TO CARL SAGAN—

On your sixty-seventh birthday, I was born into a world you’ve never known.

I first heard your name when I was eight. I’d searched the date on famousbirthdays.com, and you’d appeared in the thirty-first spot—honestly, much lower on the list than you should’ve been. For the rest of my time in elementary school, filling up six notebooks of stories a year and hiding under the covers with glow-in-the-dark space books, I took pride in the fact I had anything in common with you. When grown-ups asked, I told them I wanted to be an astrophysicist and an author.

I first watched Cosmos when I was barely thirteen. I’d started writing a novel two months before, and around the same time, I lay awake on Christmas Eve not from excitement, but from fear that every-thing, all of me, would one day cease to exist. I watched Cosmos as an anxious teenager, bitter with the hurt on television news and the limits on our lives. But you said that we were made of stars; when we spoke, we spoke for the universe; that cognizance can come from chaos and humans might not blow themselves up after all. Through the course of long nights and four years, I wrote about a kid who learned these truths. She was barely thirteen. She would never grow old.

And then it was nearing your eighty-fourth birthday. I’d read five of your books, and I owned many more, my searched-for first editions, but I knew once I read them it would all be over; I’d never turn a new page at night under my covers. I was still deeply saddened by the end of all things. I was afraid to finish my novel. I’d written the last chapter, but I could find no relief, constantly revising the remnants of the writer I’d aged beyond. Those four years would feel a waste if I didn’t publish young. Friends gave positive reviews, as did grandmothers, and I felt emboldened enough to seek an editor.

A good first novel, she said, but not commercially viable.

In hindsight, I’d been afraid to move on.

Twenty-two years after you died, and one month after I buried my novel, I made a sad sort of pilgrimage to Ithaca. Maybe it was strange that I cried at the grave of a man I never knew; maybe it was justified when everything felt like an end, when you were gone so long before you reached this future full of new frontiers; the only world I’d ever known. But somehow, even if you weren’t around to see them, you’d changed worlds you couldn’t have imagined.

I sat on the path beside the grass. I gazed at the gravestone, its trinkets and tributes, and realized that even in death, our cycles live on. We are stars, and may return to stars—but we are more than our chemical fuel. We are books that rewrite and reform. We are stories that sometimes aren’t ready to be told. But as old works live to inspire new, our thoughts and dreams pass down through the ages. We are cycles of mass and energy, but also of kindness and knowledge and hope.

And sitting on the path beside your grave, I realized those four years had been practice so that someday, I might change the world of another kid with a book under the covers at night. And then all the ends—and all the new beginnings—didn’t seem quite so bad.

*** This week will be your eighty-eighth birthday. Even in the four years that have passed since I left a letter on your grave, I’ve grown so much. The world has grown, too, for better or worse—JWST is finally sending its stunning images back to Earth, and we’ve found over five thousand exoplanets. But we are clawing our way through a pandemic of sickness and pseudoscience, wishing CEOs would have the sense to stop smothering us in blanket after blanket of pumped CO2, hoping to visit landmarks by the coast even once before they sink into a silent, dying ocean. There have been yet new fears, new demons, since you died. We are still afraid of the dark. I can’t help but wish you were here to hold a candle to the truth. Soon after I wrote the first half of this piece, just months before the pandemic hit, I stumbled across the letter I’d left you, the letter in which I’d written that surely, a paper as flimsy as this would be swept away in the coming days. Some person might read it, but it wouldn’t be you—and it wouldn’t be many. But I was proven wrong. My message had mattered enough to someone that they’d taken a picture and posted it online. What I thought was ephemeral had been captured in photo—and tens of people had responded. They saw it— They saw me. I think all I ever wanted was to be a messenger like you. It was never enough just to know things for myself. I wanted to uncover the secrets of the natural world, but also make them not so secret anymore. I wanted to speak for the universe. I wanted to brave the dark and blink out my message to a sea of empty space. I could only hope someone would hear me on the other side. Those forty people taught me there's always someone who listens. *** I’ve visited the grave a few times each semester I’ve been at Cornell. Sometimes I’ve left a message or two. Though I have to admit they’ve never been as good as the first:

My favorite quote of your writing comes from Contact. “For small creatures such as we,” you wrote, “the vastness is bearable only through love”—but I have come to believe that the vastness is not only bearable, but filled. For as long as humans send their hearts into the dark we will live on in that empty space—for that long and ever longer—we make moments last until the end of time. Quite possibly, you’ve filled the space with more hope and awe than most who have ever lived. But speaking only on my own behalf, you’ve bestowed enough wonder to convince me, even during the worst of nights, that life truly matters on a cosmic scale. That even my own life will matter, however brief. That we speak for the universe—and is there not no greater cause?

It was nearing your eighty-sixth birthday, the pandemic in full swing, when I ended up at the grave again. Forty people had heard my message, but now I was alone once more, at a new school in a still-new pandemic. Sometimes five days would pass and I wouldn’t have a single conversation outside the stoic faces on my screen. The weather didn’t help matters. It was cloudy that day at the grave. I sat on the grass. I gazed at the gravestone, its trinkets and tributes. I didn’t realize it then, but I’d already met some of my best friends in the entire world.

Still, the fact remains that you lived, that you died, that your words touched so many minds; that Voyager, too, speeds on, though the twins will soon cease to speak; that the golden record still shines; that humanity has not, of yet, destroyed itself; that you are buried here in Ithaca and I have left you a letter you will never read. That I feel a bit silly for writing it, too, but that maybe it’s not a bad thing, to be so moved as to talk to the dead—to be human.

The clouds were starting to part. I was trying to steady my breathing. I was trying to assure myself that someday it would all be okay. There was a lawn mower in the distance, birds and bright blue flowers. It was beautiful. I pulled out my phone to take a shaky picture of the sky.

In a billion years, maybe, all will be forgotten. But in this moment I live. I exist. So do you, in some time or another, and even when the Voyagers return to stardust the facts will all remain. You lived. You live, in moments that last for all of time. You’re filling the space between the stars.

The clouds were parting. Down the hill from your grave was a single deer, standing in a ray of sun.

And in the end, what I’ve wanted to say most of all

is thank you for that.

We were suspended in a sunbeam.