Space and Time

When humans cry, tears drain through the lacrimal ducts in the middle corner of the eye and into the nasal cavity, which is why your nose runs when you cry. This means that, in space, without gravity, tears form globes of water over your eyes held onto your eyes by surface tension, but your nose never runs.

In 1997, Arthur Aron published a study titled “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness” which suggested that intimacy could be created between strangers by taking 45 minutes to ask each other a series of 36 questions. The questions were designed to create increasing vulnerability and openness as the two strangers progressed through them. The interesting thing about the study, to me, is that they did a nice job of pairing lots of different personality types based on Myers-Briggs tests and emotional attachment style. The study seemed to show that personality type and attachment style didn’t make a lot of difference in the outcome other than the fact that extroverts generally felt closer to everyone. I think a subtle point that is easy to overlook is that the study design required the participants to take turns listening to one another for 45 minutes. To me, this suggests that taking time to listen and to be listened to is pretty crucial for creating meaningful connection. When I was a child, my father never hesitated to remind me that I had two ears and one mouth so that I could listen twice as much as I talked.

One wine-drinking evening many years ago in the basement, laying on a large rug under some black lights, Tiff and I got to discussing these questions and decided to work our way through them. It took us hours. It was revelatory and emotionally exhausting. At one point in the evening’s wandering conversation Tiffany asked me “When was the last time you cried in front of another person and when was the least time you cried by yourself?” This is question #30 in the list and we were pretty deep into some heavy truths and the mood was fairly serious. I really couldn’t think of a time that I had cried as an adult. I have no particular stance on crying but it just wasn’t something that ever really happened to me. Tiff likes to remind that I said to her, with a straight face in complete earnestness, “I’ve seen people cry and it just doesn’t look like any fun.”

Now, saying this sort of thing to a psychiatrist who lives in your house and watches you brush your teeth in the bathroom mirror every night can really get you into trouble. I have subsequently learned quite a bit about emotional vocabulary, masculinity in general, and the value of identifying and processing unwanted emotions. But it’s been an interesting journey since then in being open to figuring out what gets me weepy.

A twenty year career in emergency medicine has given me a lot of gifts that I would never return, but it has also turned emotional dissociation into a survival skill. In our current medical system, there simply isn’t a time or place to process grief, shock, or anger in real time. When someone dies, that means it’s time to see the next patient. I don’t think it’s good for people to do this and there’s good evidence to support that notion. If you look at people who choose emergency medicine for a career, they generally test very high in emotional resilience and, yet, the field has the highest burnout rate of any specialty year after year. (EMS workers have a similar trajectory with the exception that 25% of them leave the career due to physical injury as well.) But this process of learning to delay or forego emotional processing amidst human tragedy and suffering becomes a default mode of operation.

I was recently joking with a nurse about how emergency room workers would be more likely to be eaten by a grizzly bear than most people because we would just be standing there calmly finishing a cup of coffee trying to remember an algorithm for bear attacks while everyone else runs away. At this point in life, I kind of imagine my adrenal glands to be two age-wrinkled, cigarette-smoking, sex-workers in rocking chairs on the porch of my kidneys telling stories abut when they used to make adrenaline and saying things like “Fight or flight my ass, honey. It’s time to watch my show. You deal with that bear your damn self.”

The point of this brief rant about the way our medical system treats its providers is that I find it very hard to cry as a response to grief or witnessed suffering because my brain immediately switches into organizational mode as a response to these experiences. And there’s a role for that. Someone has to clean up the body, get the dropped needles and supplies off of the floor, call the coroner, and talk to the family. We generally have a chaplain on call who can come patiently stand with the family while the rest of us move onto the next case. By the end of the shift, it’s really difficult to rewind the night and genuinely experience the appropriate emotions. Clearly, this stuff goes somewhere into the mind and heart, but it gets difficult to access pretty fast.

However, I do find that I am fairly regularly moved to tears by hearing or reading certain types of stories, and recently I had an experience that helped me identify what still manages to sneak through my defenses and break open my heart.

*This bee hung on here through an entire windy rainstorm, waving all about.*

With both children in camp this week and Tiffany at work, I had the rare experience of having a day with nothing to do and no one around. I had worked the nightshift before, slept as much as I could and was drinking espresso like it was a contest. I decided to go for a long bike ride in the forest behind our house and packed my journal and plenty of snacks. Less than 2 miles from the house I had already experienced two flat tires and didn’t want to risk being stuck out in the woods if I got another, so I returned home, annoyed and frustrated. As it turns out, I got back home just in time for some severe thunderstorms and a tornado watch. I have never heard of a tornado watch in the mountains before. That’s like having a hurricane watch in North Dakota. But sure enough, it started raining sideways and the sunflowers in our garden were bobbing around like those weird inflatable fall-over-and-stand-up-again people that advertise used car lots. (Those things always remind me that there’s a fine line between religious fervor and epilepsy in terms of bodily movement)

So I found myself in the extraordinarily rare situation of being in my own home with no one around and nothing to do, which immediately prompted some very loud trippy dub music and my odd form of dancing which I’m hoping the neighbors think is some kind of vigorous yoga and not just an over-caffeinated reggae hoedown. I’m from Kentucky; dancing involves having your thumbs through your front belt loops. I thinks its some weird epigenetic effect from having to stand too close to inbred racehorses.

After I settled down a bit, I picked up one of the graphic novels that I’d purchased for homeschool this year. (Homeschooling my kids has taught me that I learn way better when books have a lot of pictures). This book was part of our history curriculum and covers the Challenger disaster and the government’s attempt to cover up the fact that the explosion was an expected consequence of launching the shuttle at temperatures that cold. (Tangentially, I’m gonna take three paragraphs or less and lay out this story because I think it’s fascinating. Skip ahead if you wanna get to the part about why I ended up crying my eyes out for a bit)

*History Comics: “The Challenger Disaster”, Pranas T Naujokatis, 2020*

…In the mid 1980’s public interest in the shuttle program had waned and NASA’s funding was at risk. Viewership of shuttle launches was down and they began a push for reengaging Americans by starting Space Camp for kids and by selecting a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, to send into space. They had hoped to make this the most watched shuttle launch in history. However, due to weather, the launch was repeatedly delayed, placing increasing pressure on each new launch window. On January 26, 1986, they decided to launch the shuttle despite below freezing temperatures and the shuttle subsequently exploded, killing all seven crew members and shocking the nation’s watching school children.

Prior to the launch, the engineering team responsible for the design of the O-rings that joined the sections of the solid rocket boosters (the twin white rockets on either side of the shuttle) recommended against the launch and stated that there was an unacceptably high risk of explosion. The rubber O-rings were designed for warmer temperatures and were known to be too brittle to function below freezing. NASA’s administrators overruled the engineers and proceeded with the launch.

In the subsequent investigation of the disaster, this information was hidden until nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman began investigating the issue after receiving an anonymous tip at a party to examine the O-rings. After discussions with the engineers that recommended against the launch and confirming the O-ring as the source of the explosion, he dramatically demonstrated their design flaw in court by submerging one in freezing water and breaking it. The shuttle program was suspended for 3 years and protocols were put in place to allow engineers to delay launches. In 2012, after her death, it was revealed that Sally Ride, youngest woman in space, designer of the shuttle’s robotic arm, tennis champ, and first LGBTQ astronaut, had supplied the anonymous tip about the O-rings to Richard Feynman through an army officer. At the time Sally Ride was a public persona and may have feared investigation into her personal life and her long-term secret relationship with a woman…

Ok, so some of you may now know what my homeschool voice sounds like and are as bored and ready for a snack as my children. So I’ll wrangle this wandering, self-indulgent monologue back to the unexpected afternoon I spent ugly crying and what I think I’ve learned from it.

The detail of the Challenger explosion that snuck around my sob-prevention measures was something I read about the recovery efforts in the days after the disaster. Each astronaut was equipped with a helmet that had an emergency face shield that could close and seal, offering a few minutes of pressurized oxygen. This feature was designed for emergencies while in space and the button that activated it was not easily reached while sitting. In the cabin seating arrangement only three of the astronauts would have been able to activate their own helmet. When the crew cabin was recovered, 4 of the helmets had been activated.

When the Challenger exploded, the crew cabin was sheared off of the shuttle. This suggests that while in free fall from an exploding rocket the size of an office building, an astronaut had the presence of mind to reach out and try to save the life of a crew member. The amount of time in which this occurred was only a few seconds.

Cue massive tears for me here.

Having spent time in the presence of death and its heart-wrenching mysteries, I have seen that dying is one of the most important moments in our lives. We will all do it as differently as we have lived. There is a great wisdom to succumbing to death with acceptance when life is long and suffering outweighs joy. But, when death arrives without invitation or warning, there is little that inspires me more than someone putting up a good fight. The righteous anger against suffering is a defining trait of our species and, in our best moments, it moves us to look beyond ourself and to the suffering of others. Knowing that, even amidst a fiery explosion on the upper reaches of our atmosphere, with no hope of survival, a human’s last choice was to extend the miracle of life to someone for just a few seconds more…it moves me beyond words. This is a type of calm selfless courage that many people will, hopefully, never find out if they possess or not, but knowing that we are capable of it, gives me hope.

Curiously, another defining trait of our species is the oddity of producing tears as an emotional response. This type of crying is technically called “weeping” and the tears produced have a different chemical composition from tears produced to clean or lubricate the eye. Weeping produces tears with higher concentrations of prolactin, ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), and enkephalins which are theorized to play a role in social bonding and the emotional release that accompanies weeping.

When the Challenger exploded, I was in fourth grade and, at the time, desperate to be an astronaut. I was a socially awkward kid who loved science and believed that we would be living in space in my lifetime. (At the time, space travel seemed like a grand human project and not just the next version of a houseboat for billionaires). The explosion of the space shuttle shattered me and the day is uniquely clear in my memory. Despite the tragedy, I remained committed to becoming an astronaut and somehow convinced my parents to allow me to attend space camp in Alabama. 37 years later, my Aunt Lois still remains mad that my parents let me get on an airplane by myself and considers them irresponsible parents the same way she does me whenever I’m not exactly sure where in the neighborhood my son is.

After spending a rainy afternoon learning about the Challenger disaster and trying to decipher the odd burst of emotions that it caused, I called my mother to see if she had any photos from my time at Space Camp. I wanted to reconnect with this quiet awkward kid who said things like “acceptable risk” with regards to his imagined career as an astronaut.

I don’t have any memory of what kept me excited about being an astronaut after the devastating disaster and shut down of the shuttle program. It may be that I was one of the 4 or 5 people who actually saw the movie “Space Camp” which was tastelessly released 5 months after the challenger explosion. In this movie seven children are accidentally launched into space during a launch simulation at space camp and have to figure out how to land the shuttle themselves.

When I look at the pictures from across the intervening decades, I notice how easy it is to feel disconnected from our childhood self; the ability to be inspired by new knowledge, the fearless dreaming that does not yet know the constraints of “wisdom”, and the certainty that we can become something different than what we are. When I was a child, I longed to be an adult. Now with children of my own, I am trying to relearn their ways and perspectives. I carried the dream of being an astronaut through the beginnings of medical school (more than a few astronauts are doctors) but eventually succumbed to the constraints of adulthood and the realization that astronauts spend a lot more time in Florida than they do in space. Boldly sweating in places no one has sweated before wasn’t really my jam. But, I have held onto a deep reverence for a quiet form of courage called perseverance and a continued heart-held belief that we are all in this together. Seeing those beliefs manifest in others breaks through my emotional defenses like a crystal glass being shattered by song.

New Mexico

Havasu