It’s Been A Year
I recently watched Neil Degrasse-Tyson talking about how when we die, our energy remains. For someone who is buried, their energy, their molecules, become part of the earth, giving back to what nourished them in life. For someone who is cremated, their energy is converted into heat and light, and it travels at the speed of light away from the Earth. He says for someone who died four years ago, they would be reaching Alpha Centauri right about now.
By that measure, my dad has traveled just over one light year. There are no stars, planets, or other well-known systems at one light year from Earth. He’s around the outer reaches of the Oort Cloud, at the edge of our solar system. He’s in an interstellar medium, among sparse gas, dust, and cosmic rays. Mostly nothing.
Last night, while chatting with friends over dinner, I found myself talking about his death, a topic I usually avoid. It came up sideways, as things do. My mom and brother had recently spread some ashes at one of his designated locations, a list he kept adding to as a joke. A year ago, I was sitting with my mom in the funeral director's office, explaining that he wanted his ashes spread in multiple locations. The funeral director asked, “How much would you like?” I looked at my mom in awkward silence, turned to him, and said, “I don’t know, a tablespoon?” So that’s how we ended up with 16 dime bags of my dad. Over a sparkling rosé, we laughed at its absurdity, which is exactly what he would have done.
When I was a kid, we lived in the country outside Jackson, Tennessee, where my dad had built us a blue house, me a matching tree house, and we collected goats, sheep, donkeys, ducks, bees, cats, and dogs. My dad, not known for ever cooking anything besides hot dogs with a fork over a stove top flame, showed me how to make all kinds of eggs just because Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows ate coddled eggs, and I didn’t know what those were. He read E.B. White, James Herriot, and Rudyard Kipling to me at night. I spent my days outside with nothing but imagination. What a beautiful childhood he gave me. One at ground level, and one always reaching upward.
In his office, he had a large map of the visible constellations above his desk. At night, we would go outside, lie flat on the driveway, and look up at the stars. He would point them out above us, just as we had traced them on the map inside. I remember how much I loved looking up at the stars, seeing how big the sky was, thinking about how much was out there. The best times were during the fall, when the asphalt was cold and my ears tingled from the air, and we both pointed upward to Cassiopeia or Ursa Major.
It seems fitting to think of him where he is now, in the quiet stretch between systems. After a year, I am also more quiet, a kind of stillness. Occasionally something unexpected makes its way into my thoughts, and that familiar catch in my throat arises; however, these moments are fleeting, less intense. Happy thoughts bring them on more now, no longer those last moments - though those last moments do come in like an asteroid and leave a crater still.
In the last week, with his birthday passing for the first time without a cake, I’ve started noticing little connections. Maybe they’ve always been there, I’m just more attuned since that day is coming up. I got in the car and Touch of Grey by the Grateful Dead was on the radio, a song we listened to on a cassette tape in his truck, while surveying “the empire” (his words for various farms), and when he would leave me in the truck alone, he would say to stay put and defend it from “all enemies foreign and domestic.” Later, we would wait in a Ticketmaster line together at Cat’s Music to see the Grateful Dead at the Pyramid in 1995, their last tour with Jerry Garcia. My mom went to the symphony the other night, sent me a video, and wrote, “From Dad’s playlist.” I accidentally took an afternoon nap and heard his voice repeating a phrase three times in a dream. I immediately woke up. I lay there for a moment, heart pounding in my ears. I had not heard his voice speaking to me in so long.
He is both on Earth, in places he loved, and somehow at the Oort Cloud, in a place he dreamed of. He is not on the way somewhere, he is already part of everything expanding outward. And so are we. How lucky we are to have even existed. To have somehow come from nothing to live on this oasis of a planet. To sit in the sun and warm our faces. To connect with another human over coffee. To love, and to mourn.
To lie flat on a driveway, looking at the stars that are, in fact, us.
I still do.