The Sunday Letter, Part Three
Do you ever stop to marvel at how incredible a thing it is, being alive? Sounds cheesy, I know. But really. Do you stop and think about it, ever? You might be able to reach across your counter and pour yourself a glass of water from the tap—hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and minds working together and physics and water drawn up from somewhere deep within this planet. Water that was likely something else, once upon a time. You turn on your tap and pour it into a water glass (itself another thing of wonder, made in a factory or in a workshop or in a warehouse somewhere far away or somewhere close, another human being’s hands shaping this implement that you use and then put back on the counter without, generally, a second thought) and then you drink from it and go back about your day.
Extraordinary. There’s no other word for it.
In September of last year I spent two weeks on the coast of Massachusetts, in a house that was literally feet from the ocean. I was there because Jess’s family had decided to spread her ashes. Her husband had indicated that he wanted to spread them in Cape May, NJ, which is where they’d all gone as a family to vacation every year, so the second weekend that I was in MA, we drove down to New Jersey and found ourselves standing on a beach as the sun set, giving her back to the ocean.
It was a glorious and terrible and very hard day for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the fact that we’d all travelled so long to get there. Some of us were sick, all of us were tired, and no one wanted to say goodbye. But there we were.
It was so beautiful. Probably one of the most spectacular evenings I’ve ever spent on a beach. There were dolphins cavorting in the ocean. There was not one, but two weddings going on as we trudged up to the water (sparking jokes from her family as Jess had had a period of time, in her twenties, of unknowingly crashing not one, but two, but several weddings during her touristy travels—opening the doors of a church just as a photographer captured the couple in front of the doors, etc. At one point her brother joked that we should hold the urn up and photograph it with one of the weddings in the background. Jess, photobombing yet again, 2022). As we gathered around and shared a few words about her, a flock of birds swooped and spun over our heads once, and then once again. I can still hear the swoop of their bodies as they dove through the air.
Someone—I can’t remember who—dug a trench just before the water met the sand. Her ashes went in. As the tide came in, the trench was whittled away until every bit of her had melted into the sea. As though the Earth itself was gathering her back again. Come, come here. It’s all right. You’re back where everything started. That’s all.
This beach will be here in a hundred years, I thought. This beach will look almost exactly the same in a hundred years, and we will all be gone and over.
This beach will look exactly the same.
It has been so helpful for me, over these years since Jess’s death, to have moments like this, of zooming out and remembering just how small we are, this pale blue dot in the universe. Our tiny planet that formed some 4.53 billion years ago, give or take 50 million years. My joys and sorrows and worries alongside all of yours. In a century, none of these worries will matter—not to us, not in exactly the way that we hold and grieve them now. They might be someone else’s joys or worries or sorrows, yes. But so much of what propels us forward in our individual lives—the things we stress and obsess over—all of these things will cease to matter, in time.
And yet, for all of that, none of us are actually insignificant. If this is all we have, why not make the most of it? Why not spend a moment or two (or three, or four, or days and days and days) remembering how extraordinary a miracle it truly is, being alive on this planet right now? You with all of your hopes and dreams and sadnesses and wonderful things about and around you. The life that you’ve wrested for yourself the way that stars wrest entire solar systems into place. The gravity of your life settling into orbit just the way that planets do.
Our pale blue dot is 4.5 billion years old, which makes it just over one-third of the universe’s age. Give or take. Which means that for billions of years before our planet—with its eventual future of rivers and lakes and oceans and mountains and Starbucks frappucinos—swirled into dust and rock, there were countless other planets and stars doing the very same thing.
Think about that. How much grief can the universe hold? I miss my best friend so much that sometimes I feel like I’m on an entirely different planet. Like I’m walking in a different galaxy altogether, cast ahead into an unfamiliar, unknown future. But my grief, just like yours, is a universe all its own. That is how I begin to understand what infinity means. All of the billions of people who have lived and loved and cried on this earth, and all of the trillions of billions of beings who have loved and cried out there in the universe. Somewhere. All of these sorrrows that feel large enough to reshape the cosmos somehow all existing alongside one another. We are all of us so important. We are, all of us, not important at all.
I am, as you’ve probably noticed, still trying to figure out what this newsletter is supposed to be. My research into Substack keeps saying this: the writers who are most successful on this platform are the ones who are pouring hours and hours a week into their newsletters; I don’t have hours to do this, and is the point of this supposed to be about success, anyway? Not really. I think the point here is something more along the lines of connection—reaching out to those other tiny pinpricks of light in the universe and seeing what pings back. Maybe I’m trying to make a constellation in Substack form. Maybe I’m chronicling grief as a way of chronicling a new religious experience. (More on that later.). Maybe some or all or none of these things.
Maybe I’m just trying to make sense of the world in a way that can fit this kind of joy and grief and sadness. The infinitude of it all. Just in the time that I have, knowing that the waves will come and the beaches will keep on being beaches even after I am gone.
Amanda, it's wonderful to hear from you again! Wishing you joy and connections in 2023!