Widowed: My Husband Is Missing Out — On the Sight of Two Galaxies Dancing in Space

Jon wasn’t here to tell me about it, so I had to learn about the Penguin and the Egg from a radio announcement.

It seems that there are two galaxies out there in space, dancing cheek-to-cheek, neither of them big enough to overwhelm and consume the other. The astronomers at NASA have named them the Penguin and the Egg.

If Jon were here, he’d be telling me about it.

Widowed: My Husband Is Missing Out

Jon has been gone three-plus years now, and he’s missed out on a lot. Grandchild No. 1’s first piano recital. Grandchild No 2’s first swimming lessons. He’s also missed out on the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope back in December, 2021.

The Webb telescope was decades in the making, conceived in 1989 as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Jon followed the Webb’s progress over the years, intrigued by its ability to record infrared light from distant galaxies and what that light could reveal about the early history of the universe — and what that history might say to Jon about the nature of the universe.

Time is moving along without Jon. History is being made. Wars are being fought. People are running for president. Jon’s grandchildren are learning to do arithmetic and ride bikes. Our backyard is blooming with newly planted salvia and Pacific iris. The madrone trees planted in his honor (two, in hopes that one will survive) are putting down roots.

Or Is He?

Does this mean that Jon is missing out?

I am missing out. I don’t have Jon to explain the dancing galaxies to me.

But Jon is not missing out on anything. He had a life. A life that included many nights standing outside on our deck after dinner, leaning against the railing, taking in the silvery moon and the tumbling stars and thinking his Jon Newhall thoughts.

Jon had a life. He was here. He was here just as surely as the Penguin and the Egg were here when they sent out the infrared light that has just now arrived at the eighteen mirrors of the Webb telescope floating spider-like in space.

More space photos at “Geoff Machin: We Go Looking for God When We Could Be Having a Beer.”  Obsession with the concepts of space and time run in the Newhall family. More about that at “Take a Second — To Celebrate the Fabled Leap Second.”