My Deceased Husband’s Voice — Coming at Me From the Stars

My deceased husband’s voice came at me the other day — from across the years, all the way from 1988. He was speaking to me from a summer’s night in the mountains, under the stars.

Jon’s thoughts came via a column I wrote for the Oakland Tribune in 1988. It was titled “Under the Tumbling Stars,” and I came across it as I was pulling together some of my old Trib columns for an upcoming book.

Journalist that I was during my Oakland Tribune days, no doubt I had taken notes that summer night in 1988. Back in the office the following week, I could use those  notes to write an essay about Jon — the mortal Jon.

I could write about what he had said then about where he is now.

Under the Tumbling Stars 

The Oakland Tribune, August 21, 1988

The children were crowded together in the loft in sleeping bags, like so many sausages in a frying pan. John, our host for the weekend, turned the tape player around, aiming the Vivaldi out the window. Judy, our hostess, turned out the lights. It was time for the adults to retire to the porch of this old cabin high in the Sierra. Woolen blankets and an astoundingly starry night awaited us there.

Stars. The workaday person has to watch out for stars. They have a way of changing the subject. Like most breadwinning folks, I’m basically a pavement watcher, a plodder. I keep a steady eye on the path ahead. And usually the path ahead is a freeway or a city sidewalk leading me somewhere important — the office, the pediatrician, the hardware store. Gripping my to-do list, I stick to the business at hand. Eyes downcast, I know where I’m going. I stay out of trouble this way. I get my work done, my time card filled out, the washing machine repaired, the kids picked up punctually from day camp. Rarely am I distracted by the meaning of it all.

Stargazing at Wawona

The last time I took a good look at the stars was the year Jon and I married. My new husband and I lay on our backs on the Wawona golf course at Yosemite, looking for the Andromeda Nebula. Back then, we had nothing better to do than look for Andromeda. It was Before Kids — 3½ years B.K. Jon taught me to see a star by looking just to the side of it, and then make it disappear into my fovea by looking straight at it. Together, we considered the possibilities of life out there, of black holes and 2 million-year-old photons just now reaching Earth.

In eighth grade, Lynn McWilliams and I dragged our metal cots out of our Girl Scout camp cabin and spent the night sleeping under the stars — or rather, not sleeping under the stars. All through the night, our eyes searched the star-laden night sky for meaning. We pondered God. We pondered certain 13-year-old boys. When the first glow of sunlight appeared in the east, the magical stars faded and released us from their spell. Lynn and I fell asleep on our dewy beds. For all our talk and for all our pondering, my junior high friend and I learned little new of God or the pubescent boys we so yearned for. But after a night of thinking and talking, Lynn and I were friends. The stars had done that much.

Decades later, we are more cautious in our conversation and in our friendships. We stick to the city, the paved way. We rarely see the night sky. Workaday bedtimes, fog, city lights, and air pollution keep us from the stars. If God had intended industrialized human beings to stay in touch with the heavens, after all, would God have invented nitrogen oxides?

Necessity drove us to the porch and the stars. The sausages needed their sleep, and for that they needed quiet. Otherwise, in the morning they would awake from their cocoons, transmogrified into grizzly bears. 

My Deceased Husband’s Voice

A starry night has a lot in common with the psychiatrist’s couch and the confessional. The speaker does not see the listener. The ego sprawls like the Milky Way. Confidences spring forth like popcorn from a popper. As shooting stars fizzled one by one in the Sierra sky, Jon, a computer programmer and a sci-fi buff, speculated that this world is but a dream. At death we would awaken to our true state.

No, life is finite, said John, a physician and a scientist. What you see is what you get.

“Life is in the living,” Judy concurred. Judy is also a doctor. “When I die, I die. My DNA rots.”

The Possibility of Friendship 

When I was 13, the Girl Scout camp conversation went from eternity to the opposite sex and back again. Tonight, as Andromeda spiraled toward us at 300 kilometers a second, the conversation turned once again from the heavens to the important, fleshly issues of the day. We were all getting closer to the rotting of the DNA, we told each other. Eyes and backs were failing all over the porch. We talked of bifocals and nocturnal pit stops, and did our best to laugh.

The questions asked under the night sky may have changed since we were adolescents. But some things had stayed the same, enough of them to keep us comfortable out here, wrapped in our blankets: the granite mountains, the tumbling stars and the possibility of friendship.

More thoughts on nature at, “Nature — We Love It, but Does It Give a Darn About Us?”  And on human nature at, “Lt. Colonel Vindman and That Old Question — Are We Born Selfish?”

Note to readers: This Oakland Tribune piece about friendship and stars will be featured in the book I’m working on right now: a memoir-in-essays about having it all — marriage, motherhood and career — in the 20th century. More to come on that topic. I’ll keep you posted.