On Binary Stars and the Death of our Parents
It was only recently that astro-physicists discovered the relative rareness of our being raised by a celestial single mom. Perhaps 85% of stars in the universe are part of a binary system, one that involves two stars revolving around each other, spending billions of years in the paths of each others light. It is much less common to be raised by a single human parent on Earth, in the US the official number hovers near 25%. Relatively recent science suggests that Jupiter, named for the father god of the ancients, might in fact be our star’s still-born companion, an unlit star that, as a result of it’s darkness, created conditions where life could emerge on Earth. Jupiter is Earth’s Mufasa, it’s death preserved our life.
Being home for the holidays for the first time as a full-fledged, out-in-the-world adult has me reflecting a lot on my parents, their lives, and what comes next for our family as my time horizon switches from four years to 50 (or likely, much more), from the range of college to that of my working life. Unless Google really ramps up it’s immortality research and our family wins the lottery to be able to afford it, whether I like it or not, sometime in the next 50 years, my parents will, let’s say, “go quietly into that good night.”
I’m lucky enough to be from a binary parental system in one of the most distant and insignificant parts of the known universe; Cheyenne, WY, USA, Earth, Milky Way. For most of my life I’ve been revolving around my two parent-stars, awe-struck by their stories, their lives, the sheer quantity of time they’ve gone on burning in the darkness. But in the very recent past, less than a blink in cosmic time, I was flung out of my stable orbit into interstellar space on a very long and elliptical trajectory that brings me back to them only once or twice a year. Out in the universe I’ve seen amazing things, sailed past other brilliant stars and left a burning trail through galactic communities from Georgetown to Cape Town to Sacramento. I met new stars who, bit by bit, burned off the coldness parts of me and left me a little smaller, barer, and purer. Every year that I come back home, I think my parents recognize me a little less, and I’m losing my ability to tell how they feel about that.
I’m beginning to sense the approach of that future moment when my home system goes supernova. The event will dissolve my last links to this little boondock of my inheritance. Some silver-lining-seeking part of me wants to believe that the heartbreak of this moment will be illuminated by the lightness of it, with the gravity of my home system no longer pulling on me, I’ll be free to journey to places that my parents could have only dreamed of. Some more bitter and vulnerable part of me thinks even that as they age, forging heavier and heavier elements in their celestial furnaces, my parents will only drag more and more on me, crippling my adventures with their cosmic baggage. This part suggests that to reach my fullest heights, I must first be free of them, that only the shock wave created by their collapse will be enough to knock me from my ordinary orbit into an extraordinary one.
Then I’ll be shepherdless, guided only by the more gentle pulls of more distant stars, my birth place obliterated, destined to sail through the skies of roving galaxies until my ice is spent and I fade into some distant darkness. It’s hard to think about directly, the end of these glorious beings that have raised me more than anything on their light, nourished me on the energy that emanates from their hearts, burned awe into the cold and dark that is the natural state of the universe to make me positively glow. I know that when this supernova commences, I will be lost, cold, heartbroken, alone when for all of my existence, despite all distances, I had always been together.
When I come back down to Earth, the only thing that I can really know about the eventual departure of my parents is that it will be unimaginable. Whether or not the shock waves are enough to change my path in life, the effect of the cosmic radiation will certainly denature me, leaving me an altogether different being thereafter.
In this way I can reasonably predict that the collapse of my binary system will create a black hole, and one with an event horizon so dark and so long that even without entering it, something of me will be lost in it. But so too will something of my lost stars be in me, etched into the molecular structure of my matter, star seeds blasted into my core that I will carry always. In that way, though my parents are now captured by the pushing and pulling of our lawed universe and won’t again wander beyond Cheyenne, WY, Earth, Milky Way, their death would allow them to go everywhere at once, return to their adventures, stay with me and be free of me, rest their exhausted hearts and leave the struggle of existing to us.
