Grief Makes Us Time Travelers - The New York Times

I am in my pajamas, watching a Netflix documentary about space telescopes when I begin to think about my mother. “The iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones was literally formed out of a star that exploded billions of years ago,” the documentary’s excited astrophysicist says. An image of the Southern Ring nebula floats across the screen. “This is a dying star in its last gasp of light,” she explains. It looks like an eye, an iris, a nipple, a womb, a portal opening up in space. I stare at the dying star — taking its last breath, mothering us all. I was with friends in Hell’s Kitchen when I first saw my mother’s brain scans. We were neuroscientists at Princeton in our early 30s, freshly done with our Ph.D.s. A few days earlier my mother — the political scientist, the litigator — had woken up next to my father in their home in Tehran, unable to speak properly, terrified. Her brain scans arrived the night before my hurried flight home in January 2016. When I showed them to my frie

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