A universe of things to try to understand

At bedtime, I probably shouldn’t have brought up the death of the sun. Under the nightlight — the solar system projected onto the ceiling — I found myself telling my sons, Didi and Gege, how the sun would swell in 5 billion years, engulfing Earth in a fiery doom.

In elementary school, I first learned about the red giant phase of the sun. How shaken I’d been — and maybe still am — to hear that everything would be destroyed. All record of human achievement would disappear too, the history of our heroes, and the books that once touched so many lives. Losing the books — that had disturbed me, as a kid.

The twins seemed stunned into silence.

“But that’s OK,” I said hurriedly. “We’ll be gone by then, long gone. Your children, your children’s children will all be gone.”

I trailed off, wincing inside. Galactic annihilation is hard to grasp, but at least it’s impersonal and far off, and here I’d made them contemplate the end of their own existence.

A few friends told me that the sun blowing up had been a subject of endless fascination and horror in their families, too. One mother tried to comfort her son by saying that humans, more technologically advanced by then, could escape to different galaxies.

In truth, we may be extinct by then, due to climate change or toxins in the environment. Or if humanity survives, we would exist in a form wholly unrecognizable to us today. Modern humans evolved only 200,000 years ago, and our minds can’t truly grasp spans that long, or distances so vast.

At the California Academy of Sciences, we thought the boys would be thrilled to go into the planetarium, but Gege resisted, bolting from the line and shouting “No! No!” We didn’t know what scared him — the prospect of trying something new? Afterward, we learned that he thought we were actually going into space, with all its attendant dangers, but at the time, I persuaded him to enter by promising him a visit to the gift shop. Walking into the dome, we heard a snippet about the International Space Station.

“How long do astronauts stay in the space station?” he asked. “A few weeks or few months,” I said. “Do they pass away?” he asked. Pass away? He’d been considering his mortality, I realized. He’s often quiet, unless you get him going on a favorite topic, like colossal squid, but he’s busy pondering.

“Close your eyes if you start to feel sick,” the announcer warned.

We started on Earth and the view pulled back through our solar system, flying through our galaxy, getting farther and farther away until we could see thousands of pinpricks representing hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of suns.

We learned about the large-scale structure of the universe, gravitational forces that shape the long filaments of galaxies and the emptiness in between. The delicate branches had the look of capillaries, of veins on a leaf, of organic life in all its complexity, and I considered the galaxies in miniature within us at the atomic level, electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun. Zooming from telescopic to microscopic, I felt a renewed sense of wonder.

Looking deep into space is like looking back in time, the announcer said. The horizon of the universe is the oldest edge of what we can see, though probably it goes back farther still. I cuddled Gege my lap, reminded about how very small we were in the grand scheme of things — blips, less than a blip — making our time together more precious.

The following week, we brought Gege and Didi to the cemetery to visit my father. With mortality on their minds, they’d been asking to see his grave. After helping arrange the flowers, my sons searched for daisies they could add to the bouquet, and for unusual grave markers, the ones commemorating the very young and the very old. It was a crisp, sunny winter day and you could see the Pacific, a view that would have captivated my father.

“I wish I had a time machine and I could go see him,” Didi said as we drove away. “And that I could bring him back.”

I ached for my father and for my boys, who would never know him except through the stories I vowed again to keep sharing.

“He was an engineer, just like you,” I told Didi, who loves to build Snap Circuits. “You got that from him.”

Galactic annihilation is hard to grasp, but at least it’s impersonal and far off.