Cedric and I were like the sun and the moon; not quite opposites, but decidedly different. I was always the quiet, shy girl who never minded being in the background. This worked out well since Cedric had a bright, bubbly personality that commanded attention. From the moment I met him I knew that we would complement each other well, that he needed a calm presence like mine to keep him grounded. It was not often that I felt needed. That feeling alone was enough to make me shrug off any resentment I felt about Cedric getting so much glory and praise. He deserved it, after all, and most of the time I was happy to be the girlfriend who stood behind him as he accomplished amazing things. With Cedric I never felt selfish or conceited. I felt happy to be so close to someone so fantastically talented. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t close at all.
Three years ago my boyfriend was chosen to be part of the first group of astronauts to establish a long-term colony on a space station, Hades, which would enter into orbit in our solar system like a ninth planet. For Cedric, a brilliant aerospace biomedical engineer, it was the opportunity of a lifetime and the result of years of hard work. For me, it felt like the end of my life. I was losing my best friend, the only person who saw my value as a person. When Cedric left for training six months after receiving the job offer, I went through all of the stages of grief as though I had lost him forever. I was alternately angry, depressed, and in denial, and I worsened my ever-present anxiety with repeat viewings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In spite of all my conflicting emotions, when Cedric would come home for a weekend or even a day I would forget why I was ever worried at all. We would look up at the stars and I would try not to imagine the near future, when looking at the stars would be the closest I could get to seeing Cedric.
“You’re gonna get tired of looking at the stars all the time,” I quipped, “eventually you’ll miss Earth and its ugly cities and stupid gravity.”
“I’m going to miss you,” he replied. “The rest of it I can live without.”
He sounded so certain that I was afraid to question it, but deep down I wondered if he truly meant it. How could he possibly imagine the profound homesickness he might feel, up there in the stars for an indeterminate amount of time? Or maybe I was flattering myself, thinking that he’d miss our dying planet when he had galaxies at his fingertips.
Despite his reassurances and his semi-frequent visits, Cedric could not quell my anxieties. At the suggestion of my friends and my mother, who noticed the marked change in my temperament, I moved to Houston to be near him while he trained. When his busy training schedule kept him away from me more than our distance had, I asked him to marry me. We went to city hall on Cedric’s day off, just the two of us, and spent the afternoon at the planetarium. I thought getting married would change things, but the next morning Cedric still went into work and I went back to waiting for him.
For two years I kept my mouth shut and just appreciated the brief moments that I got to spend with him. There was so much I wanted to say, so many questions I needed to ask, but I knew the last thing Cedric needed was a nagging wife who wanted to stop him from achieving his dream. The takeoff date loomed nearer and nearer. While Cedric prayed for sunny, cloudless skies, I prayed for a thunderstorm, or a tornado, or something to keep him grounded and close to me. But the time passed quickly and the clouds blew away, leaving Cedric with the perfect conditions to leave me for the stars.
“When will I see you again?” I asked him, alone for a moment before his departure. Although he tried to remind me that his contract was not lifelong, that he would come back at some point, I didn’t dare to hope for his return out of fear that I would jinx it. His answer was just as awful as I’d expected.
“I don’t know.”
He held me until his commander told him it was time to leave.
The first year after Cedric left was the hardest. I was lonely, of course, but more than that I felt lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself without Cedric around. I found myself picking up my phone to text him, or driving by the Training Center at the end of his workday before remembering that he wouldn’t be coming home.
As time passed, I got better at managing the sense of loss, but the loneliness never went away. Communication with him was extremely limited, with him only being allowed to send me a video message once a month due to the distance and his busy schedule. My job, my friends, nothing meant anything to me anymore except for the five minutes each month when I got to see my husband. In my video responses, I tried to tell him everything that was happening back on Earth, but it all seemed so minuscule in comparison to the ground-breaking work he was doing in space. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was bringing us farther apart, the distance or the inferiority and loneliness I feel being the girl back home, waiting for my genius space traveller husband to find time to remember me.
The pain, fear, and loneliness I felt then was nothing compared to what I felt on July 7, five years into the mission, when I went to see my monthly video message only to be told that none had arrived.
“Should I come back next week?” I asked the NASA publicist who usually communicated with me on my visits. “Will the videos be here then?”
“Lady, at this point we don’t know if you should bother coming back at all.”
My whole body went numb and my mind raced, imagining all the possible reasons why my husband’s video message wouldn’t have arrived. I immediately came to the conclusion that he had died up there in space, a million miles away from anyone who loved him.
The real answer was far worse.
They sent me home that day without answering any of the questions running through my head. I sat numbly in front of the TV all night, waiting for a news bulletin or something to show up and reveal to me what exactly had happened to Cedric. The next day, I went back to NASA. They sat me down in a big room with the loved ones of all the other people on the mission and told us that contact with the space station Hades had been lost and could not currently be recovered. I do not have any recollection of the 24 hours immediately following this announcement. I just remember waking up in my room with my mother at my side and forgetting for a brief moment what I had learned the day before.
“Mama?” I said, my voice hoarse and my eyes swollen from crying.
“It’s gonna be okay, baby,” my mom said, stroking my hair as if I were still a child.
Bursting into tears for probably the thousandth time that day, I clung to my mother.
“What am I supposed to do?” I choked out, in between sobs.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
I spent 10 years fighting a losing battle against my loneliness. Every time I made some sort of progress, I’d see a television show about space or hear his favourite song on the radio and be reminded of the husband I lost to the stars. I tried not to give up hope those first few years, but it was difficult when there was no evidence supporting my fervent hope that Cedric would make it back. As time passed I stopped hoping for his return and began praying for a sign, anything at all, that would prove that Cedric was still alive. While NASA could confirm that the station was still functioning, which meant people had to be maintaining it, they could not confirm which crew members were still alive. In the eyes of everyone on the planet, my husband was dead.
When I looked back at my actions the years leading up to his departure, I felt ridiculous. I put so much effort into making sure Cedric was happy and able to pursue his dream that I didn’t allow myself to be selfish. I should have asked him to stay, I should have cried and begged and pleaded with him not to go. He said he loved me, he promised me forever, and I ended up grieving twice for the loss of a man I never should have lost at all.
After I lost contact with Cedric, I couldn’t imagine allowing myself to move on. I had invested so much love into our relationship and it had ended so abruptly that getting close to another person felt masochistic. Besides, at the end of the day I was still married, still committed to my lost astronaut husband. How unfair would it be for me to move on and allow myself to be happy with someone else when Cedric might have died in space, alone and still in love with me? I talked to therapists who called it survivor’s guilt and urged me to continue living my life. Imagine the insensitivity of continuing to live when you allowed someone you loved to become lost forever.
Four years after Hades lost contact with ground control and nine years after Cedric climbed aboard for the journey of his lifetime, something in me changed. I was 32-years-old, effectively a widow, and continuing to mourn for someone who would never have wanted me to mourn for him. I thought about all the things Cedric had wanted to do on Earth, all the places he had wanted to go. I woke up one morning and couldn’t believe that I had stopped living my life because there was a chance Cedric had stopped living his. My mentality had been completely backwards this entire time: Instead of ceasing my earthly life as abruptly as Cedric had, I should have spent the past ten years living enough for the both of us, doing enough incredible things to fill up two lifetimes. When Cedric was alive I felt compelled to stand in the background and let his brilliance shine. Now I had to shine twice as hard to make up for his absence.
I did more in that year than most people do in their entire lives. I travelled, climbed, ate, cried, bought, sold, cut and grew. In between it all I wrote and wrote, hundreds of pages documenting every sensation along the way in the hopes that, somehow, Cedric might one day be able to read them and marvel at all that I had done in his absence.
On July 7, exactly five years after ground control lost contact with Hades, I did something that was not on Cedric’s bucket list. I went on a date.
I felt like I was 20 years old again, young and careless. He took me to a carnival and we spent hours eating cotton candy, going on roller coasters, and just enjoying the nervous excitement of a first date. When the sun went down, we went on the ferris wheel and looked up at the stars. My heart raced as we neared the top, the closest I could get to Cedric while still being stuck on Earth. Despite not having heard from him in five years, I knew that he was watching me and smiling, probably making fun of my awkward banter and the chocolate sauce hanging from my chin. For the first time in 10 years, I felt at peace, knowing that I could live my life here and he could live his out there, and it didn’t mean we loved each other any less.
High off the rush of a first date gone well and aware of the approaching end of our day together, my date turned to me.
“When will I see you again?” he asked.
I smiled, knowing that for once there was an uncomplicated, quick, and exact answer to that question.
“How about tomorrow?”
—Julia D’Silva, second-year conflict studies.
