Orion and One Family's Story

A personal essay by Andrew Oakes

Orion used to be the only constellation I ever bothered to look for--and it still is.

"Stars"

How can I do justice to Grandma, and to stars? I am not the first person, neither will I be the last, to have gazed, somewhat stiff-necked, up at the night sky. I am not the first person, neither will I be the last, to have tried expressing (clumsily) the camera obscura holes in our dark, warm night-blanket, which open on unexpected realities on their other sides. I am not the first person, and I will not be the last, to take pride in knowing the constellations, and relaying their stories to my friends. Neither am I the first—as these last several months have taught me—to pay homage to a life which now finds itself among those stars.

Something Grandma said to one of her close friends.
Typeset by Maddy Mortell

On the ground-level, I’m worried that my expression of my thoughts and feelings in a too—how should I say?—over-inflated way would fall into her “Don’t take yourself so damn seriously!” category. My relationship with her began as a child and spake as a child and was in all respects, that childlike connection between grandchild and grandmother. “Going to Grandma and Poppa’s”—that was our youthful refrain every time we piled into the red car for Sunday dinner. It meant playing pool in the game room, playing chess in the sun room, playing cribbage with Poppa, or watching Grandma play solitaire. It meant eating ice cream bars or Poppa’s famous fudge or Grandma’s crazy cake. In the summer it was running down to the pool for smores and more ice cream. And so my own impatience circa 8 years-old (and for some years beyond) turned to excitement when we finally crested the hill and saw the red barn, and the final turn into their driveway. It’s a feeling that has staunchly lived in childhood, so utterly unattainable now—it’s expression can really only properly be related in “Going to Grandma’s and Poppa’s.” But that was Grandma for me. Back then, the star was on the ground.

When she died, did childhood die? I’d so much rather agree with Grandma and not take myself so damn seriously, but given mine were most definitely not the only misty eyes on her funeral day, we’re all having a hard time following her advice.

"Oh my stars!"

Her advice so little resembled the feeling of the word—she gave at most maxims, and most often just bits of life that slipped off her tongue at opportune moments. Softly, her voice filled her corner of the room. Quite frankly, you had to master what we call in our family “the lean”—the bodily forward inclination required to listen to low-talkers like her. It’s a trait that’s been passed down to her progeny. But Grandma’s voice filled your ears with warm familiarity. Even coughs felt familiar, because they almost always were followed by a quip, or a retort, or something funny, or simply “Oh my stars!”

“Oh my stars!” meant something. It teetered between “Oh my stars!” little so-and-so is tearing through the house and there’s no catching him, or “Oh my stars!” Senator what’s-his-name said the dumbest thing in Congress, or “Oh my stars!” and then a groan, and a twinkle in the eye, and a laugh. “Oh my stars!” and that gentle reproof because you did something stupid.

A photo I took of a painting of the New Canaan Chapel
 hanging in my grandparent's home.
Not pictured--the septic system. 

She probably said, “Oh my stars!” when sitting in the town meeting where some inhabitants of New Canaan, Connecticut, vehemently opposed the construction of an LDS church building. Their reasoning? A misplaced worry about the Mormons flooding the town’s septic and sewer systems. From her own astute observation, the building of the church did not noticeably strain pipelines.

She probably said, “Oh my stars!” when she herself was playing Miss “Not-so-nice” for her youthful charges in Sunday School—demonstrating with gusto the do’s and do-nots of etiquette, most memorably with socks and a banana, which she unpeeled with her toes. She probably thought it when one of those charges sighed with boredom and laid down on the floor in the middle of another lesson—to which she responded, in turn, by laying down next to him, all eyes on the pair, and waited till he was ready to rejoin the rest.

“Oh my stars!” was probably on her lips when my aunt gave her a neon green wig after the chemotherapy.

The cancer treatment was my first inkling of any imperfection in her, I having ignored the persistent nudges of reality-checks throughout my first twenty years of life. And yet, as it could only be with her, that cancerous anvil from the sky landed soundlessly on something, something like a pillow of soft feathers, the weight of it lost in her good humor and lifetime’s worth of zingers. Cancer was the bully that Grandma was always saying that we should “out-nice,” and it seems that Death just couldn’t help but sit at her knee and laugh with her and say he’d come calling again another time, no more mean and scary than the next door neighbor.

That anvil weighed heavier in the fall. It wasn’t the cancer this time. It was her heart. It had taken a beating during the chemo, and it was weak. Mom went out to Idaho. She was gone for almost two months—she and her siblings keeping the vigil till Death came knocking once again.

The day she died I didn’t cry. I felt like I was stepping on solid ground more than I had for weeks. The expectation of a singular text from Mom was lifted, the text having already came. I walked to work breathing deeply from the morning air. As much as I wanted to, though, as much as I thought it would be something that she would do in this situation, I couldn’t laugh. It caught in my throat and I was silent. “Oh my stars” had departed. She wouldn’t fill my ears again.

Christmas and Orion

Christmas eluded me all December. To detail papers, exams, sleepless nights, and the all-too-familiar finals flail would be pointless—except that the anvil was now on solid ground, pressing its weight on me. The lightness of the season was lost on me.

Christmas lay hidden in plain sight, and I had no idea that I was even missing it. Perhaps finals had something to do with it, but the cloud cover had descended and the night was inky black and impenetrable. I didn’t even know—I never thought to look up. Normalcy, I thought, was taking my tests. Normalcy, I thought, was putting my head down and going to work. Normalcy, I thought, was “don’t take yourself so damn seriously.” I think I did laugh a few times, but they simply got muffled in the fog that I was trying so hard to ignore.

A photo I took of a painting of the Barn,
where we spent most summers.

I remember growing up and the normal thing to do was give Grandma a call on a warm, late-summer afternoon to ask if we could come swim in the pool, my young voice trembling because I was shy on the phone. It was normal to bake cookies and bring them to Grandma and Poppa’s house. Piled in the red car we brought a plate of cold chocolate chip cookies because we had waited around at home too long and it took twenty minutes to get there. The cookies, cold, were nevertheless appreciated. They were all the warmer for the surprise.

I remember, also, poking my head through the entrance to Grandma and Poppa’s kitchen in Idaho, two years absent in Thailand. She sat munching on cold cereal in her spot by the big window, not at all wise to my arrival. I called out, “Hello!” and she turned slightly, and when she saw me her eyes widened and she said, “Oh! Oh! OH!” She didn’t even get to “Oh my stars!”

Christmastime after her funeral didn’t feel like Christmastime—not at all, until on Christmas Eve I rolled off my bed and stepped into the night; “the first stars,” I saw, had already “[begun] to frost the heavens.” So in awe of the warm night-blanket tucked into the scraping treetops before me, I gathered myself and went back inside to bring whoever else would come and see.

The stars, we watched, “emerged slowly, popping out one by one.” Time stopped and the sky circled noiselessly on its axle—"and then they all came in a rush, spilling out of the ether until the narrow ribbon of sky above was no longer speckled with isolated motes but was a milky torrent, alive with eddies and whirlpool…”

"Orion"

I noted Orion, wheeling around his pole, clearing the celestial milieu of nebulae and leaving young stars in his wake. He was tethered, it seemed, by nothing but his faith in Polaris: the North Star. In muffled voices, my parents and siblings and I remarked on his determination.

Christmas was Grandma’s favorite holiday, but with her gone, what was there to rejoice in this time? Christmas didn’t feel so until I watched Orion’s example that night. I didn’t know why, then. All I saw was his perpetual pursuit of his quarry, uninterrupted for millennia with Canis Major by his side. How many millions of miles has Orion tracked through our night sky? How many stories have been told under his watchful eye?

Since her death, the family folklore has been told with greater boldness—our little remembrances trying to pick up the pieces of her passing. The story goes that Grandma and Poppa were outside on a clear night, Orion in view. As my aunt tells it, “my mother pointed to the heavens, poked her lips out, turned her face toward my dad’s and said, ‘Look Rodney, there’s Orrrriiiioonn.’ –he got the hint and kissed her.” When she died, my aunt walked out of the house and there was Orion again—now, “a family symbol, standing as sentinel.”

Since that Christmas night, the cloud cover has dissipated and I can track Orion again, steady and unwavering, the unchanging story of a family. Grandma’s busy drawing new constellations now, tending to them just as gently and with as much good humor as ever. Her voice sighs with a wry smile on the heavens:

“Oh my stars!”







Image credits: "Stars" by 1980supra and "Orion" by sl1990 are both public domain photos from pixabay.com