The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  She was hilarious.

  She was fun, she was warm, she was smart, and she definitely did things when she wanted to. She was our Lulu. Our light, and our hope.

  When I returned home, I didn’t see the people who weren’t there. I saw the people who were there, and who wanted to be there.

  And when we got to talking, it turns out that none of us knew what to say or how to say it. But now they listened, and they said that they loved our perfect little family.

  They thanked us for showing them the way, by just treating her as a child, because that’s what she is.

  And once I stopped fearing being this kind of mom, I realized that all moms cry a lot. All moms doubt their ability to raise this child. All moms worry about the future.

  I used to wish I could go back in time and get that test after all, but now I wish I could go back in time and allow myself to feel the joy that a new mother feels. Because that’s what I was.

  It’s a lot easier to talk about this stuff now. Now if somebody asks me if I was shocked when she was born, I say, “Of course I was shocked. I never expected a daughter of mine to have straight blond hair.” (I definitely thought she’d be rocking the Afro puffs.)

  We still go to our music classes, and we still go to our play groups and the museums, with typical kids. And we go to places just for kids with Down syndrome, too.

  After our long days filled with fun, we come back to the apartment.

  When I put my key in the door, Lulu always says, “Home, Mama.”

  And I say, “Yes, Lulu. We are home.”

  BETHANY VAN DELFT’s “hip & grounded, laid-back delivery” has earned her the honor of performing at the prestigious Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal and notable appearances on Comedy Central, TV Guide Channel, and NickMom. The former model is a co-creator of the fabulously fashion-forward comedy showcase The Dress Up Show, and her new monthly show, Artisanal Comedy, has been named “one of the top indie nights to check out.” Unashamedly in touch with her inner nerd, Bethany enjoys being a panelist on You’re the Expert and Literary Death Match.

  This story was told on April 11, 2014, at the Shubert Theatre in Boston. The theme of the evening was Coming Home. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.

  I’m sure the woman on the other end of the phone identified herself as being from the clinic I’d been to the day before. Maybe she said her name. Maybe she asked if I was sitting down. But I don’t remember any of that.

  In my memory I just pick up the phone, and this voice says, “Go immediately to the emergency room. Your kidneys are failing.”

  And as I get up and get dressed, there’s this voice in the back of my head saying, This is absurd. I’m in my twenties. I’m invincible. I’m immortal. I don’t even need health insurance.

  I don’t even have health insurance.

  Sure, I’d been feeling bad for a while. But my swollen ankles, those were because I was waiting tables, working double shifts, trying to save up money, not because my body wasn’t processing water waste, right?

  And those splitting headaches, those were because I was really stressed out, trying to get into grad schools, and not because your kidneys regulate your blood pressure.

  When I had finally collapsed a few days before, I didn’t have any more excuses. That was when my boyfriend, Sean, made me go to the clinic.

  Sean and I had been dating for a year and living together for a few months. It was moving a little bit fast, but either of us could go to grad school at any minute, so it was fine. We had sort of a day-by-day mentality. We were keeping each other just at arm’s length.

  In fact, I was able to convince him not to go with me to the emergency room. I mean, why should we both sit around all day waiting for some doctors to tell me that that’s not what it is? That it’s something else—something that can be fixed with a pill?

  So I went. Alone. Terrified, but hiding it well. And this trait of mine, this sort of crazy independence, maybe it stems from when I came out to my Southern Baptist mother from Alabama and my Catholic Hispanic dad from Texas, when I was a teenager growing up in Kentucky.

  If you’re thinking this didn’t go well, you’re right.

  There were Bibles manifesting from nowhere (even though I’d been to church more than they had throughout my life). There was screaming and yelling, and I left that night thinking, I’m one of the damned.

  Because they told me, “You’re going to hell.”

  We didn’t speak for a while—over a year. And when we began to try to put our relationship back together, the damage was pretty done. How close can you get when there’s this whole part of your life that somebody wants nothing to do with?

  I remember once, out of the blue, my dad, said, “I never want to meet anyone you’re seeing. I don’t ever want you to bring anybody home.”

  But as my emergency-room visit became a ten-day stay in the hospital, I had to let a lot of people know where I was.

  In fact, that hospital room was where my parents first met Sean. I learned my kidneys were functioning at less than 10 percent. I learned that I would probably have to go on dialysis.

  If you don’t know much about dialysis, it’s a way to live. It’s not a great way to live. It’s not pleasant. It’s very time-consuming. It’s expensive.

  No, what you want in this situation is a living donor, a kidney donor. You could get on the national transplant list. That is going to take time, maybe years, waiting with a bag packed by the door.

  And cadaver kidneys have other issues; they’re not the best choice. If you can get a living donor, though, usually family—somebody who’s a perfect match—that’s the ideal situation.

  Well, my relationship with my parents had left me a little bit wounded. I had trouble trusting people. This is one of the things I was bad at in my twenties. It used to be at the top of the list.

  Now the top of the list was kidney function. But the not trusting people was still up there. I had this trouble with accepting help. And if you have trouble accepting help, imagine trying to accept a kidney.

  People stepped up to get tested. My dad, despite our differences. My mother wasn’t eligible. My best friend, his dad. Friends from college, high school, work.

  But there was one more person who really wanted to get tested: Sean.

  Talk about a commitment.

  He eventually wore me down.

  He said, “You know, whatever happens, whether or not we’re together in the future—if I can do this for you now, I want to.”

  As the months began to pass, and I did go on dialysis, and my father was disqualified as a donor because of kidney stones, I went on Social Security and food stamps because I was too weak to work.

  Friends were disqualified for various reasons.

  I wasn’t going to be going to grad school. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going from twenty to eighty overnight. Comparing blood-pressure medicines with my grandmother. I spent a lot of time alone, sleeping, mostly.

  But I remember this one day where I made it out to the park, and I was sitting alone. It was a cool day, a fall day. I was praying, meditating, considering this entire process. And I found this really strange peace that’s hard to describe.

  I found this kind of acceptance of myself, and where I’d been, and I thought, You know, it’s fine. If this is what it is, if this is it, I’m okay with that. I can die in my twenties.

  I stopped praying to get better, and I thought about the thing that I’d want. If I could pray for one thing, it was to feel worthy of that love that I hadn’t felt for so long.

  I stopped asking for time, and thought about time well spent.

  It was December when Sean called me from work and said, “I have an early Christmas present for you.”

  He was as good a match as my dad.

  He said, “Would you let me give you a kidney?”

  And I said, “Yes.”

  And we spent time well. Sean’s a big language geek, so we named it: Renée, after the
renal system, and Renatus, for rebirth.

  We would tell people, “We’re having a kidney!”

  Our friends convinced us to have a party. We had a kidney shower. (Sean really wanted to register, but I thought that might be going a little far.)

  Nevertheless, people brought us gifts: pajamas for recovering, and bad movies. (Sean loves bad movies.) And we played games, like “kidney bean bingo” and “pin the kidney on Gil.”

  We got this big red-velvet sheet cake shaped like a kidney. And we wore medical masks, and we cut it together, and fed each other pieces and took lots of pictures.

  The day of the surgery came in May, and they had us both on gurneys, ready to go. We’re surrounded by Sean’s family and my family.

  My parents are there. And my mother starts crying.

  We never talk about this, but we cry the same way. We scrunch up our cheeks in the same way, and we hold back those tears. I can see it in her face when she’s trying to work something out.

  She leans down and takes Sean’s hand and says, “Thank you.”

  I think she’s seeing him differently, and maybe she’s seeing me differently.

  The surgery goes great, and we recovered together for weeks and weeks in a strange little honeymoon.

  A year later we get a card in the mail. Now, it’s not unusual for my mother to send cards. (She sends cards for the strangest occasions, even though they live fifteen minutes away.)

  But this one was addressed to Sean. It said what a blessing he is. And it recognized our anniversary. They asked us to go to dinner with them, like couples do with their parents.

  And I never asked for any proof, because you’re supposed to rely on faith, but I have a family where I have parents and a partner—a perfect match—where before I had a boyfriend.

  And a ten-inch scar across my abdomen to remind me every day that I am loved.

  As a director of live theater, GIL REYES mostly tells other people’s stories from behind the scenes. Gil is a co-founder and co–artistic director of Theatre [502], a member of the Fairness Campaign’s Leadership Council, and a Kentucky Colonel. Post–kidney transplant his life path took him from Capitol Hill to championing education-focused nonprofits. Gil, Sean, and their dog, Herman, share a shotgun home in Louisville, Kentucky.

  This story was told on October 28, 2013, at the Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, California. The theme of the evening was The Big Bang: The Moth at the Bay Area Science Festival. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  It was the Fourth of July this past summer, and I was really looking forward to a day off. I had been working hard for a long time on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, and there was always something to do. But I was going to take the Fourth of July off. So I slept in, I read a little. I decided to check e-mail.

  Never check e-mail on a day off.

  There was a message there from the mission operations manager, Alice Bowman. My eye immediately went to it. It said that the spacecraft had gone safe. It called home, which is basically saying, Help me, I’m broken.

  That’s the worst possible thing that can happen. I was like, How could this have happened? It was gonna be a simple day—a day off.

  I had been working on this project for more than a decade. In 2004 I had relocated my family from California to Boulder, Colorado, to work on this mission.

  This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m an astronomer, and I had been spending decades looking at Pluto through ground-based telescopes. And it’s just this fuzzy dot. There’s not much to see—you can’t make out any surface details. We kept looking through these ground-based telescopes—even through the Hubble Space Telescope—but it’s still just a fuzzy dot, because Pluto is really far away.

  So we moved. My husband started telecommuting for his job, and we moved our three-year-old and our five-year-old.

  We were here, we were settled.

  All we needed to do now is build a spacecraft, test it, launch it, and fly it 3 billion miles to Pluto.

  So we did. It worked out. We built a small spacecraft, about the size of a baby grand piano, and we launched it on the largest rocket we could get, an Atlas V. It’s about twenty stories tall.

  So you’ve got a small spacecraft, a big rocket, and what you get is the fastest spacecraft ever launched—it’s going at thirty-four thousand miles per hour.

  To put that in perspective, when the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it took over three days. For New Horizons the spacecraft passed the moon in just nine hours. We were flying. (It’s an unmanned spacecraft, so I mean that figuratively—there’s no one on it.)

  But it will take the spacecraft nine and a half years to go from earth to Pluto, so we’ve got a lot of time on our hands.

  We think about what data we’re going to collect, how we’re going to do it, and we make contingency plans in case something goes wrong. We considered more than two hundred different scenarios. What do we do if this breaks? What do we do if that goes wrong? We had this huge binder full of contingencies.

  So I find myself on that Fourth of July. It’s just ten days before our closest approach to Pluto.

  You see, we can’t stop and orbit Pluto. We don’t have enough fuel to slow ourselves down, because we’re going really fast. So we just have to go right by and take the best images we can as we’re flying past.

  It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We have to get it right at this time.

  And the spacecraft has just gone safe.

  I rush over to the mission operation center, and I settle in the situation room. This is a conference room right outside the mission operation center. You can see the operations people through the window, but they like to keep the scientists a little separated so we don’t get in the way.

  I’m sitting with my colleagues, and, interestingly, I’m starting to feel calm. That sick feeling in the pit of my stomach is relaxing, because I’ve been working with these people for more than a decade, and everyone knows what they need to do. We all know what our responsibilities are and how to make this work. We have three days to get the spacecraft back in working order. By July 7 we have to have it up and ready to start executing those commands, so that when it flies by Pluto, we get the data that we’ve been waiting more than a decade for.

  We start to get information back, but it takes a while.

  It takes the signal four and a half hours to travel from earth out to the spacecraft, and then it takes another four and a half hours for it to come back so we can hear what the spacecraft had to say. So it’s like a really slow conversation. Imagine you say “hi” to someone, then you go watch three football games, and you come back and they say “hi” back. That’s the kind of data rates we were getting.

  We start to find out what went wrong. We had overtaxed the computer on the spacecraft. Remember, this computer is ten years old. (My guess is that none of you use a computer that’s ten years old on a daily basis for really important things.)

  But we planned for that, because we sent two computers. So we overtaxed the prime computer, but before it crashed, it started up the backup computer and said, “Call home.” So now we’re on the backup computer, we kind of know what went wrong, and we’ve got a big question in front of us: do we try and get back on the prime computer, or do we fly through closest approach on our relatively untested backup computer?

  The whole time we’ve been flying across the solar system, we’ve never turned on the backup computer. The last time it was on, was on the ground when we were testing it a decade ago.

  So we make the logical decision to switch back over to the prime computer. But we’re worried, because if we really messed it up, it may not start, and we’re getting short on time. At this point we’ve been in the situation room for three days. People are taking naps in the conference room; many orders of pizza are coming in and being eaten.

  We don’t have a lot of time left. We send up the command to switch back over to the prime computer, and then we wait.

  I find myself nine hour
s later back in the situation room looking through the glass window at the operations people, hoping this works.

  When I hear mission operations manager Alice Bowman’s voice over the intercom say, “We are back on the prime computer,” I see people erupting in cheers—everybody was so elated.

  I let out this huge sigh of relief. I didn’t even realize I had been holding my breath. It was amazing.

  We managed to get the spacecraft back in working order, everything was going right, and we had four hours to spare. It was outstanding. We started going back through our main sequence and getting data.

  It was absolutely stunning, views of Pluto like we had never seen before.

  I couldn’t believe the beauty and the details that were awaiting us at Pluto. We would have never expected the unusual terrain we’ve seen. We saw a heart-shaped glacier made out of nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices. At the edge of the glacier there were huge mountains—mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains—made out of water ice. Pluto has a large moon named Charon, and on that moon there’s a deep canyon, deeper than the Grand Canyon.

  All these wonders awaited us.

  When I had previously looked at Pluto through our ground-based telescopes, they were there; I just couldn’t see them. We had accomplished our objective of transforming Pluto from a fuzzy point of light to a complex, rich geologic world.

  It was miraculous.

  CATHY OLKIN is a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Her main topic of research is the outer solar system, specifically planetary atmospheres and surfaces. As a deputy project scientist for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, Cathy has been wonderfully busy soaking in all the new information about her favorite planet. After more than nine years and 3 billion miles, the New Horizons spacecraft made it to Pluto and took the first-ever close-up pictures of Pluto and its moons.

  This story was told on September 21, 2015, at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. The theme of the evening was High Anxiety. Director: Meg Bowles.