We are all from the stars. The energy that constitutes our bodies came from the stars. if we go back to the past, we all started from the same place. From the Kdrama, Doom at Your Service
When I was a kid, I lived on a small farm. Summer nights I would go out onto the grassy hill above our house and lie on my back and stare at the stars. It felt as if the sky were shimmering, and I would imagine that I was sliding on the Milky Way or splashing in the Big Dipper or leaping from star to star. In my child’s mind, the visible universe was endless.
When I was seven, the Soviet Union sent the satellite Sputnik into orbit, launching the space race, linked forever in my mind with the song, Telstar, by the Tornados, a favorite 1962 tune. I think I was in sixth grade when I first visited a planetarium. It made a lasting impression. As a teenager, I thought being an astronomer would be fabulous, but math wasn’t my forte, and in my small town girls weren’t encouraged to pursue careers in science. Be a nurse, a teacher, a secretary. Better yet, get married and have kids.
Then in 1969, I sat in awe with my college boyfriend as we watched the first moon landing. I still get chills recalling those fuzzy pictures on TV of Neil Armstrong stepping onto that barren surface. To think we were watching from Earth—238, 900 miles away. To borrow a phrase from the 60s, it was mind blowing. In recent years I’ve developed an interest in physics, especially astrophysics. I think if I had to do it all over again, I’d become an astrophysicist, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, someone who makes science accessible and entertaining.
Our book club is currently reading Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by physicist Alan Lightman. It’s a series of essays in beautifully written language that “explores the tension between our yearning for certainty and permanence versus the modern scientific view that all things in the physical world are uncertain and impermanent.” In the book, Lightman says that the material of the stars and the material of our bodies are the same.
“Literally the same atoms,” he says, “because all of the atoms heavier than the two lightest elements–hydrogen and helium–were manufactured in stars.” He explains that hydrogen and helium atoms fused to form larger atoms: carbon, oxygen, silicon, etc. Eventually “some of those stars exploded and spewed their atoms into space. From there they coalesced to make planets. From which single-celled organisms formed in the primeval seas.” And the rest is…evolution.
“It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backwards in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms,” he writes.
In the Kdrama fantasy, Doom at Your Service, a young woman editor, Tak Dong-kyung, receives stunning and horrible news from a doctor. She has an inoperable brain tumor and three months to live, during which she will suffer excruciating pain. Later that day, she finds out her boyfriend is actually married and a father-to-be, and to top it all off, she is stalked by a creepy guy. That night, standing on her deck drowning her sorrows in alcohol, she sees a shooting star and wishes for the world to be doomed. To her astonished disbelief, who shows up at her door later that night? Doom himself, personified in a very handsome man. “You called?” he asks.
Doom offers Dong-kyung a guarantee that she will not be in pain during these three months and that he will grant any wish she makes. However, if she doesn’t explicitly wish doom on the world before she dies, the person she loves most will die in her place. To keep the guarantee valid, she must hold his hand once a day.
As in the way of all Kdramas, things don’t go as planned. As she spends time with Doom, Dong-kyung finds herself falling in love with this supernatural being, who wants nothing more than to be human, and to be loved.
One evening as her last day draws near, they are sitting by a lake under a stary sky. She tells him she has always wondered what happened to the people she loved after they died. Then she says, I would sit here for hours staring at the sky. After looking up for a long time, I understood. They just went back to the place they came from. We are all from the stars. The energy that constitutes our bodies came from the stars. If we go back to the past, we all started from the same place.
And Doom replies, When we all go back to the same place, we will meet again. We will never be separated from each other.
In some mythologies and fables, when you die, you become a star. I like the idea of being a star that will be twinkling in the night sky for those who come after me on earth. It’s not very scientific, and any physicist would scoff at such silly nonsense, but I think it’s a rather lovely thought.
After all, we are all made of stardust.
