The Smallest Lights In The Universe by Sara Seager

 

Astronomers tell us that every atom of our being originated with the celestial cataclysm of the Big Bang.  And every element and fiber, sentient or not, also has its origins there.  We are a multiverse of chemistry and matter, a plethora of particles and nuances.  When we look up to the heavens on an end-of-summer night, we see ourselves reflected back in the light of the stars.

Sara Seager, in her book, The Smallest Lights in the Universe:  A Memoir (Crown, 2020), has spent her career visualizing distant galaxies to find exoplanets, bodies that orbit distant stars, not unlike our sun, and who mirror the planets in our own solar system.  “There might be thousands of billions,” she writes, all “circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars.”  Hers is a study of light and dark, combing through space to get a clear glimpse of one of these exoplanets that might share some secret of what exists there at the very edge of what we see through the lens of a telescope.  To find this mirror earth would require us to see the “smallest lights in the universe.”  She searches for chemical signatures of life—water, oxygen, and other elements, but life elsewhere may not even incorporate the same elements as Earth.

Seager traces her life from the moment she knew she wanted to be an explorer of the stars.  On a camping trip as a child, she leaves her tent one night to gaze at the sky above her.  “My heart stopped,” she tells us.  “All these years later, I can still remember the feeling in my chest.  It was a moonless night, and there were so many stars—hundreds, perhaps thousands—over my head.  I wondered how such beauty could exist, and I wondered, too, why nobody had ever told me about it.”  She goes on to trace how in science, one investigation leads to another.  She has the epiphany that “scientists are explorers,” and she must follow her interests up into the heavens.

An important person in her formative years is her father.  He was a medical doctor who helped her focus on the things that matter, but she learns that “where you are changes everything.”  The first great tragic loss of her life is when he is diagnosed with cancer.  He tries to comfort her with platitudes:  “Death is a part of life…We start to die the day we are born.”  To the end, he supports her pursuit of her vocation.  “When the door of opportunity opens, you have to go through it,” he tells her as she contemplates taking up a challenging position at MIT.  As he approaches death, he pulls her to his side to tell her, “You are the joy of my existence.  You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you have exceeded all expectations.”  His loss profoundly affects Seager, and through her strong writing, impacts the reader as well.

The second major loss of her life is that of her husband, Mike.  They meet and form a bond, one that helps her navigate her world.  Later in life, she realizes that she is on the autism spectrum; in her days with Mike, she can be a bit standoffish and a loner.  He helps her socialize, and the two often journey into the wilderness to hike and canoe.  Together they have two sons, Max and Alex.  Their family is an even-numbered unit, complete and whole.  Mike takes care of most of the home duties leaving Seager to pursue her career.  Yet, he, too, is diagnosed with cancer, and as he fights the greatest battle of his life, Seager struggles to hold things together.  Her sons are very young, and she tries to shield them from the coming death.  The boys see the toll the disease takes on their father.  Seager wants them to remember their father.  She tells them that “memories are important,” and “All things live until they are forgotten.”  In the end, Mike’s passing leaves them an odd-numbered family, a group of three.  From studying her own grief through the lens of life after Mike, she realizes that we do not lose the dead all at once.  “You lose them a thousand times,” she writes, “in a thousand ways.  You say a thousand goodbyes.  You hold a thousand funerals.”

The saddest moment in the book and the most life-affirming is when she must let go of Mike’s memory to start a life with a new man, someone she was not looking for, nor did she think she would find.  In many ways, he seems like a better match for her, or maybe it is just that she has been changed by the confluence of elements in her life.  She is different, shifted, more light and sure of her world.

“I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every large telescope,” she writes at the end of the book.  “If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us.  We think we’re worth knowing.  We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky.  And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.”

The strength of Sara Seager’s writing is the way she takes us into her life.  We gaze through the mirror lens to see the poetry of the stars, and through the light, come to see ourselves.