The Path of Life in Space
by Steven Lebow
The Director of Human Resources of the Mars Project needed a home. He had a new house built on land that overlooked trees and a road that ran past a fence encrusted by the rich, red soil of northern Florida. The house was finished in late summer, a time he had come to hate because all the med-psych workups had to be written and the evaluations reviewed in September.
It was then the autumn again, when all the books were open and then all the bets were off.
“Life,” he told himself, “is the secret of all secrets. And whatever we are, space travel simply seems to bring out the essence of us all. If we are strong, the journey gives us the ability to acknowledge that strength. And if we are weak, then space travel highlights those weaknesses, too.”
The people who were sent in the early days of the Mars colony were screened rigorously. The doctors at the Cape took a complete physical and psychiatric history of the astronauts. Each was put through a battery of seventeen tests before he or she was even considered an applicant for the colony.
The several hundred men and woman who lived on the colony during those first years came from many backgrounds, but he observed that those who had come from some kind of religious or spiritual background seemed to adapt better to the rigors of space travel.
Why? Maybe they knew that life was a gift, as most religions were taught. Passion would always be present and, sometimes, not easily ignored. And love, while crucial for existence, could not be pursued. It came, or it went, of its own accord.
These were simply lessons that a 60-year old man wished to convey to strong men and women, one-third his age.
He was ignored, as elders often are. The young pilots listened to his boring speeches and his trite sayings about the emotional pressures of space travel. They hardly paid attention. This was not hard science, and they assumed that anything less than science would not help them survive in space.
They thought if they were strong enough to handle 3Gs of pressure, they could easily withstand anything emotional that space would throw at them.
In the early days of their orientation, their conflicts with the Old Man became clear.
“What do you mean you won’t send me to the Martian Colony with my wife?” said one of the space boys to the Commander.
“There’s a protocol against it,” he explained. “There is a protocol that has been worked out for every eventuality of this type of mission. The taxpayers aren’t spending $80 billion dollars just so that you and your wife can be together.”
“Just tell me why,” said the pilot.
“I’ll tell you a few reasons,” he said. “There is no room for friendly conversations on this trip, no time for fraternization, no room for true human relationships. How do you think the other corpsmen will respond if you were the only one to have what would be seen as a girlfriend in space?”
As he came to see later, separating spouses for long periods of time brought about a number of unintended consequences to the Mars mission. One crewman on the first wave had an affair with the wife of a second crewman.
When the husband finally pieced together what was going on thousands of miles above his head, he went berserk and threw himself off a bridge.
Living in the close quarters on the ship and then, even later, beneath the Mars dome, brought a load to bear on all of the team.
During the second year, an astronaut became infatuated with one of his female crew members and, when she refused his advances, he shot her with an ion disrupter gun.
Why would anyone have thought that life amidst the stars would be any different from life beneath the stars?
Many ancient religions spoke of the Book of Life which contained the fate of all humankind, and it often seemed to the Old Man in those early days of the fall that he could open this book and read what would come to pass.
To see that space travel hadn’t changed a thing in human nature made him both sad and angry.
One by murder, one by suicide. One by fire, one by water.
As the Director of Human Resources, it was his job to bring comfort. But there were no words adequate to comfort the survivors.
They lived on, despite whatever he said. They lived on in spite of their feelings or their inability to feel.
The survivors survived. That was their job. Some days it was done with grace and other days there was no grace at all.
At first, the death of an astronaut or of their family member brought more anger. But, in the end, he came to sadness and acceptance.
In the end, he realized it was not about him. The Mars project wasn’t about his feelings. He kept reminding himself that when an astronaut died, it wasn’t about his thoughts or his inadequacies.
Some of the astronauts came to him with theological questions that he wasn’t trained to answer. One father, whose son had died in a training accident, came to his office to rail against God.
“How dare God let this happen?” said the father. “How could he take my only son?”
He knew that the only answer that he had for the father was to simply remain silent.
Inwardly, he felt sorry for people who let themselves believe that the universe had conspired against them.
“People simply die,” he wanted to tell the families who came to him. “Whether in space or not, there is no escape from death.”
During the first seven years of the Mars colony, some of the dying lingered, acquiring exotic names; melanoma, myocardial infarction, renal failure. Some went quickly in their sleep or in the now decisive hand of some accident.
It was too expensive and too difficult to move the sick back to Earth. They were treated by the colony physicians, but the treatment often wasn’t good enough or quick enough or was simply not fated to succeed.
As he sat at his monitor and looked at Mars from his office on Earth, there were days when he asked himself why it hurt so much to lose a loved one; a father, a mother, a sister, a brother. He found himself envisioning a family as a single biological organism. If one member of the family died, it was like one of the organs had given up the ghost.
He found himself thinking, Losing a member of the family is like losing a hand or a foot. You could survive the death of a loved one, but he saw in the extended families of the Mars crew that he treated that the pain of their loss was excruciating for a long, long time. And he saw that the emptiness would never be filled.
In the late weeks of the summer, one of the wives of a colonist came to him for counselling. She had learned by radio that her husband had been stricken with cancer and that he would soon be dead. She was in daily contact with him and even so, the mourning had already begun.
The astronaut could not come back to Earth and she could not journey to Mars. “What should I do?” she asked him.
“Think of it as a gift,” he told her. “Now you have some time to say goodbye. Some people never get this chance. Some people never love this deeply. Think of it as...” And then he stopped and he let the silence settle in. It was better to be quiet than to say anything stupid.
The Old Man called himself a JuBu, a Jewish Buddhist. He believed that the world was composed of equal parts of compassion and of suffering.
There are no good words to say before those who sit before their dead. Better to just sit with the survivors in silence, remembering that one day, you, too, will be in the place of the living or the dead.
And so it went. In the later days of autumn, three on the Mars colony died. He called on the families of each one of them, trying to bring some comfort.
The following month, three wives who had been left behind gave birth. The infants were born and he called on those families with congratulations. In NASA rituals he blessed and named them all, in those late days of the fall.
Three people came into the world and three people left, and he found himself meditating on the mystery of it all. One of the Holy Books said that when one soul leaves this world another one enters it.
And so it went.
In the late autumn of the year, he drove home to the new house on the piece of land that overlooked the trees and the road, past the fence crusted by the soot of the rains that fell in the closing paragraphs of one more week, by the dying light of one more day.
Copyright © 2023 by Steven Lebow
