by Sara Seager
Another race was on. I had taken a few months off after the births of both Max and Alex, but each time I grew itchy to get back to work. Mike and I hired a nanny to help fill in the gaps; I was still exhausted. I was caught trying to be both at home and far, far away.
Despite my desire for near-term results, I also still worked under the auspices of the Terrestrial Planet Finder and its grand, distant goals. While the original four teams had disbanded, a new team had started up, and I was thrilled to continue thinking about a space telescope with a built-in coronagraph. At an astronomy conference, an engineer named Charley Noecker invited me to hear about a tangential idea: a mammoth shield that would fly in tandem with a space telescope, working the way we might hold out our hands to protect our eyes from the glare. The shield would block the star, and the telescope would be able to see the smaller lights around it. That shield, an “external occulter,” was fraught with technological tall poles. But two members of the presenting team—Jon Arenberg and Ron Polidan, both engineers from Northrop Grumman—were so enthusiastic, so confident in the future success of the project, that I couldn’t help sharing their optimism. I joined their early efforts to make the scientific case for it.
After leaving Princeton, I continued to work on exoplanet atmospheres as well, but in a scattered, undisciplined way. The launch of the Spitzer telescope made me focus. I helped write a careful, punchy proposal—atmospheres and temperatures are intimately connected—and my team was awarded telescope time. The lives of space hardware are shorter than even our collective attention spans, and Spitzer cost hundreds of millions to build. Every minute such an expensive machine is given over to you is a gift. I felt an incredible sense of validation when, after years of planning and anticipation, Spitzer took my prescribed aim.
In 2005, I coauthored a study that detected the existence of a previously discovered exoplanet through its infrared. Planets that transit in front of stars can also pass behind them, in a secondary eclipse. When that happens, the combined light of the star and the planet drops a tiny bit, because the planet is blocked from view. Given that drop in brightness, we could measure a planet’s infrared heat. Our findings made a lot of news. For the first time, we could see an exoplanet, albeit through invisible light. It was our old friend HD 209458b, which Dave Charbonneau had first seen in full transit. Now it had been seen three ways, making it one of the most researched planets outside our solar system. Spitzer couldn’t photograph HD 209458b but could undeniably detect its presence. We had it surrounded.
Because we happened to be looking at HD 209458b’s heat, we could also estimate its atmospheric temperature. That was my job. I came up with a pretty big number: a balmy 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. HD 209458b is a great ball of fire, and obviously a little too warm to sustain life. The cooler signature of another Earth would remain a far more challenging find. Our progress was still undeniable, and I looked forward to expanding my work on atmospheres and transits with the Terrestrial Planet Finder’s beautiful star-blockers. With those pieces in place, I felt sure we were finally on our way to seeing the invisible.
Then NASA suddenly postponed the Terrestrial Planet Finder work, and later canceled it entirely. I had been a proud member of the first generation dedicated to finding another Earth: We were going to become interstellar Magellans. Now we weren’t even going to bother to look. I was crushed.
I hadn’t learned to accept that the development of a piece of space hardware, like so many journeys, is rarely linear. It is murky and ugly and sometimes confused, a long war in which the advances hopefully outnumber the retreats until finally something gets won. National space agencies, NASA or Roscosmos or the European Space Agency, have their own priorities and agendas, set by governments that might rise and fall over a single budgetary dispute or illicit hotel-room rendezvous. One president wants to go to Mars; the next might settle for the moon. Giant corporations like SpaceX and Lockheed Martin have their own engineering departments fevering away. Universities develop and build their own technology for satellites. Every day across the world, thousands of smart, devoted people work toward the same ends—separately, in pockets. Dozens or hundreds of languages have words for telescope. Not many people know more than a handful of them.
That was the first time something I had been working on fell into astronomy’s developmental morass, its promise unfulfilled. The lesson I took from it? The universe might be infinite, but our appetites for exploring it are finite, and so are our resources. Time is the most precious resource of all.
* * *
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary science faculty called me while I was on maternity leave with Alex. They were inviting me to interview for a professorship. I was excited to make the trip back to Cambridge, not far from my former haunts at Harvard. I also had serious reservations. Before I’d taken the job at Carnegie, I had interviewed at Caltech. And Berkeley. And Princeton. And the University of British Columbia. And, as it happened, MIT.
None of those meetings had gone well. The worst one had been at UBC. At the start of my visit, I had to listen to some older male professors salivating over a crop of undergrads they had seen at an event the day before. With the exception of my hosts, nobody in the faculty had any interest in exoplanets. When they did deign to ask me about my work, it was about my early research in recombination after the Big Bang—something I hadn’t thought about much since Harvard. They grilled me with a surprising hostility. Feeling bullied and insecure, I gave unsatisfying answers to every question. My last interview was with a junior biophysicist. He was the first kind face I’d seen in hours. “I bet this is the end of a very long day,” he said, and I nearly burst into tears in front of him.
The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end. Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing. A few dismissed finding exoplanets as “stamp collecting,” an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them. I couldn’t convince the cynics otherwise. Despite the growing number of known exoplanets—by then about 150—people told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would. We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them. The challenges would always be too great. My breakthroughs were mirages; my discoveries were flukes.
It had been a debilitating process. I went to work at Carnegie, doing my best to steel myself against what felt like an army of skeptics. There was a gap between our desires and our abilities, but there always had been, and we had always found a way across them. Then we used Spitzer to see HD 209458b. Unbeknownst to me, MIT had continued to watch me and my work from afar. By the time I went back for my second interview in early 2006, John Bahcall’s line between lunacy and scientific fact had moved just enough.
This time, MIT offered me a job. Somehow, I wasn’t sure whether I should take it. I was honored, but I had never been a teacher. I had never been responsible for the futures of students, only my own. There are a limited number of hours in a week, and my university duties would mean less time for my research.
It would also mean less time for my family. We had recently lost one of our founding members: Tuktu had died earlier that year from a brain tumor, taking her last breaths on her favorite couch. Mike had lifted her body from it and carried her away to be cremated. I cried every day for weeks after we buried her ashes. She was such a faithful companion.
I spoke to my father more than usual. We had always kept in touch, talking often and seeing each other when we could. He would still occasionally ask whether I’d changed my mind about becoming a medical doctor. When all of our conversations shifted to Tuktu and her death, it became clear to both of us that I wasn’t prepared for such emotional work. For months after she died, my father and I inevitably talked about mortality. “Death is a part of life,” he said. “We start to die the day we are
born.”
Now, with MIT’s offer in my hands, I called my father again, this time looking for a different kind of support. He told me to take the job. It didn’t matter what else was going on, what else might or might not happen. “When the door of opportunity opens, you have to go through it,” he said, his voice rising.
* * *
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My father might have believed that his journey toward death started the day he was born, but it began in earnest with a series of stomachaches. Through all of the many times we talked about whether I should work at MIT, he was suffering from a sporadic pain in his gut. I was at a conference in Chicago—Pale Blue Dot II—standing outside the Adler Planetarium, drinking a coffee and taking in a little sun, when he called with an explanation. It was windy and crowded around me, but the truth eventually worked its way through and landed like the verdict of a hanging judge: He had pancreatic cancer. In the wicked spectrum of cancers, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest. For most people, sickness means doubt. There was no mystery here. Pancreatic cancer carries with it the worst kind of certainty.
I left the conference early and flew to Toronto. My father was living in a new condominium by then, with a woman named Isabella, his common-law wife. He had never been short of girlfriends, but Isabella had become a permanent fixture. He was almost as restless when it came to his homes, but his new place was in North York, just down the highway from the apartment where he had torn that orange polyester blanket in two.
He looked broken when I arrived. He had already spent the morning summoning friends and trying to give away his things. He wanted to see his prized Rolexes strapped around other wrists, but no one wanted to take the treasures of a dying man. I gave him a long hug, and then we went for a walk together in the cemetery across the street. We had gone there for walks and bicycle rides when I was a girl. As the sun set it filled with the most beautiful collection of shadows. Now we walked again between the tombstones, and for once it was my help that my father needed. He was picking out his gravesite.
Midway through his career, not long before he began offering hair transplants, he had spent a couple of years working in palliative care. He had felt it necessary to take his turn at it. I think it was strange for him, becoming the sort of doctor who faced problems he couldn’t fix. He had always felt in full command of fate, and not just his own. It’s a different mindset when you give up fighting death and seek only to ease its arrival. That sort of honesty has its comforts but also its price. My father knew too much about what was coming for him.
I burned through my frequent-flyer miles shuttling back and forth between Washington and Toronto for the next few weeks. I brought Max, not yet four, with me on one of my visits, trying to lighten the load on Mike back home. One afternoon, I decided to get some air and take Max for a walk. My father rushed out the door after us.
“This might be goodbye,” he said.
He had woken up to my leaving noises, and I think he was still in a dreamy haze. I told him that I wasn’t going back to Washington; I was just taking Max for a walk. He wasn’t about to take any chances. We looked at each other long enough for Max to get tired of waiting and start playing on the floor.
“Sara,” my father said finally. “You are the joy of my existence. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you have exceeded all expectations.”
I was astonished. He had talked about our connection since I was young, but his style was indirect. He talked about love scientifically, abstractly—as though, like reincarnation, it was a force to which we were subject, as though we were passive actors. Love was something that happened to us. Now he was saying something different. He was saying that love was active, a feeling that we could order and measure, and that he loved me with all of the strength he had.
To me, there was something almost catastrophic about his revelation. It was as though my life and his life had played out in an instant in my mind, and only then did I realize: Nobody had loved me like him. His love, a father’s love, was without conditions, without reservation, without peer. And only now, at the moment when I understood how big and rare that kind of love must be, did I realize how close I was to losing it.
My father hung on, and I hung on with him. On another visit Isabella and I took him to see his doctor. He looked truly sick. Tumors were starting to grow all over his body. One was forming over his eye, and his weight loss was significant enough to change the shape of his face. The doctor looked at my father and said, “Dr. Seager, you’re at rock bottom. People hit rock bottom, and then they start getting better. I am not bullshitting you.” I couldn’t decide whether the doctor was a liar or incompetent. Then I couldn’t decide which was worse.
My father didn’t believe his doctor, either. We went back to his condo. He wanted to die in his home, not in a hospital. He soon developed a blood clot in one of his legs, visible under his pale skin. Cancer is so awful, an endless loop of invasions. It can feel like the same set of burglars keep coming back to steal what little they didn’t take the last time. At midnight, Isabella and I stood beside my father’s bed. We both stared at his leg.
“If this blood clot gets to my brain, it’s the worst thing that could happen to me,” he shouted. Then he fell quiet. “If this blood clot gets to my brain, it’s the best thing that could happen to me.”
My father survived the night, and the next day, and the day after that. I went to California for work a couple of weeks later; I landed back in Washington to a voicemail from my father’s brother-in-law, my uncle. He said it was time. “You don’t have to come,” my uncle said. “You probably don’t want to see him like this.” I left Arrivals, went home to repack my bags and book a new flight to Toronto, and returned to Departures. It would be years before I could walk through that terminal without tears.
When I got to my father’s condo, my uncle greeted me at the door. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t cry when you see him.” I’ve never been given more impossible instructions. It was more than my not wanting to say goodbye; I didn’t know how to say goodbye. I wanted to beg him to stay. The only words in my head were: Don’t leave me.
I went into my father’s room. The tumor over his eye had grown large enough to close it. He looked alien. There were lumps all over his body. I tried to hold it together, waiting for him to wake up, but I failed. I put my head on his chest. I could barely get out the words.
“Dad, what am I going to do without you?”
He was being robbed of almost every faculty, but he could still hear, and he could still speak. “Whatever you usually do, of course,” he said. He even managed to laugh a little.
“Dad, I mean nobody will ever love me the way you have loved me.”
I had said out loud what was, in some ways, a terrible thing to say. But in that moment, I believed it. I knew it.
Now he didn’t say very much. Now he said everything. “It’s always so.”
A parade of visitors came through during each of my visits. Doctors and patients. Family and friends. Some big, brawny men with heads of very natural-looking hair. Many of them were overwhelmed with emotion. Some of them cried. Most of them said something like, “I will remember you.” Nobody says that to you until the end. Dying is the opposite of birth. Every former first becomes a last. There are new firsts, but they’re all lasts, too.
Still my father hung on. It was early December, hard and gray outside. He had made it ten weeks or so, near the standard for pancreatic cancer patients. After several more days with him, I finally decided that I had to go home to see Mike and the boys. I had been away so much. I flew back to Washington and fell into a deep sleep in the early evening. I woke up to Mike’s grip on my arm and didn’t have to ask. Isabella was on the phone. I flew back to Toronto one last time.
My father had told his best friend, “See you on the other side.” I couldn’t help hoping that he was right about life
after death.
Today I am largely estranged from my mother and most of the rest of my family. The bad memories are too close to the surface, I think, and we’ve all made mistakes in our learning to live with them. My sister, Julia, is the only one I see. But maybe…Maybe my father was reborn somewhere. I wondered whether I might meet his next incarnation. I still do. But what I knew, beyond any doubt, was that I would never see my version of him again. The man I had known as my father was gone. He was there, all my life, and then he wasn’t.
* * *
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Two weeks later, Mike, the boys, our cats, and I moved north in time for the start of the winter semester at MIT. I was excited to return to the frozen rivers and happier memories of New England, to Beth and Will’s Christmas tree farm and the pleasures of our relative youth. This time around, we could do a little better than the carriage house. We found a pretty yellow Victorian in Concord, twenty miles and a world away from Boston.
Despite the most inauspicious of starts, Mike and I had finished building our own solar system, with its own discrete centers of gravity: two boys and three cats living in a pretty yellow house. He would continue to work from home, surrounded by his marked-up books. He also took over nearly all of the practical duties that go into running a family. I was never good at those things, and practice hadn’t made me any better. I still struggled to pump gas into the car; basic household chores mystified me. Mike agreed, in action if not by marital contract, to take care of everything ordinary so that I could focus on the extraordinary. A new, unassailable order settled into my life, a productive simplicity. My place and my objectives were clear. I took the train each morning and watched the trees turn into concrete; at night the concrete turned back into trees. All I had left to do was find another Earth.