes.
Except when the silence encloses me.
Except when I am not in the presence of humans.
So I close my door and I ask that no one talk to me.
But I have to open my eyes again. And he is gone again.
I stare at the JSWT snapshots of our evolving Universe and I search the collapsing stars and colliding galaxies and ask, “Papa are you there?”
Are you in that scintilla atop the Horsehead nebula? Are you joyously circling the star studded Westerlund while happily singing your offkey made up songs because you were of joyous spirit?
Might there be a wrinkle in time where I can meet you and once again hug you completely then ask you who your favorite daughter is and to hear you say once again, “Lorraine Marie.” And to have you pat my head again as you say this?
“People like us who believe in physics know that the only distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
I want to learn how to lift the veil of this stubbornly persistent illusion and see that there is no need to be as I am now– grief stricken– because really and truly, you are with me like the stars that have long captivated and guided me have been with me.
Papa where are you?
I am a collapsing star, papa. And I would like to collapse in your arms.
She Writes 