We Are All Made Of Stars
Last week I saw the Aurora Australis. This hasn’t been seen in my part of the world since 2003 and I am not sure I even knew it was happening back then. I was knee deep in babies and interrupted sleep.
But this time, the baby is an adult so we traipsed out at 11.30pm, my husband in his slippers, my son and his girlfriend shoeless and all of us laughing as we made our way to the section of the Bayside beach where I read it was best to see the magical lights.
This part of the beach is special to me. It is where the ashes of two family friends were scattered and as I walked to the water’s edge, I gave them a nod of my head and a silent greeting.
Then I held my phone camera up to the skies and there it was, the beauty of a geomagnetic storm in all its glory.
It was very beautiful and baffling, kind of like life and hard to understand or explain so I just stood in the glorious changing colours and let it be a part of me.
The next day, I happened to come across a video of a woman who is an artist, Gabriela Reyes Fuchs. When her father, a spinal doctor who had saved many lives, was diagnosed with leukemia and died just six days later, she struggled to comprehend the finality of death.
Being a photographer, Gabriela needed to see evidence of this death more than a body, she wanted to look at her dad's ashes under a microscope. She went to a university lab where they had incredibly high-powered microscopes, the scientists there told her human ashes just look black, white and grey under the lens. But when Gabriela put a slide of her dad's ashes under a high-powered scope, she saw the world in a different form.
Instead of dull human ashes, she saw something that looked like the universe itself - colorful nebulas, meteor showers, planets, stars. It was like peering through a telescope at the night sky. ( or like looking at the Aurora Australias or Boralis.) All her ideas about life, death and reality were shattered at that moment. She no longer felt the sharp separation and loss instead she understood something at a deeper level.
All human ashes look like this under high magnification - a beautiful, star-filled universe, which makes sense, because science has shown humans and our galaxy are made of 97% of the same atoms. We can trace our origins back to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when particles combined to make the first atoms and stars were born. Those ancient stars created the elements that make up our bodies today.
We are all made of stardust. When we die, we return to that fundamental state. Gabriela's experience looking at her father's ashes suggests that maybe, on some deep level, nothing and no one is ever truly lost. We come from the cosmos and we return to it. Somewhere inside, we seem to intuitively know and long for that connection to something greater.
The emotionally perilous journey from childhood to adulthood can turn us into cynics and we lose the sense of magic and wonder that made us want to know more as children, but some of us never stop marvelling at the stars in the night sky because we know, at a cellular level that we are a part of that infinite universe. And in that sense, nothing is ever really gone forever.
When my close friend died two years ago, I bought her a star and named it after her. I told her to pop the astral kettle on when she’s gone and I’ll come and visit her. I realised the other night, that the astral kettle is closer than I thought. It is all in us. If I tune in enough, I can feel my friend, talk to my friends at the beach. It’s everywhere, glued together by the big love. I think that’s the thing that binds us together so we don’t scatter and fragment across the world, love.
This leads me to this from Physicist Aaron Freedman.
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
Kate
x