On the day of her return there were celebrations the whole world over. People out in the streets. Music. Fireworks. Streamers and confetti. Billions of people watching the same live feed of her climbing out of that shuttle. We all saw her expression, but no one knew what it meant. But we knew what it wasn’t; triumph. It wasn’t that at all.
The diagnosis came a year later. She’d been screened for that kind of thing after her return but nothing had shown up. Then twelve months later she was riddled with a hyper aggressive cancer. This alarmed everyone. It was only natural to assume the faster-than-light travel had caused it, or something from her exposure to deep space. For us, it was a tragedy on a smaller and far more concentrated scale.
She never did speak much about what she saw out there, in the farthest reaches of space. But as my mother lay dying I asked her about it, if only to distract her from her present pain. She said; ‘I saw God, and It spread its terrible wings, and I knew I was less than a grain of sand in a great storm. And yet It held me in its sight and saw me. It saw me.’
Paddy Dobson
15th October 2021