The Sunday Letter #21: Dark Matter
Four years ago, on December 6, 2019, I was in my kitchen, getting ready to make dinner. It had been a difficult day for other, separate reasons I won’t go into here, and I was feeling tired and a little bit sad and ready to pack it in for the day. As I was standing at my kitchen island and pulling out things for dinner, my phone lit up. A message from Jess.
And also, not from Jess, as it turned out.
Hi Amanda, the message went. This is Jess’s sister. She’s still with us, but won’t be for very long. If you’d like to call or send a message I know she would love to hear from you.
And that was that. Your life is one way and then suddenly everything shifts and your life is entirely different. That is how it happens.
Content Note: this post contains recollections from the first few early days and months of grief after my best friend died. Some of the content is raw and petty and angry because grief makes raw, petty, angry supernovas of us all. If you are struggling with your own memories of grief and don’t have the space to read this today, please come back to it later (or never!), when you have a soft place to land.
I panicked on receiving the text message, as anyone would do. I immediately called back—I wouldn’t realize until weeks later that it really made no sense for me to call Jess’s phone—and the phone rang and rang. Eventually I hung up and texted, again to Jess’s phone, and her sister answered shortly after.
How long does she have? I said. I knew it would still be a little bit of time—a few days, at least. Enough time for me to fly out and say goodbye. I owed her that much. I hadn’t know she was that sick, because she hadn’t told me.
It’s hard to say, her sister wrote back. Hospice said it could be today. She loves you dearly and the two of you shared some of her most favourite times together. She can’t speak or respond but I can put you on speakerphone if you’d like to send a message to her.
She can’t speak or respond. I almost dropped the phone in horror. Then I went into crisis mode, except that it was crisis mode through fog. I had to get to New Jersey, immediately. Who would look after the dog? How soon could I book a flight? If I went on standby would that be sooner? Door to door it would probably be at least six hours before I could get to her. That would be enough time, right? Wouldn’t it?
What. What. What. What was happening? We had spoken via text just under two weeks prior.
How are you, my love? How are you doing?
Meh. Not having the easiest few weeks here. I’m trying to rest as much as I can, but I’m a very impatient patient, so it’s hard. Thanks for checking in!
Months later I would learn that she had been in and out of the hospital for weeks that fall, starting right from August, when she texted me to say that the cancer had come back. All of this unravelling, and I’d had only the faintest idea. I hadn’t wanted to pry, had known that she needed to rest, had wanted to give her the space that she needed. I’d emailed and messaged her, and had rarely heard back, and so I’d let it go, and sent love out wordlessly instead. That would be enough, I knew. Love would get us through. Love would make sure that nothing truly terrble happened.
What kind of best friend are you, Amanda?
And now she was home with her husband and her parents and her siblings and so many other friends and extended family, and I was not there.
I would be there, though. I was sure of it. I wanted to speak to her but I was terribly afraid that I would burst into tears. The last thing she needs right now is tears, I told myself. You get on that text message, Leduc, and you give her all the light and love and faith and vast unknowing knowing that you have. Then, you get on that goddamned plane.
I crafted a message and sent it back to her sister. Then I said I was in the midst of booking a flight and would be out soon. Either that night or the next morning.
You can always, always come here, her sister said. I’m reading your beautiful message to her right now, and showering her with your love.
Then I sat down in front of my computer, and kept on panicking. Flights were so expensive and I knew that money didn’t matter, but also it did. Because I didn’t have any. But I also didn’t have any time. The earliest flights I could take left at 8pm, and that was if I dropped everything at my house right that instant and took a taxi to the airport without worrying about the dog, and even then that flight wouldn’t get me to their door until 11 or 12, depending on traffic, depending on time.
These things all feel so simple now, looking back on it. Book the flight, tell your neighbour or your family about the dog, and go. But scrolling through that night just felt impossible. My brain felt like it was filled with fuzz. I couldn’t make what felt like the simplest of decisions. How would I get to the airport? Could I Uber? Get the bus? Take a taxi?
I sat at my couch and stared at the screen for an hour, maybe more, scrolling and thinking and weighing so many flights from so many godforsaken airlines. Then I settled on a flight that would leave Toronto early in the morning on December the 7th. As soon as I clicked on that flight and pressed “PAY” everything settled in my gut, a roiling, boiling sea suddenly come to a standstill.
Yes, I thought. Yes. Everything will be okay. Then I made arrangements for the dog and booked a car to get to the airport early the next morning.
Then I walked through the streets of downtown Hamilton and went to a friend’s bookstore, in the midst of a Christmas market, because I could not stomach standing still, needed to move, needed to do something. There was a band in the centre of the downtown square playing Christmas carols. I had my headphones on and only faintly heard their music, but I remember thinking about the music as though it was coming from some other, disembodied place. How are there Christmas carols going on right now. How is everyone singing?
I stood in the middle of my friend’s store and burst into tears. Then I went home, and somehow went to bed.
In the morning I got up and took the bus to the rental car place so that I could drop off the dog and get to the airport. Everything felt right, the way it was supposed to be. I had made the right decision, I told myself. Everything would be okay.
I got off at the bus stop near to the rental car depot and texted Jess’s sister, via Jess’s phone, again.
How is everyone holding up this morning? I am on my way to the airport now.
The answer came almost immediately.
Sorry to say that beloved Jess passed last night.
And there it was. I had been wrong about everything. I had made every wrong decision and nothing would ever be okay again.
In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that doesn’t seem to interact with light or the electro-magnetic field. We cannot see it; we deduce its existence only by seeing its effects on other solid matter around it. When light from a distant star bends toward us over the space of billions of light years away, we infer that dark matter—invisible, unknowable dark matter—is present in that space to bend the light. Because otherwise, why would light bend? It bends for no other reason except when there is something in the way.
We don’t understand dark matter, at least under current physics concepts. Newtonian physics doesn’t explain it; Kepler’s Third Law of planetary motion does not explain it. (See here for a handy animation of what dark matter does on a galactic scale. Neat, isn’t it?) There is so much about it we don’t know, in fact, that there are subsets of astronomers and physicists who argue for modified gravitational laws to explain what we cannot, at this moment, explain. And even those modifications don’t account for all elements of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.
Our framework, even after centuries of observing and thinking and studying and building on the work of others gone before, is still wrong on some level. There is still so much out there that makes absolutely no sense.
Like grief, you might say. Maybe like that.
I read that text message on Jess’s phone just as I was about to cross the street. I stopped at the crosswalk and bent forward, head into my knees. The world slowed just like everyone says that it does.
What, I heard myself thinking. What, what, what?
What? Breathe. What? Breathe.
What is going on? What just happened? How is she gone, already?
“Excuse me,” said a voice, and a hand touched my arm.
I looked up, as if through fog all over again. Blinked.
A middle-aged woman in a blue hijab stood beside me, holding my arm. “Are you all right, my dear?”
What, I kept on thinking. What what what. Who am I? What is going on?
“My friend,” I gasped out. “My best friend—I just found out that she died.”
“Oh,” she said, and her face crumpled. “Oh my dear—I’m so sorry.” Her hand grasped my shoulder so strongly and I leaned into it. For a moment I had the strangest feeling that if she let go, I would float away into the sky.
“My daughter,” she said then. “My daughter, she died twenty-nine years ago. When she was a baby. She would be twenty-nine this year and every day, I think of her. Who she would have become. What she would have been like.”
“Oh,” I said, and I raised my hand and squeezed her arm right back. Inside I was horrified, but also grateful. I never wanted her to leave. I wanted to go through the rest of my life with this woman holding my arm, keeping me from floating off into space.
You mean I’ll have to remember this feeling for the next twenty-nine years? Maybe more?
How can I do that? How?
Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light. It escapes the constant of light, that thing which provides the basis on which all of our understanding of the universe operates. We order everything according to what light is and what light does, and still somehow there is dark matter, unknowable matter, weaving in and out and through it all in ways that we can’t see.
Eventually the woman in the blue hijab and I said our goodbyes, even though I wanted to keep her with me for the rest of my life. I walked to the rental car depot and rented the car that I was going to drive to the airport, even though plans had changed and I was not going to go to the airport anymore.
I remember watching the attendant at the car depot watching my face, carefully. I didn’t have a car of my own yet at this point and I was a regular customer, and I think he knew that something was wrong but didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.
I rented the car and took the Dog of Doom to her overnight boarding place and then instead of going to the airport I drove to Scarborough, to the house of a friend who had previously invited me over for a girls’ night. I had cancelled because of the flight and then re-invited myself again when the news came through about Jess. I did not want to be alone that night. So instead I drove to Scarborough, and I have never experienced such a surreal stretch of time as driving on the DVP that night, in the darkness, living and breathing and doing and thinking, the whole time, Jess is dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Like a heartbeat, like a drumbeat, like a bell.
I brought chocolate fondue to the party. At one point—there was a group of us who were a Bit Older there, and a group that were A Bit Younger, and at one point one of the younger people said, “He had lots of BDE,” meaning Big Dick Energy, but all I could pull out of that was Before Death Experience, and all I could think was, “Life? You mean he’s full of life?”
Because I didn’t want to sleep alone that night and also didn’t want to make the long drive home, I decided to stay over. I slept in my friend’s spare room downstairs. At multiple points in the night, I woke up chilled under her blankets and thought, this is a bad dream.
This is all a bad dream.
I don’t actually understand what any of this means, of course. Dark energy. Dark matter. Things that we don’t see but infer that are there because they have an effect on things around them.
I mean, maybe I understand it, a little. The way that you embody things like love and grief and sadness even while struggling to say what they are.
The next morning, my friend made me fry bread in her kitchen and asked me to talk about Jess. Her kitchen was warm and radiant and beautiful and I am still, all these years later, unstitched by the power of the gift that she gave me that day. The gifts that came barreling my way from the universe almost instantly, right from that moment on the road, before the crosswalk.
Tell me about her, she said. What was she like? How did you meet?
My friend had lost her mother a few years earlier and was no stranger to loss. I didn’t understand what was happening then but I can see it now, from this vantage point of a few years in the future. The way that grief remakes you, the way it changes the terrain under your feet. The way you suddenly find yourself drawn to others in ways that you never expected.
Like gravity. Or like someone with a cosmic catcher’s mitt, standing there ready to go when a meteor smashes into your Yucatan Peninsula and sets your orbit askew, into new directions.
One day a few months later I sat across the table with another friend I hadn’t seen in some time and felt a thought come up, vicious and inescapable.
Why did it have to be Jess? Why couldn’t it have been you?
I did not actually want that friend to die, of course. But oh, the pettiness and the rage and the sadness and the unbearable itchiness of it all in those first months, that first year, that second year.
The selfishness of grief. The all-consuming maw of it.
Jess is the one who is gone, I kept trying to tell myself, desperately. She is the one who’s been robbed here.
But of course that was wrong too, a little. We are all robbed, aren’t we, when grief comes crashing into our neatly ordered shores.
About a week after Jess died, I flew to New Jersey for her celebration of life. I was so nervous because I hadn’t seen any of her family in a few years, and I also didn’t know that many of her friends, and I knew I was probably going to be lurking around at the venue looking at pictures and trying not to cry somewhere in the corner. But also, I wanted to be there. I wrote to her family and texted her siblings at multiple points that first week and hearing from them was so wonderful, like seeing light finally reach you from galaxies away.
Mine, I remember thinking. They are mine now, too.
I got to New Jersey the night before the event happened. The driver who picked me up drove very fast—too fast, given that it was raining and stormy out. We hydroplaned over the New Jersey Turnpike at multiple points. He told me stories of his heyday years, when he made $2500 a week driving rich people around for a hotel. When he dropped me off at my hotel, my credit card fell out of my bag and he came back into the hotel, searching for me, to hand it over.
I’m so sorry about your friend, he said, and then he went back out into the night and I never saw him again.
In the morning, I got dressed and made my way to the venue. I’d brought two dresses—a black one, and then another one, navy blue, because a small voice said, She wouldn’t want you to wear black.
I wore the navy blue dress and my favourite white sweater. When the taxi dropped me off at the venue, Jess’s dad was already standing outside. We locked eyes as soon as I stepped out of the cab and made for each other right away.
You’re a sight for sore eyes, you know that? he said, and we hugged, and it was like time had collapsed in a wormhole and the years that had elapsed didn’t matter at all.
A little while later, I made my way inside and saw her husband and her mother, her brother and her sister, and hugged all of them too.
She loved you so much, her husband said to me, and then he started to cry.
When we try to describe the movement of galaxies, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity falls short. According to this theory, everything in a galaxy should fly out of it, at all possible directions, because everything in that galaxy is spinning so fast. (The rate at which everything is spinning, plus the combined mass of all of the things that are spinning, means that some kind of ejection/propulsion should occur.)
But things do not fly out of galaxies, and so we say: there must be something else in there, holding everything together.
For the first few months after Jess died I walked around feeling like there was a giant black hole in my chest. I felt hollowed out, like my insides had been scraped clean and there was nothing inside me but air.
Nothing made sense, even time. The smallest of tasks took forever. One morning it took me two hours to make myself a coffee because I stood in front of my counter and blinked and thought, coffee, but how?
What can I do, I wrote to the world on Twitter. My head feels like it’s filled with fuzz and I don’t know how to stop it.
The answers that came back were so kind, and so simple.
Eat. Drink plenty of water. Exercise.
Make sure that you keep moving—someway, somehow.
Make sure that you keep moving.
As the months went on into that first year, I noticed that the physical pain of grief was making its way through my body. In the first weeks and months it sat squarely in my throat, apt to swell and choke me at any given moment.
Then, as the days went on, it migrated a little lower, sitting a the base of my throat. I was not choking as much, but one thing could tip me over, make me suddenly as red and raw and scratchy in my esophagus and lungs as in those first few early days.
Then, after still more time, the grief moved lower still. Heartache, yes. But also chest ache, and gut ache, and aches like cramps that were not cramps.
Waking up in the middle of the night in tears, not knowing what to say, where to go.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
After some time of watching this pain through its migration, I realized it was trying to say something to me.
Pay attention, it was saying. Pay attention to how we’re moving too. In the air, in your body, in the trees.
Pay attention.
In February of 2020, I went to New York for a reading and spent a night at Jess’s house, sleeping in her childhood bed. That night I had a dream. In the dream, I was walking with a bunch of people I didn’t know and we were all searching for Jess. It was snowing and bright and cold and beautiful.
We’d walk through the snow and look and look and then suddenly she would pop up out of the snow, in her bright blue skisuit, laughing uncontrollably before disappearing, only to do it all again moments later.
I forgot about the dream when I woke up, and only remembered it a few weeks later, when the recollection sliced into me with a clarity so crystalline it felt holy and perfect.
You think I’m lost, but I am everywhere! I am everywhere you look!
In 2016 scientists discovered a galaxy approximately 300 million light-years from Earth that appears to be made almost wholly of dark matter.
Then, in 2018, another galaxy was discovered, this one about 60 million light-years away, that appears to have almost no dark matter at all.
The simple answer, of course, is all of our tools and ways of measuring are wrong.
Why bother trying to understand? I ask myself, sometimes, as I read through these articles and expose my tiny brain to these big, beautiful, unfathomable discoveries. We are missing something huge. We are building on a flawed foundation.
What is the point of continuing to press on?
I feel guilty writing about grief sometimes because it is so bloody selfish. Me, me, me, I keep saying. I am sad. We are sad. When really it is Jess who lost everything, who had to give up everything she loved even before death came to take her.
But death comes to us all, doesn’t it. It feels unnatural—especially when it happens through illness, especially when it happens through cruelty and the pain humans inflict on one another—but it is, in fact, the most natural thing in the world. In the universe.
Nothing lasts forever, even the stars. And yet we press on because simply experiencing nothing lasts forever isn’t enough. We want to know why. We want to understand.
I suppose I want to understand, too, in a way. Even as the years go on and I also understand that experiencing and understanding are themselves two different things.
Pay attention, the grief says.
Knowing why isn’t important, not always. But the paying attention is.
A year after Jess died, in the week approaching her death anniversary, I dreamed that Jess and I were sitting across from each other, folded up cross-legged the way we used to do when we lived in residence together.
It’s not fair, I said. You should be here, doing all of these things.
She just smiled and shook her head. Like she knew and understood the enormous unfairness of it all and was totally at peace with this at the same time.
I know, she said. But that’s not the way it worked out.
In September of 2007, I flew to Scotland for a year in St. Andrews. The plane landed early in the morning and a bus had been chartered to take us to the university.
The bus was filled with eager young students who hadn’t been to Europe before and couldn’t stop exclaiming at everything we saw out the windows. Look at that building! Look at that church!
I was over it all, instantly. I was tired from the overnight flight and couldn’t wait to get to my dorm and sleep. Once we got to our residence hall and got our bags and were standing in line, I turned to the woman behind me and rolled my eyes.
“I don’t care about any of this,” I said, wryly. “It’s all beautiful. But I just want to go to bed.”
She laughed at me, and agreed.
She has a nice smile, I remember thinking. Maybe we’ll run into each other again at some point while we’re here.
Then I went and got my apartment key, and pulled my suitcase on to my new apartment. Climbed the stairs, dragging the suitcase all the way up, and opened the door into my home-away-from-home for the better part of the next year. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway, and I went down and deposited my suitcase by my bed. It happened just in time to hear a knock at the front door. I went back to the front door and answered.
There she was, the woman from that moment standing in line before we got our keys. Inevitable and perfect. We both broke out laughing.
You! I felt the words deep inside my ribcage. Of course it was you! It was always meant to be you!
And that was that, as they say.
I have returned to that moment countless times over the last four years, the way that I imagine astronomers and physicists return, time and time again, to their observations. Trying to understand. This has happened at two other times in my life—this moment of meeting someone and knowing that they will matter to you in some enormous way. Knowing, instantly, that perhaps they have already mattered to you in some way that goes beyond this life, beyond what science and gravity and relativity can tell us.
Can I prove this? No. I can only embody it, the way that grief is its own teacher and defies those same kinds of observations and calculations.
But in these moments of rawness, in the days when grief rears its ugly selfish head and threatens to overwhelm, I think back to this moment and I say to myself:
You recognized each other. You don’t remember from where, but you recognized each other.
It’s entirely different from measuring dark matter galaxies in space, I know. But also, maybe it isn’t?
Maybe the tools that we use to measure and understand our lives and our places here in the cosmos are wrong, too. Maybe we don’t have the whole picure.
Maybe that’s all it is.
In September of 2023, I landed in Scotland, once again bound for St. Andrews. It was a trip that was everything I needed it to be, and many other unexpected things besides, and maybe if all goes well there will be a book on store shelves sometime in 2026 or 2027 that goes a little more into the journey. Grieving and loving and looking up at the stars. Embodying the universe and understanding none of it.
Grief, at its selfish hyperbolic best.
I don’t know how to measure dark matter either, but let me tell you: I can feel it.
I feel it the way I feel this other side of love, this underside of love, holding everything together as we spin our way through space.
May you find people that you recognize instantly, too, my friends.
May they light your way.
I’m so sorry for your loss. What a moving account of your grief 💛🙏🏻
This was such a beautiful and heartfelt exploration of what grief feels like. I loved the connection throughout about dark matter, and how this seemingly unknowable phenomenon feels so real in day to day life.