After cosmologist Renee Hlozek's father dies, science becomes a solace.
Renee Hlozek is an assistant professor at the Dunlap Institute within the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UofT. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, where she also did her undergrad degree. She did her masters at the University of Cape Town before moving to the UK in 2008 as a South African Rhodes Scholar. After four years as the Lyman Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University, she moved to Toronto in 2016. Her work uses data from telescopes around the world to test the predictions of novel cosmological theories about our universe, how it started, what it contains and how it will end. She was elected as a 2013 TED Fellow and a Senior Fellow for the years 2014-2015.
This story originally aired on Dec. 15, 2017, in an episode titled Life and Death.
Story Transcript
The day after my dad died was a beautiful spring day. It was May in Oxford, the most perfect month of the most perfect season. The sunshine was incredible and everyone was outside enjoying it, because it’s England. You don’t get that many great days. There were spring flowers everywhere, coming out of the buildings and under the trees and in the fields, and it was amazing.
I felt a total disconnect with the day. It was as if nature was telling me that I had no excuse not to enjoy myself, and yet I felt like the other reality that my dad wouldn’t experience this day from anywhere on the planet was understood by my most sensible of organs, like the kidneys and the liver. But the other organs, my skin, my hair, my face – those are not organs – my lungs, my heart, my brain just didn’t get it. It was as if my body was saying, “Just how did your logic die?”
I remember getting the call from my brother. He had texted me earlier that day to ask if he could have a time to Skype with me and my mom. My mom was visiting me in Oxford at the time. But my mom and I were going to a play in the garden of an Oxford college so we were feeling really frivolous. We decided just not to prioritize a Skype that afternoon with my brother. I can only imagine how hard it was for him to decide to call my cell phone rather than wait to Skype the next day.
We had popped into a pub, one of the busiest pubs in Oxford called the Turf Tavern, to just have a quick pint before the play. It was really loud and noisy so I decided to go into the courtyard to take the call. I had to turn into the corner and so I was actually staring at people going to the toilet when I heard the news. I heard this distant voice telling me that my father had died at 63.
I instantly felt, of course, this wave of confusion and sadness. I knew that I would have some really, really weird conversations in the months that followed and I had a sense of the tears that would come. But mostly I felt like I turned the page in some Choose Your Own Adventure book and I didn’t know how to get back.
The strange thing is that you never kind of get over that initially. You're not sure what the last words were and if they were even descript enough to remember. What if you couldn’t remember the last thing you said to someone because it was probably something really bland?
Coupled to that my dad and I didn’t have a great relationship. He was more sentimental than connected to my life so we sort of developed this symbiotic relationship of sharing memories and pleasantries. He also wasn’t really great at looking after his body and so he'd had a lot of health scares when I was a kid and when I was a young adult. So weirdly enough, I was prepared for this moment.
It was like The Boy Who Cried Wolf and one of my feelings was anger. I was angry that I wasn’t more sad, or the right amount of sad. But what is the right amount of sad and for how long? I felt like the sine wave of emotions, some sine curve that I just had to ride out until I understood my reality.
I found a really strange ally during that time. I found that science became my solace. There was this strange solidity to the physical world and the participation of science. Science isn’t the bottle of wine that you drown your sorrows in. It isn’t that fight that you pick with your friends, but it’s constant. So I found that that was communicated to me through my doing of science.
And I hate to break it to you but the universe doesn’t care about you. I found that really reassuring. I was debugging my code, we were trying to forecast what future telescopes would tell us about dark energy and I found that the coding was somehow cold and distant. It was a great friend who didn’t ask me to share, who gave me no empathy at all but gave me infinite comfort.
As an aside, I probably leaned a little bit too heavy on that comfort. As my mom was leaving one morning at 4:00 a.m. to catch an early flight back to South Africa, I was still coding at 4:00 a.m. and she thought she would try and beg me to add sleep as one of my ways of coping. She had a point.
It may seem really strange to think the fact that the universe doesn’t care about me gives me comfort, but actually, as a cosmologist, that’s something that really underpins my work. I study the initial conditions of the universe, how it came to be the way it is, what it’s made of, and how it will change with time. There's something really important about that grandeur, that bigness of the universe that I study. But if I or you or Stephen Hawking understands the universe, she continues undeterred.
I don't study cancer research or trying to change global warming. Nothing in my research will change the fate of the universe, and that’s kind of how I like it. There's something really solid and beautiful about it.
I also realized that I was given another blessing by being a cosmologist because I’m actually really good at talking about death. It just happens to be the death of the universe. I study it all the time. Because if we have the initial conditions of the universe and we understand the ratio of dark matter to dark energy, we can predict, with reasonable certainty, how the universe is going to end. It’s not pretty, just in case you were wondering.
So I know the end of this thriller even if none of us are going to be around to see it. And it will take hundreds of billions of years to play out. That’s awesome. We write songs and plays and music about the universe, we look up and get really emotional, and yet we can calculate. We can use telescopes and build new instruments to try and quantitatively understand the universe around us.
I also realized that I could use some of those skills about talking about death with my own family and with my own life. So that’s what I did.
I sat my mom down. It’s not a great conversation starter. “Please, Mom. I wanna talk to you about dying.” But she was patient and she sat with me. I told her what I want to happen after I die. I’m just going to give you the whole spiel for the record.
I want all of my organs donated for everything, if possible. Also, any kind of scientific research you want to do on me is great. I don't want a coffin anywhere near a memorial because those are only designed to make you sad. I want an eco-burial, so put me in a Mushroom Death Suit and let me feed the planet. I want a giant photo of my face, like huge. And I also want more than one person to be wailing inconsolably, and hopefully banging something hard. Just like, “Why? So young!” Actually, none of those are jokes.
So strangely enough, talking to my family about things that I want, even though it was uncomfortable, it was just an amazing way of sharing. I study the universe to understand it, but, partly, I got to understand my family and my loved ones by talking to them about my own death, which I thought was kind of beautiful.
It also made me think about things that I want in the world and things I want to do in the world. So I, as a good scientist, I made a list. I want to learn. I really love the way it challenges me and makes me think in different ways. I want to travel both physically - I like to go to new places - but also mentally, through books and films and art. I want to be taken to a new place in my brain.
I want to love and I want to be able to be loved back. I want my heart broken, because there's no more visceral way to be alive than to have your heart emotionally ripped out of your chest. That happened recently.
I also want to be able to enrich the lives of other people. I want to enable people to be excited about the universe and go and study it, go and learn and read about our planet and the universe in general.
Then I realized I had done almost all of those things. Now, I’m not going to say that the rest of my life is boring, but I’m pretty sure it will contain some mixture of those things plus a really good cocktail and a couple of great cries.
So I suddenly realized I don’t have to have regret, but it also made me think very carefully about possible limitations to my life. It’s very important for me to be able to laugh and communicate with those around me. And if I have the thought of a life that doesn’t contain those, I realize I want to optimize my life for those things and not just optimize my life for being alive.
My family now knows that if I’m in an accident and I need to be resuscitated, if those things are not possible I don’t want that.
My mom cried a bunch when she read all of this, but, to me, it’s very comforting to know that these people know this about me. And why is that bad? If we choose to look at physics with this very pragmatic objective understanding, we face the complicated calculations about the minutia of the universe, why does talking about how much pain you can tolerate or what you want your final days to be make the present any worse? Surely it’s the opposite. It gives us that rational insurance for a time when we are probably going to be our most afraid and alone.
I feel really, really blessed as a cosmologist to be able to ask these incredible questions and I do it for mostly selfish reasons. I just want to understand the universe. But I also do it because I connect to the universe that way, just like talking about the end of my life helps me connect with those around me.
The universe is really huge but the enormity of the universe doesn’t make me feel smaller, it just makes me feel lucky that I get to learn about it and share it with you, to live, to laugh, and to love. Maybe that’s the point. Thank you.