COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Writing Toward Healing
N C L R ONLINE
85
WITH ART BY TIM CHRISTENSEN
Orion Nebula (astrophotograph) by Tim Christensen
T H E S TA R S T H AT CO M P RI S E O RI O N A RE N O T B O U N D T O G E T H E R I N A N Y WAY. T H E Y D RI F T, E AC H O N I T S OW N J O U RN E Y T H RO U G H T H E U N I V E R S E . . .
is growing faint. I have read about this and I am frantic to see it myself. The skies remain cloudy. I want to show you Betelgeuse, but we are in the deepest part of winter. When it is clear, it is terribly cold and icy. I look out the windows. It is still overcast. Night after night. Somewhere up there, behind the clouds, the moon wanes, moving in its inexorable cycle toward darkness, the new moon, and rebirth. Sometimes an old star goes out with a bang as a supernova. Other times it goes out with a whimper. If Betelgeuse goes supernova, it might happen anytime in the next one hundred thousand years. Or it might happen next year. The waning light could be a prelude to a supernova. It could mean nothing. I have wanted to see a supernova since I was a young child, when I first learned that a star could die in a final burst of brilliance. I retired from surgery more than four years ago. Nights, I often dream that I have been called
back to practice. It’s always after midnight, some kind of emergency. “But I don’t have privileges,” I say to someone in the dream. Privileges are what we call the formal approval to perform certain kinds of surgery in a particular hospital. In my dreams, it doesn’t matter. In my dreams, I struggle to remember all the key steps of the operation I will have to do. Sometimes I am actually operating, but I never have the right tools or any assistance. The anatomy is different. It is kitchen table surgery at the most macabre. My hands twitch in my sleep, you tell me. Sometimes I try to speak, and you jostle me awake just enough to calm me down. Betelgeuse is almost seven hundred light-years away, so whatever we see happening now actually unfolded seven hundred years ago. As we look farther out in space, we look farther back in time. Betelgeuse is a semiregular variable star, wellknown for cyclic changes in luminosity over time.