by Peter Topolewski
Isn’t it time we talk about you?
You.
A collection in the realm of 4.5 x 10^27 atoms. A portion of your hydrogen and helium atoms originated in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. The heavier elements in you, the stuff of life, the carbon and nitrogen, they came from stars. From exploding stars, in fact. The dying blasts of stars in distant galaxies accounted for perhaps a smallish measure of your atoms. Most came from stars exploding in the Milky Way, and above all from a single super nova that preceded the existence of our own star, the Sun. Like all the others, it was a super nova without a name, one we’ll never know, but one we should be especially grateful for. It was amazing wasn’t it, generous, as Thomas Berry would say, giving itself away without asking?
It gave me you.
Extraordinary, those 4.5 trillion quadrillion atoms in you, from across the cosmos, they’re mostly empty space. Take away the space, and all of them together would be no larger than a single biological cell. As far as those atoms have traveled, as large as the universe has grown, there is, as Duane Elgin wrote, more smallness in you than there is bigness beyond you. On our cosmic scale, you are a giant.
In a photo I’m blessed to have, you’re five or six years old, standing near a farmhouse. Anyone who looked at it would say you’re little, but really you’re a giant. Who are you in that photo?
I could believe I came about randomly, through trial and error, but not you.
You are the atoms in that photo, but much more.
In another picture, you are in your twenties, alone on a chair in a living room, pensive and beautiful. All the atoms you contained when you were six and seven and eight years old, they’re gone, given over to the environment, replaced with others wholly new to you. In that frozen moment, your eyes are on a place only you can see, your mind on thoughts, hopes, concerns I cannot reach.
Who were you?
If you can be composed of other atoms and still be, you can be any atoms, can’t you? And if you can be any, can’t you be all?
Who are you?
You are atoms and more.
What did you know of those atoms, of any atoms? What did you know of stars, of the bonds between atoms and stars, the opportunity for happiness and heartbreak in those bonds? What could you know about the future, the places you’d go, the challenges you’d face. The people you’d meet and love.
In another photograph, snapped not long after, you’d found that love. You are on a boat, you are in the arms of your love, smiling, laughing, glowing.
What did you know of where that love would take you, what it would make of you, what it would bring out in you and demand of you? What did you know of the people you’d bring about, the people you would sacrifice for?
Including me.
I, too, came of the stars. The super nova that gave itself to each of us wasn’t my only crucible. Acts I don’t know about, I can’t know about and those I don’t remember, those, too, formed me. At six years old, in your early twenties and late twenties, you probably didn’t know about all that lay ahead. But I can believe that in a way you did. You had your faith, your guiding light, perhaps a vision of where all this leads, what it is all for.
In another photograph, at a lakeside the Sun is shining. This time I am in front of you, your left arm around me, your hand holding my forearm. Your atoms are different again, not the same as when you were six and twenty-six, but it’s you. Both of us, like everyone who ever was and will be, are made of stars. But you and I also share DNA, and I have not only your cells, but you mine. We don’t control microchimerism, no more than we control the stars.
At times I could believe it all came about by chance. But I have memories of you, and in my memories what you gave could not come by chance. You are what makes sense of the atoms.
What’s it all for? It’s for us.
Neuroscientists say a memory is what remains after an experience, so when we encounter one similar in the future, we change our behavior. That’s not the whole story for us though, is it?
If my memories of you were photographic, if they contained every detail and every step, like data gathered, they wouldn’t be memories at all, I wouldn’t know the difference between then and now—and isn’t that their value?
Our memories are a place to visit. We go back to our memories, wander around in them. For solace and comfort, for laughter.
You liked going back to yours. To times when you were young, when in your white uniform you cared for patients. To the people you loved, to places you visited with the love of your life. Some were the grandest locales of history, but you liked the humblest spots best.
Memories are precious because they cross time. Most fade, making those that remain priceless. What if they leave completely? Near the end, it seemed like they eluded you, but maybe not, maybe only the words for those memories escaped.
For most of my life I visited my memories and saw only myself, couldn’t fathom anything except that I was the center of the world. Now I have memories of us. I wish I could know your thoughts in those memories, where your mind trailed off to, your concerns and joys. But they’re hidden and as closed off to me as in my photos of you. Your love is not.
Now when I visit those memories, wade in and float about in them, they’re dreamlike—but not dreams.
A dream. Just a memory without anywhere to stay, Neil Young sings. My memories of you are more than dreams.
You are planting in your garden in spring, then raking leaves in the fall, smoke rising from the burn pile. It’s summer now, you’re on the front steps, knees dark with dirt from your flower beds, coffee in hand. At the dining room table, the dinner dishes long gone, wine poured, cigarette lit. Your laugh. Your surprise every time I pinch, gently, always gently, your cool earlobes from behind after you come in from the cold. You are silent at the front door as I leave in my teenage get-up, confident I’ll figure things out. Patiently you sit in your living room chair while I show off my college class know-it-all. You smile, proud, in red and silver, on graduation day, through my tears of gratitude. In the toy section, not my first tantrum, not my last, you don’t make a fuss. A snack of fries and gravy in the Kmart cafeteria. A walk home together from your work, giddy with awe of Hale-Bopp transforming the night sky. At the dining room table again, older, telling me all would be OK. Forgiving me.
When I put words to the memories, I feel the distance between us growing. When I swim in the memories, I feel you best, feel you closest, though I can’t shake it, the knowledge you’re gone. And it hurts most.
I am sorry for every sorrow I caused you. You were the best at relieving what troubled me, but you deserved better than the problems I brought. You deserved the exact opposite of sorrow.
Above all, I am thankful, thankful a thousand billion times, for what you gave, what you are.
The Sun, our star, set as you left. Quiet, brilliant, beautiful. Did you know the baby you once held would in turn hold your hand at the end of all this? But you made it so in a way, made him want, to need, to be there. Who could have known?
My memories of you have a place to stay in me. The love persists, the love in those memories. I will never forget.
Not as long as the stars are shining.
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