The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager

Author:Sara Seager [Seager, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Can you imagine someone with much more sophisticated telescopes than ours, looking for us and seeing the orange glow of our cities at night? The lightless rectangle of Central Park? The black ribbon of the Seine finding its way through Paris? The reverie made my heart beat faster. The reality, however, was that so much of my work was still just math: theoretical, statistical, sensing not seeing. Numbers were too often all we had.

When Mike died, our family of four became a family of three. Mathematically speaking, his departure represented a significant loss: 25 percent of our household. More critically, however, we went from an even-numbered family to an odd-numbered family. That might not seem like it should matter, but in the way our world can seem custom-built to defy left-handed people, we also live under the tyranny of even numbers. Deep down, a lot of people find something imperfect or unsatisfying in odd numbers; they’re like building kits that come one part short or with one part too many. The archetypal nuclear family, the mythical bedrock of American society, is two adults and two children. We see in those numbers balance and symmetry, a square root and division without remainders, and we have built our society on the foundation of that mathematical ideal.

Everywhere Max, Alex, and I went, I was reminded that we were incomplete. Not just by our own accounts, but by our suburban society’s greater calculus. If you’re an adult, it’s almost always assumed that you are part of a couple. Or, if you’re not part of a couple, then you aspire to be. A table for one in a restaurant always has a second empty chair beside it, just in case you need the confirmation that you are missing someone. And if you’re a family, the working assumption is that you’re a family of four. Cars and restaurant booths, roller coasters and family tickets to the museum: Two adults and two children. Two plus two. Two by two. Four.

I forced myself to go to work-related social events, just to get out of the house. That meant leaving the boys with Jessica. It was too soon. I almost always regretted it. Once I went to a big dinner with a guest speaker at work, unaware that most of my colleagues were bringing their partners. Someone said to me: “Well, you’re single, so you sit here.” What I’d once found so comforting in MIT—the eminence of logic, of bluntness, of practicality—now sometimes hurt me. Simple statements of fact had never been so cutting.

Humans are bad at dealing with damaged humans. If people said anything to me about Mike, they almost always said the wrong thing. I have no idea what I’d do if my husband died. That’s not the best message for a widow to hear, but widows hear it all the time. I learned to break the news of Mike’s death slowly to people who didn’t know, as though they were the ones who needed protection, not me.

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