A Star is Memory

“Take Deneb,” my father said, pointing the flashlight into the night sky. My mother and I were quiet, listening to my father’s voice rise above the pop and crackle of the campfire. Having a fire outside was my favorite thing. I was ten, and we had eaten all the marshmallows.

“Deneb is in the constellation Cygnus. Its light takes 1,500 years to reach us here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.” Everything was an educational opportunity for my father, who was a professor of astronomy. Especially an evening looking up at the stars.

“You mean the star might not even be there anymore?” The enormity of this shocked me. I imagined the sun disappearing—what would happen to us? My father taught me that stars were immense balls of gas, often much bigger and brighter than our sun. How could something so massive, so essential just disappear? All this light and nothing left to cast it.

***

A star is a guide. I am driving to work, listening to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson interview traditional Hawai’ian navigator Nainoa Thompson. Thompson has a teacher’s voice, measured, almost hoarse, compelling. He says, “If you can identify the stars as they rise and set…you can find your direction.” In 1980, Thompson navigated a boat over 2,000 miles from Hawai’i to Tahiti without using instruments, not even a compass or wristwatch. The road along the river, the bright green knotweed edged by swaying goldenrod, all disappear as I listen.

Traditional navigators use a star compass, which is a mental map. The navigator pictures a circle: At the center is the boat, and the edge of the circle is the horizon. The navigator divides the circle into houses, smaller areas of the horizon where groups of bright navigational stars rise and set. The navigator holds the boat in the direction marked by the stars, aided by patterns of clouds, waves, memories, birds, and story.

Tyson breaks in to comment “Okay, I have some stars in my head, like for fun.”

He tells an anecdote about how the stars were in the wrong place in the dramatic last scene of Titanic. This would have bothered my father too. Tyson adds, “But I don’t need to have stars in my head so I don’t die.”

***

When my father was in his early seventies, he went to the doctor because he couldn’t remember how to drive home from the hardware store. Two days later he had brain surgery for a tumor. I left my house in North Carolina early that morning, driving toward Virginia through January gold pastures, the trees black against the sky. Through the small Carolina river towns and tobacco fields, an unfamiliar crop. Lynchburg was steeple-filled, a place for fast food and getting on the main road, the tension was almost unbearable by the time I got to the foothills of the Blue Ridge and I knew I was so close to Charlottesville, but not there yet.

I went straight to the hospital and stood on the brick floor of the atrium, wondering where to go. I briefly considered sitting on the floor and howling for my mother. I went first to the surgery waiting room. Five tired heads rose to look at me when I opened the door, but none of them were familiar. Desperation sent me back to the reception desk where the woman advised me to go to a different floor. Just as I got to the banks of elevators, one opened and my mother stepped out. She was well put together, as usual, in her smart navy wool coat and her dark red lipstick, her black and gray curls cut short against her head. I had never been so happy to see her in all my life. She hugged me, and then told me briskly that we were going to get some coffee. I was used to letting my mother navigate, grateful to be swept along.

A few hours later, my sister Linda, my mother, and I all clustered around my father’s bedside, waiting anxiously for him to regain consciousness. He had undergone a craniotomy and his head had been partly shaved. His large rectangular face looked extra pale, but otherwise normal. He opened his gold-green eyes.

There are a standard series of questions that a medical professional asks to make sure a person knows where they are, and that the person is oriented to time, place, and person.

“What is your name?” the doctor asked.

“Samuel Joseph Goldstein, Jr.,” my father said slowly, as if confused as to why someone was asking.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Charlottesville, Virginia.”

“Do you know who this is?” he pointed to my mother.

My father smiled and said proudly “That’s my wife, Carol.”

“Do you know the date?”

“March…..7?” he said, although it was early February.

“What year is it?” the doctor asked gently.

My father had no idea.

***

You wake up in a hospital bed. You aren’t quite sure what has happened or where you are. You look around. Your wife is a star. Your name is a star. Your children are stars.

***

A week after the surgery, a social worker ushered my parents, my sister, and me into a cold gray cubicle on the neurology ward to meet with a surgeon and a resident.

“So, we performed a biopsy on Mr. Goldstein’s tumor,” the doctor began. His tone was not encouraging. “We were not able to get all of the tumor. The glioblastoma is star shaped. It was impossible to get it all.” My sister and I exchanged glances. Of course he had a tumor shaped like a star. The doctor said he had nine months to a year to live. He lasted six months.

***

Stars have begun to feel like an extinction. Light pollution creeps even across my own rural Vermont skies. We lose 10% of the night sky every year because of increasingly brightly lit places where the light goes carelessly up instead of down.

My father watched the stars in the Pacific Ocean on his way to repair radios in the Philippines and Guam during World War II. What did he know about history? The Holocaust hadn’t come to its genocidal conclusion. No one had launched anything into space. The Civil Rights movement hadn’t achieved prominence yet. Nainoa Thompson hadn’t helped spark a renaissance in native Hawai’ian pride by sailing a traditional ocean-going canoe from Hawai’i to Tahiti the way his ancestors did.

I feel protective of my 18-year-old father, tall, blond, serious, going to war. Did he hold the stars in his head? Were they a relief, that array of lights, a reminder of an existence beyond war, boredom, and fear of the unknown?

***

I don’t have very many stars in my head. Orion. Cassiopeia. The Big Dipper. But night after night, the unnamed patterns wheel silently across the sky. The Milky Way is a fine spray of mist across my vision. The winter stars, in particular, send a steady light, their very steadiness reminding me how cold the darkness is. The planets blaze a celestial spotlight, blue and orange and yellow.

A star is an escape. The night sky takes me out of myself, a cosmic background to nights with friends around the fire circle (at 49, still one of my favorite kinds of evenings) or winter midnights when I can’t sleep and I watch Orion shining through the bedroom window until my eyes burn. At the beginning of an explicitly authoritarian presidency, I go outside, stare up at the stars, and let the darkness take my anxiety and fear. I try not to imagine how many stars I am missing.