For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

Even though my dad died five years before Brent, his case was different because of the unusual nature of his work. He had been on TV a lot. I had VHS tapes, then later DVDs, with thirteen hours of my dad hosting Cosmos. There he is, saying words that he and my mother wrote (together with the astrophysicist Steven Soter), explaining what he knew about our place in the vast majesty of the universe. Even later, I could Google him and watch videos I had never seen before of him as a guest on the Tonight Show. Or him being interviewed on the street holding me as a baby, something I had not known existed. His light was still reaching me, through technology, through science, the summer of his life still warming me during the endless winter of his death. As I watched and read, I had the sense that there was still somehow more of him in my future. The more footage there was to uncover, the less he only existed in the past. It helped. I think of how much harder it must have been to lose your parents when you didn’t have any way of seeing them again. I felt very lucky.