Some nights I submerge into a liminal, half-asleep fog and find myself engulfed by infinity itself—an indulgent showcase of enriched guts and crucibles of light. I am wearing a spacesuit. This universe looks astounding and even suffocating in its utter vastness. A blank canvas that has been painted again and again. Surely this is what it means to embody everything everywhere all at once.

And yet, as a mortal, fallible earth creature prone to self-exiling, I sometimes find myself panicking when I feel this untethered, this alone. I gaze across the cosmic hinterland of my imagination and see there is no shuttle or structure or soft container to rescue me. No external promises or guarantees to count on for safety and protection, however illusory. Worst of all, I am not preprogrammed to know the way home. I am lost in space.

As I surrender to fits and drips of deeper sleep, relief is experienced only by conjuring the sensation of another human’s hand to hold mine tight. Endless black holes are always easier to navigate in good company. Together is better.

I woke up yesterday with a stalled brain and grief hangover. I read the essay I published the previous night—the anniversary of my mom’s death—and wept. These sentences had already transmitted to a handful of subscribers, but I was so disenchanted by my own diatribe that I feverishly began rewriting the live version on Substack. I auto-replaced every ‘hate’ with ‘love,’ but this felt disingenuous. I tried to soften my critique, especially of my father and brother, and of myself, but nothing resonated. My writer’s mind had arrived at a dead end.

Eventually I unpublished the essay and reconciled the sunk costs of knowing some folks had already seen it. I turned my attention to news headlines. Each story of violence and destruction felt like a rusty metal peeler stripping away another layer of my heart. The smell of stale grapes, rotting hops, and cold coffee expressed through my pores and filled the air. How would the planet continue to bear the weight of such terror? How does one thrive in a mad world? How will humanity survive?

My ego seeks an audience, but my spirit yearns for freedom. I must write in order to metabolize and integrate these experiences of being alive. But, the words as they fall into this public-facing wormhole are proving unrecognizable to me: a performative garble of thoughts and emotions turned outside in instead of inside out. I am recording myself aching for accolades, while the truest broadcast is a soulful yearning for connection. I seek to press my palm into yours, to lighten the darkness with you, to risk the possibility that love is the antidote.

One thing I have always known about my self: I am better off living my stories while they are unfurling in the moment—this generous spacetime known as the infinite present—rather than grasping for future retrospective. I am happiest when I am listening and holding others close. I am most content when we are writing new stories together, in life and in death.

Will you please forgive me for exiting these stacks so swiftly? If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It was such an honor to receive your support so immediately. I’ll reach out individually to see about stopping and/or refunding your payments. To my tiny but mighty flock of free subscribers, I love you all. Love is the way.

I hope to see you soon in a real place in a real moment, your hand in mine, my hand in yours, breathing, believing, together.

Briefly here, always everywhere, yours,

Breq

[The first part of this story is here.]

Not so long ago in a crooked galaxy too close for comfort, a complex human named Breq Lightner was readying for birth. This particular star nursery looked like a crumbled chapel retrofitted as a Meditation Room on the ground floor of a children’s hospital. Modern day medical facilities, especially those in urban, liberal cities, want atheists, agnostics, and spiritual ‘nones’ to have a place to rest, wail, and call on the universe when their child is sick or dying too.

Occasionally empty, the Meditation Room also served as a quiet lunchroom for chaplains in training. The date was December 14, 2022, exactly, precisely, ten years after the death of my mother’s body. It was also the exit portal out of the Sandwich Period: a monthlong spacetime that begins annually on November 14, my mother’s birthday. This year, with an audience of four colleagues and one very tall supervisor, I had committed to eating a sandwich every day for 30 days.

“Do hotdogs count as sandwiches?” my work husband asked.

Stefan was a retired civil engineer and community pastor turned chaplain resident. Once upon a time, Stefan and his real-life wife lost their daughter to a malignant neoplasm within a month of her 6th birthday. He understood Sandwich Periods: the capsulized liberation that allows for grieving with abandon mingled with the terror and exhaustion experienced when grieving with abandon.

“You’re asking a Chicago native if hotdogs count as sandwiches?” I scoffed.

“Yes,” Stefan said flatly. His shaggy, unkept eyebrows were turning wild with gray.

“Italian beef sandwiches, yes. Obviously. Hot dogs, no.”

Our supervisor interrupted, “Lunch break is over. Patients. 10 per day. Metrics. Funding. Let’s get out there.”

Sometimes those six urgent phrases were enough to spark something resembling a panic attack, a fit of hiccups, or a torrent of tears. I could be so witty and charming and grounded when I was halfway out of my body, but the moment I was instructed to arrive back and start hustling on behalf of a behemoth healthcare institution, my stomach would stomp up my spinal cord and into my brain. There it would strike a match and set afire an illogical, neurological, electrical storm.

Nothing makes sense in the Sandwich Period. My mom had been my best friend: the most eloquent, compassionate, fierce, funny, and objectively beautiful human that walked planet Earth. I held this appreciation of her for all 64 years of her life, even the last eight when she was barely recognizable and nearly impossible to love. I had been her right hand and her best buddy, so organically at birth and then more officially at age 11 when my parents divorced. I was parentified willingly, even gleefully.

Those last eight years were difficult. Young onset Alzheimer’s had started poisoning the groundwater of her marvelous being. I had just turned 30 when her symptoms of dementia began seeping up through the topsoil. I stepped off a plane, delirious, finally home from completing my Peace Corps service in rural Namibia. I needed my mom more in that moment than ever before, but she was nowhere to be found.

Her complete absence during these past many years has also been difficult. The Sandwich Period between her birthday and her deathday is frequently flooded with waking memories and midnight dreams, and they are almost always the same: we’re in a library, or we’re in our home where she died, or we’re on a busy street next to a pay phone with a numbered key that is still stuck, caked with the detritus of so many different fingertips longing to call home.

In one recurring nightmare, I am gripping a human by the collar. The face changes, but it frequently reflects the person with whom I am currently in love, who is most adorable and elusive to me in that moment of my life. With their cotton flannel shirt balled up in my bleeding fist, I am shaking them while my own body shakes. I am longing to have my mom back in her body. I am pleading with this person to love me the way my mom did. Please, I scream without making a sound. You aren’t enough.

These particular dreams sneak into the early morning hours right before my alarm sounds; the automated wakeup call never saves me in time. Instead, tidal waves of saltwater collect in my sleepy throat. I start hungering for air like my mother did in her final moments—the excruciating, vacuous seconds preceding death—when I sourced enough courage to place a hand on her chest, but not enough bravery to press her whole body against mine. Her lungs and my heart collapsed at the same time; it was too much to hold.

When the still asleep options whittle down to living or dying, and your constitution is still as hardy as mine, autonomic reflexes wake you up from bad dreams. The ensuing half-slumber can feel so violent and beautiful at the same time. For a few minutes, before reality fully overwhelms fantasy, I am simultaneously cloaked in my mom’s skin cells and my own. We are nested in a single sarcophagus. We share one heart, an organ of fire. Please, I howl into the morning sun. Don’t go.

Later that afternoon in the hospital, the final day of this year’s Sandwich Period, I am deeply fatigued by the ritualistic chore of untangling dreamed-together spirits, bifurcating the mother-child heart in my own body, and procuring commemorative sandwiches that will earn high marks from Stefan. Still, my patients—mostly dying and a small handful recovering—were calling me.

When I walked into Kavon’s room, they were sitting up in bed. Their functional hand maneuvered different patches over a new jean jacket sprawled across their legs. They looked up and met my eyes. This idea of sewing things together, of decorating a garment that could be worn out in the world one day at school, at home, and on walks through Golden Gate Park. The future was looking brighter with each passing hour. I flossed my teeth with this knowing and smiled broadly.

“Stop grinning and start reading,” Kavon mumbled through partially opened lips.

I pulled a chair over to the bed and faced Kavon. Opening Ancillary Justice, I began reading while they rested back and closed their eyes. Myriad mispronounced words gathered in the damp pouch of my face mask.

“Whoa, wait,” Kavon interrupted and slapped the back of their hand against the book cover. “This is our story.”

“Say more,” I replied like a good spiritual counselor is taught to do.

“You tell me! If I talk too much, I get tired,” they mumbled, beckoning.

“Oldest patient trick in the book,” I laughed. “How about you give me three sentences and then I’ll take it from there?”

Kavon sighed, looked up at the ceiling, and continued.

“We too are in this freezing cold place where it’s almost impossible to stay alive. Breq was a spaceship made up of many consciousnesses that was destroyed in outer space, and the remnants morphed into a single human being. Now Breq is pretty fucked up trying to hold so many consciousnesses in one body.”

Kavon lowered their eyes and searched my face to see if I was offended by profanity or the implication that I might be ‘pretty fucked up.’

“Go on,” I said with restrained amusement.

“Breq is wandering around the ice desert seeking revenge and sees her old spaceship lieutenant friend Seivarden, who is also a human now, lying sick in the street. Breq tries to save Seivarden, but in the end it’s Seivarden who saves Breq. They save each other.”

“That’s way more than four sentences,” I said, tears forming behind my eyes.

Kavon held my gaze, one eyelid still drooping. In that moment, I was reborn a space traveler named Breq, baptized by an otherworldly teenager with a cerebral cavernous malformation. The feeling of love unspooled between us and threaded our universes together. One teenager and one grownup, a patient and a chaplain, confined to a stark hospital room in the middle of the night, with a snoring mother in the background, had defied the rules and become friends.

“You’ll want a new last name too,” Kavon stated.

“Roger that,” I said and continued reading our story.

Kavon was discharged from the children’s hospital seven weeks later. We never spoke again, but I often imagine them strutting down the halls of their high school wearing a jacket covered in stitched designs. Maybe sewn inside the collar is a small, heart-shaped patch with two intergenerational astronauts nibbling ice cream sandwiches while floating through a gorgeous swath of stars.

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Some of my young patients don’t die, thankfully. While they recover, I have the remarkable chance to spend days, weeks, and sometimes months listening to their stories, sharing my stories, and shaping new stories that belong to both of us.

There is an old school pedagogical theory in therapy, social work, chaplaincy, and similar professions that asserts reciprocity, mutuality, and personal sharing are inappropriate approaches to counseling and healing. We are trained to always focus on the client or patient; we should never make the conversation about us.

I have sat bedside with dozens of children and even more adults while they bravely greeted the end of their lives, and I am certain the theorists are wrong. A dying teenager will eat a reflective listening robot faster than a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The conversation must go both ways or it will go nowhere at all.

It can be messy and intensely vulnerable to walk into a hospital room and absorb the fiercely palpable and odorous energy of Life and Death in battle. Most hospital chaplains carry copies of the Tao Te Ching, Holy Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Torah, or Quran as shields. Some spiritual care providers recite prayers by Navajo and Omaha people. We hope these coffers of religious tomes and spiritual stories today will make the coffin lid easier to close tomorrow.

For the first two months of chaplain school, I tried to follow the rules. See 10 patients per day, but be quick while having deeply meaningful, life-altering, death-welcoming interactions. Engage the evidence-based Spiritual AIM Model, but in a holy, sacred, secular way. Refer to patients as ‘patients’ instead of Joan or Diego or Tiny Potato. Maintain emotional boundaries, but keep your heart wide open. Be clinically natural and naturally clinical, at all times.

Eventually I decided near-misses at getting fired were better than far-wins at staying employed in a system that was making the otherworldly task of being present with another human dying almost impossible.

I started raising one eyebrow, a lot, and I began packing my chaplain bag with poetry and science fiction novels. Over time I would learn to pause outside of a hospital room in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and breathe my self fully back into my body. And then, I’d follow my toes. Wherever they went next, I went too.

Cerebral cavernous malformations sometimes bleed. In this case, my 16-year-old patient arrived in the PICU with stroke-like symptoms. The medical team always calls the chaplain when a kid is awake but can’t speak. They hope praying will help, or maybe I will be able to read their mind.

Yes, their mind. Teenagers, especially in the bubble called San Francisco, are as exhausted with the gender binary as I was then at age 48. It said right there in their medical chart, which I reviewed briefly before seeing this patient, that they use they/them pronouns. They also have a chosen name, Kavon.

I arrived at the nurse’s station and asked for a status report.

“Kai’s brain is bleeding. We’re waiting to see if it will stop on its own, or if she will need surgery,” the nurse said.

“I understand their name is Kavon?” I replied with curiosity.

“Oh right, yes. Sorry, her, I mean their, sorry, dad is inside and I think he’s okay with all of this, but her, ugh, their mom doesn’t speak English and I’m not sure she understands any of the pronoun or name stuff. Sorry. We’ve been trying to use the iPad translator with mom, but it’s not working well. Dad hates it. I’m actually not sure if the parents are still together. I’m so sorry,” the nurse said, seemingly distressed.

“Thanks for the details, sincerely,” I offered with a soothing tone. “I’ve never met Kavon, but I’m a pretty big fan of any human who is willing to show up as the truest version of themselves, even if it’s a ‘phase.’ I mean, today might be the end of their life, so cheers to anyone willing to be themselves on their death bed?”

A salty eddy was collecting in my throat, and I hiccupped. It was only noon, but I already felt so impossibly stretched trying to provide fast and perfectly appropriate care to my patients, their families, and the unit staff at the same time. I started to feel sad and overwhelmed, not at the people, but at the system. Then I remembered people built this system and anger started simmering behind my sternum.

I reached my arm up to high-five the nurse. This instinctive action seemed like the only response to the many emotions coursing through our bodies. She raised her hand and I laced our fingers together, not letting go. I hiccupped again and offered some of the escaped air to her hungry lungs. This is me putting my oxygen mask on, now let me help you with yours, I pled silently. Breathe.

“I’m with you,” the nurse said, waffling between bewilderment and relief.

The first few days I would walk into Kavon’s room and greet their father before sitting bedside. Dad sat near the back window, stoic, hunched over his laptop, observing me with skepticism. The tat-tat-tat of his keyboard became the dissonant soundtrack that scored our days. Kavon was now sedated while the medical team scrambled to diagnose and prognose.

“Kavon will be okay. She’s very smart and very strong,” Dad would say each time I arrived and departed. He loved their new name, but he longed for his little girl.

On the fourth day, I walked into Kavon’s room and there they were, awake! Suddenly gone, but now here. The knots in my chest started to loosen. I paused and looked into Kavon’s eyes. Their irises were black, vacuous, infinite, beautiful.

“Hi!” I smiled broadly. They couldn’t speak and seemed already bored by my presence. Teenagers. I hiccup-laughed this time.

“Holy smokes! I’m so glad you’re awake. I’ve been wondering about you. Who is Kavon? What are they up to in their life?!” I exclaimed.

I watched their body relax. I got their name right and their pronouns. No teenager ever calls for a chaplain; every teenager aches for a caring adult who is paying real attention, affirming who they are versus who we want them to be. We were together now and our only mission was to grab hands and not let go.

The tiniest smile overwhelmed Kavon’s paralysis and crawled into the tiny space where their cheek met their lip. We were 32 years apart in age, of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, with vastly different upbringings, but for one moment, this moment, we were free of labels and constructs. I was stunned by the feeling of comfort, this stardust-y sense of belonging to one another, of being each other.

On the eighth day, Kavon’s brain was learning how to be itself again. Their body was starting to heal on its own. A whiteboard was brought in and placed on their lap. Although their hand motor skills were still very challenged, they began expressing their thoughts and needs using ink that could be wiped away as quickly as it landed.

“How would you feel about me reading to you when I visit?” I asked.

They wrote an almost indistinguishable YES.

“What kind of books?” I wondered aloud.

They wrote a very sloppy SCIFI.

That night I walked into a bookstore near the hospital, City Lights, and asked for a science fiction novel recommendation. The cashier grabbed my hand and led me through a maze of staired hallways and musty shelves until we found the right section. Without pause, they pulled a copy of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and pressed it against my chest. The very story of my being was now resting in my bosom.

Saturday arrived and I was scheduled for an overnight on-call shift. My supervisor wouldn’t be able to argue with my odd or extra hours this weekend. Once each month I was allowed—actually required—to stay late. I was the person charged with baptizing dying babies in delivery rooms between 5pm-8am. Reading novels to teenagers in the middle of the night was also acceptable.

After completing my rounds and consuming a bowl of microwaved oatmeal in a closet containing a twin bed for overnight chaplain naps, I walked through the empty hospital hallways to Kavon’s room. They’d been moved out of the PICU to a recovery floor. I entered their space quietly. Kavon’s mother was asleep on the back couch.

“Hi,” I whispered. “I brought a book to read.”

They mumbled from a small opening in the left corner of their mouth, “Good.”

Instantly my eyes started watering. I tried to make myself laugh instead, but the hiccupping commenced again. Kavon’s mother startled awake. I held my breath and waited patiently until she fell back asleep. Kavon shook their head, amused.

“Hi. Hi. Hi,” I whispered again. “Wow. We’ve spent everyday together for the past three weeks and I’ve never heard your voice. It’s so excellent sounding.”

I knew that hearing their voice meant Kavon was healing and getting better. Maybe they’d have years, decades, a whole life ahead of them still. I wanted desperately to hug their mom and call their dad. You won’t have to figure out how to live without your child! I’d bellow through a cacophony of hiccups.

Kavon rolled their eyes. They found my emotional sentiment exasperating, as any healthy teenager would. I didn’t care. I was lucky to have many tweens and teens as part of my chosen family outside of the hospital too. I knew the annoyance translated to Please don’t stop caring about me even when I’m an asshole, I need you so much.

“Will you read already?” Kavon implored like a drunken sailor.

I moved a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Kavon rested their head back against the pillow. Their mother rolled over and began snoring, barely audibly, so sweetly. I stood up again and placed a hospital blanket over her, allowing my hand to linger on her shoulder momentarily.

I returned to my seat and pulled Ancillary Justice—the origin story of Breq—from my bag. I had no idea what I was opening up in that moment. My life, my name, my pronouns, my identity, my perspective, my spirituality, and my ‘chaplain stance’ were about to reshape into shapes I couldn’t have previously imagined.

[Stay tuned for Part Two, arriving in the Sandwich Period.]

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A child’s heart had just stopped and what I remember most are her mother’s shoes. I was sitting cross-legged on the tiled floor, and my fingers were resting in the canvas creases between the shoelaces of her checkered Vans. Some chaplains hold the hands of family members, but I prefer to hold their sneakers. Surely my own trembling is less perceptible this way.

She was sitting in a hospital room chair holding her one-year-old daughter. At least a dozen tubes and lines were strewn across the crib and over to her mom’s lap: a hatchling in an upside down bird’s nest. Her mother pushed away the twigs and branches to see if her baby was still alive. This mother had been away for too long, so long that she became too scared to return at all.

“Are you my mother?” the child’s heartbeat sang.

Except this wasn’t a heartbeat. It was a metronomic tempo that required forced ventilation, hydration, and medication. The sound created the illusion of life, but I knew that this tiny being had already scurried back to the star nursery nestled in Orion’s constellation. There her soul had climbed into a warm, gooey, urn-like womb and turned into glittering dust.

Astronauts who grow up to be humanist chaplains know these things.

I ran my thumb across the scuff that grayed the rubber trim of the mother’s shoe sole. I wondered whether the road had ever risen up to meet this young woman, or if she’d only known potholes and cracked tarmac in her 22 years traveling the planet.

I longed for a Magic Eraser to remove the scuff. Maybe if her shoes looked new, sparkling, ready, she would be okay when she left the hospital without her child tonight.

It was only 1:30pm in the afternoon, but my upper torso had morphed into a concave shape, contorted by its inability to exhale. My chest felt like it wasn’t mine anymore. It was my mother’s chest, and this mother’s chest, and a million mothers’ chests constellated around a million mothers’ wounds.

In my late 20s, I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in rural, (barely) post-apartheid South Africa, and I rarely slept for fear of malaria or HIV, or drunken men, or hippos walking backward, or black widows of all sizes and shapes crossing my path. I thought that was what bone tired felt like.

In my late 30s, I took care of my mom with young onset Alzheimer’s, in three different facilities, and then at home, and often our best sleep—our only sleep—occurred around 10:00am after listening to Tina Turner and sprinkling Seroquel on mocha almond fudge ice cream. I began to believe that was what exhaustion felt like.

Then I met a tiny child who, on her first birthday, accidentally discovered and ingested her mother’s fentanyl stash while left alone at home for a short period of time. I wondered then if I would ever be able to sleep again.

The hospital nurses in our pediatric intensive care unit were so angry. How could a child be abandoned like that, and on her first birthday? Why would you leave drugs out for a child to find? Who does illegal street drugs while they’re raising a child? Even the doctors were mystified and shook their heads in disbelief during rounds.

“Call the chaplain,” a member of the medical team would say every morning while they stood in the hallway and a tiny body lie motionless inside the room on life support. Within a few minutes I would arrive at the sliding glass door and wait to see if my toes would allow me to take another step forward.

Nadeem, the bedside nurse, was there almost every morning and every afternoon. He stood at the computer stoically, but I always witnessed his relief when I arrived.

“Hey,” I said quietly and searched his face for new information.

I sought hope, but I knew there was no hope. Nadeem’s irises were black and vacuous, blinded by having witnessed too many children die in his presence, and at the same time his eyes were so clear that he could see everything everywhere all at once. I longed for an end to this tragic situation. He longed for this with me.

“We’re planning to conduct the final brain death exam today, but the mother is missing. She went to the cafeteria and never came back,” Nadeem whispered.

I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the patient’s grandmother. She was wearing a faded yellow tank top, jean shorts, and flip-flops. Her hair was straggly and gray, her skin pale and translucent, and she was not much older than me.

“I don’t believe she’s really dead,” Grandma said emphatically. “I want to be present during the tests. I won’t let you remove the machines until I am sure.”

This is when my brain goes rogue. Affective empathy isn’t wrangled from intellectual queries or cognitive quarries, and I don’t believe it is inherited or a consolatory byproduct of complex trauma. Maybe Magic or God or Great Universal Spirit (thank you, Anne Lamott) is empathy’s true source. Maybe not.

All I know for certain is that empathy is bravery—a delirious choice to surrender to the cosmic notion that we not only belong to one another, we are each other.

“If it will bring you peace to be present, I can honor that, and I will stand next to you and hold your hand,” I replied. “But, these exams are very difficult to observe. My wish for you is to remember your granddaughter as vibrant and full of life.”

“She was so full of life!” Grandma exclaimed. “My husband is a cranky crabapple, but she would climb on to his lap and he couldn’t help but smile. She spent more time at our house than anywhere else. Mostly we raised her alongside my grandson. What will I tell him when he asks where Sissy went?”

I watched her body shift between delight and awe and terror and grasping.

“I wonder if you have any photos of her on your phone? Will you show me?” I asked tenderly.

“Oh yes! I would love to show you,” she said and pulled an iPhone from her back pocket.

I noticed the rough texture of this woman’s skin as her forefinger skated across the cracked screen. And then, there she was so suddenly, this tiny small friend, almost gone and now here: a living, breathing, vital child with an entire life lived in exactly one year’s time.

Grandma pressed play on a video and now I can watch her grandkid giggling, singing, crying, and audibly sighing while sleeping. The tightening in my chest expanded into my throat and then wrapped around the roots of my teeth. Everything began to hurt.

Empathy in full reversal is called dissociation, and it is in every chaplain’s emergency kit for moments like these. I mentally scrounged for just enough salve to spread across the back of my eyeballs, to halt the images and feelings from spreading to my vital organs, and to prevent myself from passing out.

I looked to Nadeem and he nodded slightly as the medical team walked quietly into the room to begin the exam.

“Shall we stay out here and keep looking at photos? Or would you like to go in?” I asked the grandmother while she pressed play on a short video for the fifth time.

“We can stay here,” she mumbled. “Out here is better.”

Again a child’s laughter escaped six tiny holes at the bottom of her phone and filled the entire PICU hallway. Nurses at every bedside station at every neighboring room looked toward us. Many of them appeared irritated. Anger is justifiable, but I knew underneath the anger was so much fear and even more grief.

Later I would walk down this hallway and ask each nurse how they were coping. Some would look away and some would invite me to hug them. They’d use catchphrases and attempt to diminish their own pain. They’d talk about secondary trauma, and I would remind them that watching a child die, even if it’s not your child, is traumatic, and not in a secondary sort of way.

I would then encourage these nurses to book 15 minutes in a massage chair in the breakroom at their earliest convenience, and we’d laugh at how absurd it is that a chair with an embedded timer is how our society shows care for front-line workers. I’d tell them that there is no professional role I respect more than a pediatric ICU nurse. And then, I would let myself cry in front of them, and this would help more than anything.

Eventually the clock showed 8:22pm and my backside shivered and ached against the tiled floor. I looked across the room at Nadeem’s shins when he entered the room again. We had spent the last several days together navigating this strange neverland, and now I loved the sight of his limbs more than anything in the world.

Nadeem walked over to the mother’s chair and cleared away the tangle of life lines and nestling twigs from the baby’s torso. He gently pressed a stethoscope against her rapidly cooling skin. My fingers crawled farther into the spaces between her mother’s shoelaces. The four of us had become so deeply intertwined.

I thought about my brother and his five kids, and I wondered if any of them were in a hospital tonight. I wondered if they were all alive. I wondered if a stranger, somebody somewhere, was holding Galen’s shoe too. With all of my heart, I hoped so. I hoped someone was loving him even though he had been consumed by drug addiction and even though he had caused so much harm.

I would eventually come to know these 60 seconds of stethoscopes and sternums pressed together as the longest minute a human—especially a parent—can experience. It is a time capsule in which multiverses collide into one another and violently scatter the ingredients of all existence everywhere. It is a sacred, suffocating, liberating space where everything begins and ends over and over again.

Nadeem retrieved his stethoscope and then crouched down next to me and the mother holding her child. His elbow rested gently on my shoulder and his hand fell softly on her forearm.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” Nadeem whispered.

The mother then looked at her mom who was standing in the far corner of the room, weeping, and then she looked at me, and then at her baby. She was shaking and understandably in shock.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard about this thing called the Hubble telescope?” I asked, startling myself and wondering if this was quite possibly the most inappropriate thing I could say right now.

She shook her head.

“It’s a very special instrument that can see so far into the universe, all the way to this incredible place that astrophysicists call the star nursery,” I offered.

“Like where baby stars are born?” she asked, her eyes finding mine.

“Exactly. I like to think that maybe our favorite humans start as bright stars before they arrive into the world, and then they return to being bright stars when they leave.”

“I like that idea too,” she said looking back down to her child.

“When I stare up at the starry sky each night,” I added, “I will think of your baby girl, and of you. The days and months ahead will likely be some of the hardest. There will be so much to handle, but none of that will be as difficult to endure as the pain in your own body. Try to keep going. Try to allow yourself to be changed by this experience in some way. Try to keep the feeling of love in your heart.”

Nadeem and I then stepped out into the hallway to allow the family some privacy and time together. Police detectives were standing in an alcove, waiting patiently.

My phone vibrated. It was my supervisor texting: “I see that you’re logged in at the hospital. Please tell me you’re not still there with that patient and her family.”

“I’m still here,” I texted back.

“Boundaries, Breq,” she scolded. A tiny moon appeared below the text message letting me know that her notifications were now silenced.

She was probably correct, but it felt like the most unkind thing a person could possibly say to me in that moment. I had just held space for another human being in a way that inverted my understanding of what it meant to hold space, of what it meant to profoundly love a stranger who most people might choose to hate. If there was any chance for interrupting the cycle of generational trauma in this family, extraordinary amounts of love would be required. This I knew for certain.

“Boss, I eat boundaries for breakfast,” I typed and then clicked Notify Anyway.

When I arrived home, I changed into pajamas, poured myself one thimble of bourbon, and climbed into bed. I switched on a nightlight so the ceiling of my studio apartment became drenched in stars and the Aurora Borealis. I allowed my eyes to close halfway, and soon I drifted into a fit of daydreams and nightmares. I imagined Nadeem lying next to me, fully clothed, holding my hand while he pressed his stethoscope against my heart.

“Let me hear you breathe,” he said.

My chest expanded and I fell sound asleep.

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For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the stunningly complex and wildly orderly cosmos. It only made sense I’d grow up to be an astronaut.

Or, a sailor of high seas. Because isn’t the ocean just outer space turned upside down and inside out? Cooked crucibles above us and sultry seagrasses below us, worlds so utterly indecipherable and profoundly mysterious. Oh how these exhaling vacuums taunt me, aloof and intimate in the same moment. I long for gills and better lungs.

Some might say I’m all grown up now, and it turns out I’ll never be an astronaut. I blame my failure to thrive in space on my brother’s inability to thrive on earth. Hospitalized somewhere outside of Chicago, his saturated liver is slowing down and embalming his body while it’s still breathing. He burned up his nine lives in 47 years. I hate open casket funerals, but I can’t wait to view him in my never-worn spacesuit.

“Lieutenant Galen, this is Captain Breq. Come in. Can you hear me? Come in.”

I imagine reaching down and shaking him in his stainless steel coffin. Perhaps I am hoping he’ll wake up, or maybe I am checking to see if he’s really dead. If he gets a tenth life, and he absolutely could, I wonder if I might kill him myself. More likely, I’ll hold his ashy face against my breast while he weeps, and while I weep, his sibling who never stops missing him.

My brother and I haven’t spoken in six years, since that catastrophic Christmas when his twin girls were born and confiscated by child protective services along with the street drugs already swirling in their tiny veins. Soon after, Galen was carted off to federal prison on drug trafficking charges, and all five of his children fell into the care of felony-free humans wearing plain clothes in the great outdoors.

Amidst a global pandemic, prisons became petri dishes and coughed out all sorts of sad, angry things, my brother included. Galen agreed to change his plea to guilty and was ironically released eight years early. Still my boundaries stayed firm: unless he committed to ongoing therapy, sobriety, and a vasectomy, I would not answer his calls, even if he used a space walkie talkie and howled for his Captain Breq.

The psychology text books and addiction specialists call this tough love, but I don’t feel tough and this can’t possibly be love. It’s just what has to be for me to stay well, and one of us needs to stay well. Our mother died of a broken heart at age 64, and our father is nearly 80 now. I don’t have enough hands to hold all of the hands that need holding in our family, and so I did what only made sense in my tangled brain: I trained to become a pediatric hospital chaplain.

Therapists and social workers, especially the savvy somatic ones, suggest that many of my (questionable) life choices stem from adaptive behaviors that saved my life as a child, but no longer serve me today. Apparently my disorganized attachment style comes with a dysregulated nervous system that requires crisis to organize around. As backward as it sounds, and feels, chaos is the way I experience order, purpose, and calm in my body.

Cool, cool, cool, I say to those credentialed helpers. And then, I raise one eyebrow and flash a grin so charming and so cunning that I could be my brother’s twin, sans meth-decayed teeth and useless limbs full of bullet fragments. Therapists and social workers are always falling in love with me; it’s both flattering and incredibly lonely.

Holding parents who are holding their dying kid in a pediatric intensive care unit was never a career goal of mine. However, in the early days of a renowned spiritual care residency program at a very fancy teaching hospital, my supervisor—a seven-foot-tall woman whose ancestors helped found the Black Panther Party—loomed over me and whispered in my ear, “I spoke to God and He told me to place you at the children’s hospital in our toughest unit, the ICU.”

My eyes pooled with tears while I mumbled, “But, what if I don’t believe in God?”

“No problem,” she replied. “I do believe, and you’re being called to the PICU.”

That night, I went directly to the optometrist and ordered a style of eyeglass frames I felt certain an astronaut would choose. I paid extra to have Breq Lightner engraved on each temple. The perplexed older gentleman behind the counter looked over his smudged reading glasses and asked if I’d like my lenses tinted.

“No thanks,” I muttered. “I want the clearest vision possible for my journey ahead. When I look up at the night sky from each hospital room window, I want to see all the way to Jewel Bug, the planetary nebulae nested in the constellation Cygnus, a mere 3,000 light-years away. This, sir, is the sacred place where bright stars go to die.”

He stared at me with neither eyebrow raised. I am not inclined toward brevity, so I ached to say more. Did he know that when Sun-like stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, they shed their outer shells into space, leaving behind a hot, dense core that illuminates the surrounding material? That the death of a star can be a chaotic and rapidly changing process? That some of us humans also need chaos to light up?

I returned to the car and texted my supervisor: “Fine, I’ll go to the PICU. Not because your god says so, or because you do, but because my heart is a capacious well of tenderness, and because love is the way. I’m not following your rules; I’m following my toes.” (It’s true that I write long-winded, overly-punctuated texts exactly like that.)

Within a few seconds, a thumbs-up emoji appeared hovering over my words. No hearts or sparkles, just a cartoonish first digit erected from a fist. I knew in that moment I would be on my own, same as I had felt every second of this life since my mom died. I would continue to blaze through an infinite multiverse untethered, awe-struck, petrified, and stunningly calm.

I fell into a half-sleep that night thinking about Jewel Bug. I had read that one possible explanation for its unique nebulae transformation lies in the presence of a hidden companion star. The gravitational tug of its partner can distort the outflow of gas, producing the spiral or cloverleaf patterns.

When a star runs out of hydrogen, it collapses. By the end of my residency year, I had found, held, laughed with, cried alongside, loved on, and helped release 26 little companion stars, all of whom tug at my heart right now, years later.

When I exited the hospital on my last day, graduation certificate and honorary awards in hand, I removed my mask and gasped for the air I needed to fully exhale. The sun was setting and each silhouette on every street corner looked like a mother I had held while she held her child. They were living ghosts, and they were standing next to my mom, an actual ghost. The best I could do was collapse too.

The aforementioned therapists say there is nothing to fix here, I am safe, and all of the trauma is behind me. But, is any of that actually true? There is still so much to address. None of us are that safe in this burning down world. And, right now, my little brother is dying of liver failure. Our mother is no longer holding him, and I am no longer holding her: the closest companion stars I’ll never be able to find.

“Lieutenant Galen, this is your Captain Breq. Come in. I’m here. I am not apart from you. I am part you. Galen, can you hear me? I love you. I really fucking love you.”

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Star Nursery Shenanigans is always available at no charge. Subscribing for free helps elevate the content, so thank you for clicking below if you haven’t already. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports my service as a hospice caregiver for children and adults, most of whom are low-income and/or first-generation immigrants:

Subscribe now