Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  Isn’t that the driving force behind so much of what we do? We seek answers. We want to know more. One question leads to another.

  This strange motivation we humans have, to explore our world, to gain knowledge beyond what we need to survive, has taken us to the moon, expanded our mastery of internal medicine, and lent us a better understanding of our neurological functions, of our very genes. We search for our place among other humans—people living among us: father to daughter; people living epochs apart: prehistoric hunter to modern scholar. I’m drawn to these impos-sibilities—of understanding the world, understanding my father.

  I’m still not exactly sure who sat with my father in the cave, which of my many selves sipped from the canteen. I was three people at once: part Holly, following her father in Land of the Lost; part Indiana Jones, swashbuckling through the snake-filled Well of Souls; and as much as I hate to admit it, part Fear Factor contestant, a bare-legged hiker craving a blended rat smoothie.

  Herein lies a major difference between my father and myself: for him, the meaning of life might be found somewhere in absolute facts and scientific theory. For me, the answer (or at least part of the answer) might hide in the shadows cast by humans as they interact with nature and with each other. Still, I’m smitten by scientific inquiry. What fun it is to follow the circuitous path of question-leads-to-question—to reconstruct or deconstruct the making of knowledge based on observation and experimentation and quantifiable outcomes. But I’m even more interested in how the quantifiable sheds light on the unquantifiable, the human spirit. Human interaction. My own interaction with the world, with other people, my parents, myself.

  When I study the personality traits my father and I share—our openness to adventure, our inquisitive minds, our fears that perhaps our personal and career accomplishments don’t add up to anything that will outlive our mortal existence, our self-centered natures—perhaps I can find a place for myself on the spectrum of reconciliation that allows for our commonalities and our differences. While our individual choices and approaches to life differ, we also overlap. As I grapple with the new rules of engagement, as I take on these new adult-daughter responsibilities, obligations I simultaneously resist and surrender to (even though you didn’t take care of me one iota, dear father), our relationship, even today, still evolves. I suspect that after he’s gone, the relationship will continue to shape itself, to stretch and change from the perspective of hindsight.

  So there we sat.

  From inside the cave, which was very wide and shallow and not quite as dark as I’d imagined it would be, I watched the boulders’ shadows stretch across the sand below. They overlapped, layers of shadows blending, morphing together in places yet remaining distinctly separate in others. Keeping pace with the sun’s migration, the shadows stretched eastward and elongated so slowly that their inch-by-inch evolution was almost imperceptible. But they did move nonetheless.

  PART III

  Sitting-Up Mud

  Twenty-Two

  (2013)—

  When I arrive at my mother’s assisted-living apartment, she’s sitting in silence with the blinds drawn. The caregivers dote on her. They would open the blinds if she would only push the button on the pendent she wears around her neck and ask, but my mother’s cognitive connections, while improving at a slow, less-than-steady pace, aren’t anything like they used to be, so it doesn’t occur to her to let in the natural light. She’s the youngest resident here. She requires a higher than average level of care—on a scale of one to four, one being independent and four being completely bedridden, she rates at level three, which sharply contrasts with her former, active and independent self.

  Level three.

  Life changes in an instant. One minute you’re living your life—manning the Master Gardeners’ booth at the farmers’ market or making a cup of peach tea or helping your eight-year-old granddaughter memorize her multiplication tables—and the next minute you’re on the floor, not sure if your granddaughter heard you say she should call 911 right away, not sure if the sirens are outside your house or inside your head, not sure if those are your children gathered round you in the emergency room. You’re incoherent when the Mayo Clinic–trained cardiologist whispers to your son and daughter, “Less than a one percent chance. Say your goodbyes.” No one survives a ruptured aortic dissection. No one has multiple strokes at once—ischemic on the right, subarachnoid hemorrhage on the left.

  Sixty-seven years old.

  It’s not fair.

  And even if you somehow survive—if you make it through a month of cardiovascular intensive care, months of sub-acute hospital care, multiple surgeries, multiple skilled nursing facilities, a summer of home healthcare in your daughter’s spare room, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, cognitive therapy—what does it mean to merely “survive” if you’re no longer your full self?

  There in her new assisted-living studio apartment—a dim cave equipped with a call-button chain that dangles from the wall next to her motorized recliner, and an additional call-button pendent she wears like a necklace—my mother reaps the paltry rewards of her yearlong struggle that began a few minutes before that 911 call. Partly aware, partly not. Somewhat mobile, mostly not. Left side neglect; paralysis on one side—leg, arm, visual impairment. Chicken arm. Torso leaning, hunched chronically to the right. Weak as a baby bird. Flat affect. Chronic pain. Confusion. Short-term memory shot. Long-term memory spotty. Helpless, defiant, apathetic. Technically alive but sort of not.

  To be in limbo is to inhabit an intermediate, ambivalent zone.

  Level three.

  Twenty-Three

  I suppose my father and Stephen J. Gould are right. In the whole scheme of things, we’re damn lucky to be alive in the first place.

  You had a one in a googolplex chance of being here.

  I’m grateful for that, to be alive. The world is a wonderful place. Relative to the universe’s timeline, though, our lifespan is but a blip. A blip framed by...what? Nothingness? Darkness? Unaware, pure-matter existence? The universe is a swirling mass of atoms forming clumps of various things and then dissolving. Most of those atoms don’t get to be alive at all. Most of those atoms don’t get to be a person, fall in love, see sunsets, eat ice cream and ride bikes, feel the ground shake when the continent shifts.

  Lean. Let up. Lean.

  You and I are extraordinarily lucky to be one of the select, fortunate few. Kurt Vonnegut conveyed a certain kind of gratitude in his book, Cat’s Cradle, in a deathbed confessional prayer expressed by one of his characters:

  God made mud.

  God got lonesome.

  So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up.”

  “See all I’ve made,” said God. “The hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”

  And I, with some of the mud, had got to sit up and look around.

  Lucky me, lucky mud.

  I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

  Nice going, God!

  Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.

  I feel very unimportant compared to You.

  The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

  I got so much, and most mud got so little.

  Thank you for the honor.

  Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

  What memories for mud to have!

  What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

  I loved everything I saw.

  I think what Vonnegut means is that whatever the content of your life, the fact that at least you’ve been able to live at all is something in itself. Most mud isn’t lucky enough to sit up. We’re the sitting-up mud, you and I.

  You had a one in a googolplex chance of being here today.

  I guess the question is, then: how should we live, knowing that we’re a statistical long shot and we’re going to die? My immediate response is that perhaps w
e should be careful. Live cautiously.

  Many years back, my mom and I would sometimes watch Hill Street Blues, a television cop show that began every episode with the sergeant summing up the various crimes and investigations that would play out in the day’s program. As he sent his men out to fight crime on the streets, he’d always end by saying, “Be careful out there.”

  But the particular kind of care I have in mind isn’t this logistical type of fact-based caution, where if you’re not careful, you won’t notice the big truck barreling down the street and you’ll get hit and killed; or if you walk through the desert carelessly, you’ll get bitten by a rattlesnake.

  I stood in at least a four-foot snake-free radius, which included the upcoming two or three divots. I thought about turning back.

  The fact that we’re going to die seems intuitively to require a particular kind of care, because, to state the obvious, hey—you only go around once, right? The fact that we’ve got a finite lifes-pan requires us to face the fact that we could blow it. We could do it wrong. Sure, we might get some do-overs. If you live to be eighty years old, you have the chance to reappraise your life at, say, the age of thirty or forty or fifty, choose a new path. Buy a red sports car or donate all your worldly goods to charity. Or connect with your estranged daughter by taking a road trip to Baja, hike through the desert in search of ancient cave paintings. But knowing we’ll die pushes us in the direction of thinking we’ve got to be very careful because we only have a limited period of time for those do-overs.

  The way I see it, there are two kinds of mistakes we could make.

  On one hand, we might discover that we’ve made bad choices in terms of what we were aiming for. What if my father had stayed in Pomona to read children’s books aloud to me on the couch rather than driving twenty-five hundred miles cross-country to present his research to Harvard medical students?

  On the other hand, we might find that even if we made the right choices in terms of our goals, we dropped the ball in terms of actually accomplishing what it is we were trying to accomplish. Dear Rolf, I’m 48 and still alive and nobody.

  What I mean is that we have to be careful in our aims and we have to be careful in the execution of our aims. Death forces us to be careful. Yes, we’ve got the chance for do-overs, but we don’t have time for a whole lot of do-overs.

  Twenty-Four

  Visalia, California (2012)—

  A team of ER doctors and nurses scurried around us. They prepped my mom for surgery as we gathered round to say our goodbyes. She’d probably die any minute, one of the doctors had whispered to us in the hallway. Once the aorta burst, and it surely would, she’d be gone in three to ten seconds. “We don’t expect her to make it to the operating room, but we’ll prep her anyway—because, well, because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

  The social worker holding my hand interjected: Dr. C happens to specialize in this. He’s the number-one doctor in all of California in his particular specialty.

  “Get in there now,” Dr. C said to us. “Hold her hand. Tell her you love her. This is your last chance. And if she doesn’t go unconscious before we wheel her out, just keep talking. Talk while you can.”

  My brother and I must have been in some sort of stupor for them to give us such explicit instructions. I imagine we stood frozen, looking like we needed a push, a verbal list of what to do, caught in the transitional moment between hearing the information and understanding what it meant. The social worker let go of my hand and placed her palm on my shoulder, physically guiding us back into the room where my mother lay naked, her entire torso, collarbone to hips, slathered in brown liquid. She appeared to be covered in thin, translucent mud.

  My mother’s best friend was with us by now, and my husband, too. My brother and I held her hands while the nurses inserted catheters all up and down her arms.

  But what do you say when you say goodbye?

  How do you say goodbye without letting the person think that they are supposed to die now, that they shouldn’t keep fighting that internal battle that could make a difference, ignite some sort of willpower that would enable them to miraculously survive? Among other things, I decided to talk about memorable events—good times, cherished memories. At first it was easy to name and describe a few good times. But to be honest, my mother and I have always had a somewhat contentious relationship. As a teenager and young adult, it seems like all we did was either fight or avoid each other. When I was twenty-nine, we went a whole year without speaking. But then, sometime after my thirtieth birthday, we made amends—tacitly agreed it was time for a do-over—and eventually learned to work around each other’s quirks.

  My mother’s body seemed to shrink as we leaned toward her to speak, to touch her fingers. We leaned back when the nurse reached and poked, then we drew into her again. Lean. Let up. Lean. Over and over. All the while we talked, careful to speak in the present tense: You are a great mom; We have a great life together; Like, remember the time…. And the time….

  By now my brother had Googled “aortic dissection” on my husband’s phone, which we passed silently between us. The cause of Lucille Ball and John Ritter’s sudden deaths.

  Talk while you can.

  Three seconds turned to ten seconds. Then one minute, then five, then ten.

  I struggled to keep talking.

  Because, really, after “I love you” and all the obvious declarations that pour out of your mouth during the first few minutes, what else do you say when you say goodbye—when you get an unspecified amount of overtime? A deathbed do-over?

  I paused to think. Memories? Memories. I needed more memories. In reality, I probably only paused for a split-nano-fraction of a second. But everything moved in slow motion, so it seemed like a long pause. A long silence. The silence stretched like a balloon, over-inflated and thin, spreading asymmetrically between past and present.

  Then, click. The trip to Ecuador my mom and I had taken many years back, where we’d gone to the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands. The trip was amazing, but miserable, too. My mother and I didn’t get along too well during that month-long trip, and she and I both got so sick we needed a doctor’s care while traveling. My mother hated the entire trip—she discovered that she wasn’t cut out for international travel, at least not in a developing country. I, on the other hand, found a new sense of freedom, a sense of empowerment that would later lead me to travel to all sorts of places, all over the world. But it wasn’t the fact that I loved the trip, or that she didn’t, that made me talk about it there in the surgery prep room. If my mother only had a few seconds left to live, I wanted her to remember what an adventure we had shared. How it had changed my life for the better. How I wouldn’t have become who I am had she not invited me to go in the first place. So I talked. About the Galapagos Islands. The iguanas, the shark—remember that shark?—the small sailboat that carried us seven hundred miles from the shore. I talked about the Amazon. The jungle, the piranhas—remember the piranhas?—the brown water we drank each day, still slightly muddy even after being filtered. Mud every-where—remember the rubber Wellies, our legs covered in mud from the knee down each day? Remember?

  We talked of other memories, too. My brother and I growing up. The grandchildren. You are the best mom, the best grandma. We are so lucky to have you. Present tense.

  Draw strength from the past, but stay in the present. Lean into, inhabit the space where time sits up, independent of past or future.

  My mother’s eyes remained closed as we continued our goodbyes—without ever actually saying the word “goodbye”—but rather, “Remember us while you’re in surgery. These memories will give you strength. You’ll go to sleep in a minute, and when you wake up in post-op, you’ll be transformed. No more pain. Everything will be better.”

  She doesn’t remember any of that now—she has no recollection of the medical event, the ER, of us that night. But I believe part of her brain heard what we said, was awake and active during that liminal phase, that in-be
tween place where her existence teetered on the threshold between life and death.

  Twenty-Five

  (2013)—

  I push open the blinds in my mother’s room so she can see the garden outside her sliding-glass door. Sitting upright in her brown mechanized recliner, she complains that the peach tea I give her is too hot and tells me to add some cold water.

  “What have you done today?” I ask.

  “Sit here,” she says.

  “What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  I ask if she’s looked at the new books I left for her, if she had the caregiver wheel her to morning exercise class, if she’s watched TV, if she’s written (scribbled, in her case) in the notebook I left on her table.

  No, no, no, and no.

  “So you watched the paint peel off the walls, then?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The room brightens even more once I turn on all the lights. Instead of a dank cave, it now feels like an inner extension of the garden outside—cheery, cozy, and colorfully decorated with Tibetan prayer flags and Eastern Indian tapestries, framed photos, her own paintings, and pink twinkly lights strung over the sliding-glass door. I ask my mother which activity we should do today. We could work on the photo album—I brought Ecuador photos—or I could read aloud, or we could watch Monk or Raiders of the Lost Ark.