Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space

Thoughts on grief

It’s been a little over a month but it feels like a decade has passed. It is a little over a month but it feels like it happened this morning. Time is meaningless in grief, and yet time is oppressive. It moves slowly, and there is so much of it ahead of you, so much to be weathered. 

What does this feel like? It’s something I consider often; as a meditator I am always trying to observe my emotions, trying to be aware of what is happening within me. In the weeks since I held my wife as she exhaled her last, a small wave of foam forming inside her lower lip and then dissolving just as her essence did, I’ve searched for the correct comparison. Here it is:

Imagine that you are an astronaut. You are high above the Earth, tethered to the space capsule that got you there. The capsule that protects you from the most inhospitable environment you can imagine, a vod and vacuum that will kill you in seconds. That capsule has light and heat and air, and you are tethered to it by a strap that is thick but, in the grand scheme of the universe, so very fragile. There is no one else in the capsule, and you are floating just outside of it. 

The tether snaps. Unexpectedly, unfairly, the tether snaps, and you find yourself hurtling away from the capsule. You are hurtling away from the huge blue arc of the Earth. You are tumbling backwards into space. 

Your trajectory is unpredictable as you flip end over end. Sometimes you are looking at the warm glow of your homeworld, so big it takes up all of your field of vision, full of life and hope. Sometimes you are facing the endless, hopeless emptiness of space, an infinite expanse of ice cold hell. You somersault through nothing, alternating between views of life and views of something worse than death, an abyss that cannot be measured. 

Good news - you have tools for just this situation. You’ve been in trouble before and you’ve made sure that you’re equipped with ways to take control. But the tools you have are suddenly hard to access, and it turns out they’re not that useful at all. You have small jets that can push you in the right direction, but the jets are not as powerful as you hoped. They’re kind of a nudge, and because you’re tumbling sometimes the nudge takes you in the wrong direction. 

You can hear voices on your headset - people on Earth who are deeply concerned about you. They love you, and they are thinking of you, and they want to know what they can do. You are so grateful for the warmth but there’s nothing they can do; they’re too far away, they can’t get to where you are. All they can do is say nice things and all you can do is hold those nice things in your heart whenever the tumble brings you face to face with the void. 

You are all alone. More alone than you ever imagined possible, You know that many eyes on the ground are fixed on you, but they’re hundreds of miles away. They’re so far, and they can’t really help, but you’re afraid that they’ll stop paying attention - that life will catch up with them and the spectacle of the lone person floating in space will no longer occupy their thoughts. Then you’ll be really, truly alone, utterly forgotten. 

The capsule is gone - you can’t see it anymore. 

At a certain point it becomes clear to you that your space suit is actually pretty good. It has a lot of oxygen - you can survive in here for a while. And that’s terrifying, because all that means is more time floating in the nothing, getting farther and farther away from the arc of the Earth that slowly becomes a dome, and then a globe, and eventually a pale little dot of light. You can’t quite recall what it even looked like, to be honest. It had clouds, you know that. 

You keep yourself busy. You count stars or compose poems in your head. Something to pass the time. As the Earth recedes you need something to keep your mind off the unrelenting horror of nothingness. But sometimes those things backfire, and you’re suddenly and viscerally reminded of what you are tumbling away from, what you have lost. And those moments are sometimes worse than the flat, depressed moments of existential dread.

Eventually you realize that this is it - this is your life now, and that you’re either going to slowly suffocate or slowly freeze to death out here. You know that your options are limited, that even with this incredible space suit you’re doomed. You’re not the kind of person to just take off the helmet and let eternity take you - maybe you’re too cowardly, maybe you still have a stubborn kernel of hope lodged inside you like popcorn stuck in your teeth - so you have to decide how it’s going to go. It’s easy to freeze to death, to become ice and to surrender to the loneliness and nothing. It feels natural, in fact. 

But there’s another option. It might be dangerous, could still kill you. But the longer you’re tumbling you notice that you’re tumbling less; your flight path is becoming stabilized. Those tools, the ones that you couldn’t use earlier, they’re more helpful now. Those thrusters, you can use them a little bit better. It will take a lot of effort, and you might use up all your oxygen in the process, but just perhaps you can get yourself into a better position, can bring yourself closer to home, can make that little dot grow and grow. Maybe you’ll never make it, but at the very least you can keep the void at your back and hope in your line of sight.

Now you just have to decide if it’s worth it; you worked so hard to get up here in the first place, put in so much time and effort to leave behind your humble beginnings and break the chains of gravity. You know you have it in you, but you’re not sure that you want to go through it again. You’ve done enough. Isn’t it time to just give up and let the cold take you?

You’re not going to decide that today. You’re tumbling less but you’re still tumbling. Those tools, those jets, are only nudging you slightly. You have time to figure it out. But in the meantime you’re going to do one thing - try and keep that pale blue dot in your field of vision. That’s your one mission now - to not forget about hope, distant and small as it is.