Because We Can: Chapter Two

Astrid grows up.

The move continues. I can confirm my truck is fully loaded and I am set to pick up my U-Haul trailer tomorrow for the rest before heading off to the Big Apple.

This past weekend was an emotional rollercoaster of goodbyes shared with all the wonderful people I’ve met here in DC. It’s nice being able to distract myself with the physical labor and logistics of moving, I guess, but I can also feel my acute inability to process so much transition all at once. That is to say, I appreciate being able to share these essays with you all as I find writing is a neat way to accomplish both emotional processing and emotional distraction simultaneously.

So I hope you liked Chapter One, because we’re back with Chapter Two. Sorry for the late send, but hopefully this can give you something interesting to read tonight before starting your week—and something to look forward to once again next Sunday.

Be well,

Ollie

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TO RECAP: The world isn’t just dying—it’s dead already. After scientists and governments all around the world declare humanity a lost cause to environmental degradation, an astrophysicist grapples with the guilt of having just fathered his first child, Astrid.

Click here to read Chapter One.

Because We Can, continued.

A few years later, after much deliberation and procrastination, I finally put Astrid in school. I wasn’t sure of the value of a formal education anymore when I could already teach her what she needed to know. But ultimately, it felt like the right thing to do simply because it felt so normal. I was grateful for a rare milestone that hearkened back to a time when spelling tests were the most important thing in life. And it made me proud of her.

Astrid darted off as soon as we arrived, not an ounce of fear in her heart nor a care in the world for her sniveling father lingering at the edge of the playground. I sat and watched her scale the jungle gym and run in circles on the wood chips for a long time. Even better, I saw her connect with other children. I realized it was my fault for not introducing her to more of them sooner, but I didn’t get out much those first few years after the report, so neither did she. I had some close friends with kids a little older, it was just never the daily interaction I thought she needed. Seeing her now, I felt a little bit of hope for the first time in a while. Or at least the fleeting feeling that things were okay for now.

Eventually, I looked around for any other parents sharing this bittersweet moment. What I found did not make me feel any better. Yes, there were similarly contorted faces expressing a combination of pride and sorrow at their kids growing up. But I also saw those same people holding even younger children. Children born after the report. Children who could have been spared the half-life their parents condemned them to. My heartache morphed to anger as I couldn’t believe the egotism of these petty, insignificant people, so self-obsessed and distraught at their own demise that they would create life just to bring along for the ride. I didn’t know the world was ending when Astrid was born; these people did. Disgusting.

After some time, I couldn’t bear to stand around the playground any longer. I gave Astrid a final hug and kiss and tried to leave, only to run into her teacher. I cringed at the realization I still had some baseline Dad duties. So I introduced myself.

The rest of Astrid’s teachers over the years would blend together, but Ms. Wiesel remained clear as a photograph in my mind. Curly black hair, green eyes, and a warm smile dotted with youthful freckles greeted me at the gate. I found out she had just finished undergrad and was teaching for two years before applying to graduate school. But despite her cheery demeanor and the pleasantries we exchanged over my own grad school experience, I remember feeling a knot in my stomach. It was an inescapable question I was too ashamed to ask.

What was this young and vibrant woman doing wasting her time with all these kids?

I remember cringing again, then and now, at the fact that her radiant optimism also reminded me of Danielle. Nearly the entire time I knew her, Danielle was the magnet of my life, attracting me in ways that left no doubt about my intention to spend the rest of our lives together and, oppositely, emitting the motivation and support that propelled me through my early career in academia. For a long time, I didn’t understand how that brilliance could fade so quickly after Astrid was born.

That was the darker side of that day, and really most of that period. For the first time, looking around at these sick parents and this clearly delusional young woman, I felt more clearly than ever what Danielle must have felt before she decided to leave this world behind: What were any of us doing here? As a society, we had been collectively diagnosed with a terminal illness. If any one of us had received that diagnosis individually, would we go to school the next day? Or the next year? Would we still study for that test or prepare for that big presentation? It was that nagging feeling of at-best, futility, and at-worst, waste, that made Astrid’s early years so difficult for me.

Interestingly, I found a more immediate answer to those questions many years later when a good friend of mine was diagnosed with an actual terminal illness. Before the report, doctors might have been able to keep him alive and comfortable for much longer. But there were fewer and fewer resources for such luxuries—and the care he needed just wasn’t a reality anymore.

Nevertheless, this friend remained an inspiration to me until the day he passed. About a decade after the report, he finally quit his job and focused on his passion full-time: sailing. More specifically, sailing around the world one day. But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to build the boat, too. So he used his life savings and mechanical engineering degree to do just that, with the goal of finishing his boat in one year and sailing the globe in another. He retreated from the dying world almost entirely, for a time, with the intention of leaping back into it arms wide for one last adventure.

Then, two months later, a doctor told him that he, too, was dying—but so much faster than the world around him. He had less than a year to live. If he was lucky, just enough soul-crushing time to finish the boat. Not nearly enough to sail it.

And yet, every day when I visited him, there he was, toiling away in his garage, building a boat that he would never get to launch. When I finally asked him why, he just shrugged. Because I still can, he said. I wasn’t satisfied. I pushed him. Why not build something you can actually finish and be able to use? Like a bird house or a rocking chair?

Because I don’t dream of building birdhouses and rocking chairs, he told me. I want to build a boat and I want to sail around the world. That’s my dream.

All these years later I still haven’t forgotten those words. I wish I’d had that perspective watching Astrid on the playground her first day. Instead, I just had the same guilt as always.

As time went on, Astrid grew up much faster than I expected. It was during these adolescent years that I missed Danielle the most. Not just because a PhD does nothing to prepare you for the problems of a teenage girl, but also because that girl had become the spitting image of her mother. Her round, wide set blue eyes and mousy nose; the one tassel of hair that could never stay tucked behind her little ears; even the way she sighed — that long and breathy exhalation culminating in a high-pitched groan, almost like a train whistle — when staring at a tough problem in her homework.

I changed a lot during those years as well. Obviously, no one needed rocket ships anymore. People had neither the means nor the appetite for exploring a cosmic frontier when the real frontier was right in front of them. So, my time and skills were much better served fixing things than building anything new. Cars always needed repair and learning came easy to an engineer turned mechanic, so the garage became my new workplace. All the while, the world still seemed to be falling apart almost as quickly as Astrid was leaving childhood behind.

The environmental changes ultimately affected everyone the same, no matter your wealth or status. It started with the most vulnerable among us: the heat stricken and starved ghettos of the world who lost what little they had and were washed away like peeling scabs hanging on the skin of the Earth. But slowly it reached even the highest and most insulated echelons of society: lonely, remote hideaways leveled by storms and wildfires, urban high rises toppled by the desperate proletariat they had built their cities on, and eventually the collapse of all global enterprise. I guess we were fortunate enough to be hidden somewhere in between. By Astrid’s teenage years, people had largely retreated from society as we once knew it. We relied on only what we needed and who we knew. The world became much smaller.

At a certain point I figure I was spending too much time in our garage, because Astrid and I grew distant. Our first fight — a real fight, with screaming and hitting and slammed doors — came when she was thirteen. To this day, I could not tell you what we were fighting about. All I remember is that she didn’t come out of her room for two days. And that I spent the entire time toiling away with tools, hiding just like her, not knowing how to make things better as both Astrid and our world was bursting at the seams.

Nice going, Dad.

To be continued…