She is prepared for tragedy, equipped. Tragedy is an old companion, you might say, from her youth. Not quite an imaginary friend, but not fully visible either. Borderless. Her daughter thought she shut down in these moments, but it wasn’t that. It was that you had to be so careful with grief. Grief sought connections: it stacked, or swarmed. It was only the first time you experienced sorrow that it stood alone, with nothing attached to it.
Her father hadn’t died on his way to the moon. He’d slipped and hit his head in a national chain grocery store. At first it was only that: your father had an accident. Her nine-year-old imagination worked easily upon the idea of a father who was hurt but would get better; this seemed reasonable, and in proportion to the severity of the accident. Her father had slipped, he hadn’t been in a car or plane crash or shot by criminals. Helen had been instructed to hope and pray. She did so, in much the same way that she loaded the dishwasher when she was told to: uncritically and without the employment of metaphysics. There were things to appreciate about the situation. All the grandparents came, and aunts and uncles. Visits from people they knew from church, more desserts and movies and games and even gifts. Grandpa McInnery showed her how she could look at the sun through shade #14 welder’s glass and told her that if we could look at the sun in space, it would be white, not yellow. Grandpa McInnery let her help him rewire a broken lamp in the TV room. “You’re a Little Miss Fix It,” he said. She remembers that moment very well. The next part was blurry. They’d been brought to the hospital. Their father was not on mechanical life support, he was breathing on his own. He had a feeding tube. Helen was confused by the phrase a doctor used: “awake but not aware.” Grandma McInnery tried to amend this to “sleeping” and muddled things further. Helen knew what “traumatic” meant. She began to worry, and developed a nervous habit of touching the back of her head that would persist for the rest of the year and went unnoticed by her family.
Her father did not get better. Sides were taken, but not fully explained. Her father’s family did not approve of things her mother was doing, and went outside a lot to talk about it. When they came back in, Helen would go collect their cigarette butts in a piece of tissue paper and bury it in the trash. Other people, her mother, her mother’s parents, family friends all had God, and by extension, specific language for unfair misery, on their side. God had plans and tests and he believed that you could pass them. He loved and did not make mistakes. All these people said her mother was brave.
Her father’s state was categorized as persistent vegetative. The doctors could not say “he will die.” They said other things. Physiologic futility meant there were no operations, or drugs that would make her father get better. Qualitative futility meant that they weren’t entirely certain that something else might happen. People were something more than meat, but what else they were was difficult to measure and that made it difficult to know when it was okay to kill them. That was always clear. If they stopped feeding their father, they would kill him. They had the responsibility. Helen learned later on that her father had not been expected to survive that year: pneumonia, infection, organ failure were typical in cases like his. He did survive, but his vegetative state was moved from persistent to permanent.
You could kill a person’s dream, but what if the dream was a person? Could you kill that? Anyway, they hadn’t.
Her father’s family left and was heard from, by mail, only at Christmas and on birthdays. Helen’s McInnery grandparents moved to town to be closer to their daughter and help with the grandchildren. Grandpa McInnery was thought to be especially of benefit to Phil, who would require a male figure. Phil preferred his male figures to be wizards or elves or dwarves, so Helen had Grandpa McInnery nearly all to herself. “Helen’s the son Dad never had,” Helen’s mother and sisters told each other, although Helen knew that Grandpa especially liked it that she was a girl. “You’ll leave all the boys in the dust,” he told her. Helen didn’t want to leave people behind, but it was preferable to being left behind herself.
At first her father’s face still looked like her father. It didn’t look empty, like a person wasn’t inside him. Gradually it looked empty, but maybe because they stopped feeling so much when they looked at it. Maybe they were the ones who became empty.
Sergei and Yoshi stir. They have concluded their moment of silence. Helen is appalled at herself, at having routed the death of Chinese taikonauts to her father. That’s not the right way to think about it. It’s another reason why you had to be so careful with grief. It was like an impact crater, its surface always larger than the thing that created it.
HELEN
The instinct to find comparisons is strong. The Martian sky looks a little like the pink and yellow smog and marine layer haze of Los Angeles in June. The feel of her boots on the Martian regolith reminds her of the arid crunchiness of her boots on the polar desert of Devon Island. This stretch of Martian plain resembles certain barren sections of the Atacama Desert in South America. The color of those distant Martian outcroppings reminds her of the Easter egg Meeps insisted on dipping in every single one of the dyes: a muddy mixture of brown and gray and purple and orange.
It is their third Martian dawn.