A few years ago, my analyst retired. He was nearing his eightieth birthday and wanted to explore other interests in his remaining years. Throughout our work together, we had had numerous separations. There were times when I was in analysis proper, then times when I’d return to “check back in” for longer and shorter durations. He was a figure in my life for over twenty years, and I talked with him about things I’ve discussed with no one else. But retirement…there would be no going back. That’s a different kind of ending—without hope of seeing one another again.
It meant it would be me, alone in my interior, unaccompanied as I hadn’t been for a long time.
~
I read an article in Scientific American about physics and entanglements in space. They describe an entanglement as a long-distance connection between objects and view entanglements as the fabric, or perhaps more like the threads that hold space together: “Entanglement, then, may undergird the structure of space itself, forming the warp and weft that gives rise to the geometry of the world.”
~
My dad told me a story once about one of his interviews for medical school. At that time, they did in-home interviews. He said that when the man came from the University of Chicago to sit at the kitchen table in his naval town of Bremerton, WA, they talked over a couple of beers. They talked grades, areas of interest and activities. At some point the man asked, “What makes you think you can do this?”
A pointed question. Was this a question he asked each applicant, or was he commenting on my dad’s life circumstances? A boilermaker’s son sitting in a navy town.
My dad replied, “I don’t know… I was a Boy Scout.”
This response made them both break out in laughter. It was so simple, plain even. But my dad was convinced this was what subsequently earned him admission. He had equated two things that had nothing to do with one other.
Or did they? I hadn’t really appreciated the story when my dad first told it to me. I didn’t think being “a Boy Scout” was all that funny. What I didn’t realize was they weren’t laughing at the idea of being a Boy Scout but rather that being a Boy Scout would somehow enable one to become a doctor. In that moment, my father had said something unguarded as opposed to arrogant or defensive. This was his way of saying: I am someone who can figure things out.
Which all-in-all is a pretty good quality to have in a doctor.
~
My sixteen-year-old son said, “You should watch Interstellar. I think you would like it…it’s one of my favorite movies.”
I was intrigued by his favorite movie and whatever it was he thought I would like about it. Quietly, almost an afterthought he said, “The main character is what I think your dad was like.”
Now I was completely drawn in, curious about my son’s ideas of my dad, his grandfather, whom he had never met. What had come through me to him about my dad? Initially he described the main character as “a can-do-anything type of guy, hard-working, loves his kids.”
Hmm, I thought, the warp and weft of my geometry.
~
We watched the movie. It was set in the future of a drying up planet Earth. Coop, the main character, is a former astronaut turned farmer. Strange things start to happen.
In the daughter’s bedroom sits an enormous bookcase filled with books about science and space—her tie to her dad. But she notices books are being moved, almost pushed, out of her bookcase. She says she has a ghost.
Then she notices a pattern in the dust around the bookcase. It’s Morse code. The dust has fallen in patterns of communication. She reads it. Stay, says the dust.
Through a string of events, Coop is asked to lead a mission deep into space to explore other potentially inhabitable planets for the remaining people on Earth. His daughter is brokenhearted and unforgiving of her father’s acceptance of this mission.
The astronauts explore other viable possibilities. At the furthest end of their expeditions, the astronauts realize they do not have enough fuel. They will never return to Earth. Coop is grief stricken to realize he cannot get back to see his children again.
The group decides that the only way to possibly transmit all their data back to Earth is to enter a black hole. Coop accepts this role himself. He separates his pod from the larger vessel and enters the black hole. As his ship breaks up, he ejects himself and floats alone into the unyielding quiet.
We watch as he falls, tumbling through the black hole. He moves inside a tube made of bands of light. He is unprotected, alone, without a ship. Suddenly, from within this black hole, he looks into the other side of the bookcase in his daughter’s bedroom. We, the audience, realize he is “the ghost” who has been trying to communicate to her. He is the one pushing the books off the shelves. He screams and screams trying to reach his daughter, pounding on the beams of light, desperate to reach out. He is the one ordering the dirt and dust into code.
He attempts to forewarn himself to “Stay.” We see at once many moments in her bedroom across time, refracted in the light, as she grows up. Her younger self was never afraid of the ghost. She always thought of it as her ghost—a person. We watch as she becomes a NASA scientist herself, following in her father’s footsteps.
It is Coop’s love of his children that drives him homeward, into the black hole and certain death, and into the entanglement of his daughter’s bedroom. His bond with his daughter spreads across the dimensions, and it’s her love that enables her to understand the communication.
Earlier, the one female astronaut considers that perhaps love is the only concept we humans have for understanding something that could transcend space and time, that could reach through time as though time is nothing.
Watching this depiction of a father’s desire to speak to his daughter, his heartbreak and desperation to reach her, I felt my son had recognized some part of my relationship with my dad. The wish to reach through time and space and even death. A link across the universe between a father and daughter, now layered with the entanglements of my son and I.
My dad’s love of his children transcended time and space and came through to his grandchild. Was it possible to be entangled with someone you’ve never met? Or rather, I should say, this was how it’s possible to be entangled with someone you’ve never met.
~
After the movie I wanted to share the whole story with my analyst—to talk about my son sharing a movie about time and love, a father and a daughter, and how he was showing it to me, his mother.
My analyst had been poised, just so, to appreciate all the nuances and meaning here. His absence felt odd, like finding oneself outside in the cold without a coat. Or reaching for something common to find it gone. When we were finishing our work together but not yet done, I worried he was tired of listening to me, ready to be finished and in his own time. I asked, “Aren’t you ready to be done with this?” Really, aren’t you ready to be done with me?
Looking into my eyes he said, “I will be working with you up to the last minute we are here.”
In analysis there is something I think of as quiet love. Steady, consistent presence over years. A way of thinking about time that is geologic.
He did not speak emotions with his words, but his way of saying this phrase to me, I will be working with you up until the last minute, spoke volumes. His dedication to his work, but also to me. It was professional and so personal at once. I felt tremendously cared for in that one sentence. And it also meant I would be losing something valuable.
It reminded me that earlier in our work together he had developed cancer. A point came where he had to tell me, and all his patients, about the diagnosis, upcoming surgery and time off from work. Years later, after successful surgery and treatments, he shared with me that he had attended a recent medical appointment and was now cancer free. I burst into tears, flooded with relief, and felt a worry lighten I hadn’t known was there.
He had come through something so harrowing and would live to have many more years. He said, “I did not want to die on you.” Again, he looked into my eyes. I was caught by the phrasing and the meaning of his statement. He did not want to repeat to me the rupture and loss I had felt when my dad died of a brain tumor. I felt acutely the risk of all the relationships we invest in. Much to gain and much to lose.
Of course, my analyst’s cancer, treatment and prognosis had nothing to do with what he wanted. It was purely a wish, but it represented his desire to protect me from losing yet another pivotal man in my life. His wish meant something to me—a person worthy of being protected.
~
From Scientific American again: “When any two objects interact in quantum mechanics, they generally become entangled and will stay entangled….In principle, two entangled particles could sustain their connection on opposite sides of the galaxy or universe.”
God I hope so.
I miss him. My analyst. His retirement echoed the other significant loss in which there is no “going back.” My dad. Sometimes I say those words out loud to myself. My dad. Mostly because they are common words I do not use much anymore. Of course, I may say father or dad about someone else’s parent. But I rarely use the phrase my dad. Sometimes I think it could have been me, a future me, pounding and imploring from the other side of the black hole to stay. But stay where? Maybe what I want is a message that encourages me to see my dad. A second time, a third. To really look, before he’s gone. I miss him so much. And yet I find those entanglements alive in me. The relationship embedded within the fabric of myself. Indeed, my son feels him through me.
The alone I have feared is not the alone I find.
