Maisa Tribute from Yams
She called me yams for some reason. These are the words I stammered out at Maisa's celebration of life on November 17, 2023.
Man, this is hard. I guess all of you will get to see a grown man cry, somewhere in life I felt I sorta lost the ability to cry. Maisa would always tease me, as the only time I would cry would be during Disney movies. I don’t know why the degree of Disney sap would just make the tears stream silently down my face and Maisa would peek to see if the moment “got me” But we can laugh and cry at the same time I suppose, her sardonic wit will always resonate with me.
Maisa, our sweet daughter, was also our empath, even more so than her mother. So sensitive and perceptive that she could often sense our feelings before we could, or even when the waking world was blind to it. I think this gift (or perhaps curse) of perception, and sensitivity is what inhabits the souls of our most creative, our poets, and artists and philosophers of every stripe. But it is a heavy burden to bear, especially in this world. Drinking from a fire hose of ALL the emotions when the rest of the world masks in monochrome can be overwhelming.
Her philosophical insights were so heartfelt and touching that at times it seemed impossible that they could come from someone with so few years on the planet, that somehow these insights were gained before the world could wake up. She was such a good teacher, she was recently trying to teach me how to read music. It felt like trying to learn Chinese, but she was able to simplify, to explain and draw things called scales, notes, and use some math analogies for me. The math of the frequencies and the scales made sense for someone whose music career stopped in the fifth grade with my recorder. I wish she could have perceived herself more like those who loved her saw herself.
MOAB/Beetlegeuse
Girl of the Stars
Most of you are too young to get the reference, but she was sorta like the family Cliff Claven from Cheers. She would have some fact, or knowledge snippet so obscure that it would seem like she was making it up. No, Dad, that is because it is from the Latin root terr, which means Earth, and extra means outside, so Extraterrestrial means outside of this Earth. I would just stammer something about how in the 80’s we just went with ET. Her deep curiosity and truth seeking is why I have had to research some of these topics that I am sure she would just be able to spit out facts from memory about.
The picture above of our angel was taken on our way to Moab, Utah in Salt Lake City Spring Break of 2022. We visited a science center, her cousins in Park City, we laughed and they taught us Fortnite and everyone laughed a little extra as I was mocked and taken out of the game by a spry blue banana. She loved family, and was deeply drawn to the ancestry, Irish, Norse, and of course Egyptian roots. We also shared in their loss of her uncle John and just did the only thing you can do, spend time and tell stories. COVID was a thief, of life, of connection, of these kids’ childhood, and so many missed opportunities for us humans to connect, to hold each other and help. We all need and needed more of this, especially after the isolation and cancellation of so much of their youth. But it was after this wonderful reunion that we headed to Moab, UT to see some of her/our favorite things, national parks and the stars.
We were able to get a Stargazing excursion planned, in which the astronomer guide set up her telescopes somewhere on the way to Canyonlands. It was really cold and as we covered ourselves in blankets to watch the night sky under a trained eye, with laser pointers, and telescopes the stars exploded across the horizon without light pollution to mask their presence. She took great pride in making fun of her “Southern Girl” mom for being cold, and laughed as the Alabama couple gave up early to escape the cold night and head somewhere else to thaw their Southern bones. To tell the truth, it was bone chilling cold, but the light show was extraordinary. The guide pulled up one Nebula, constellation and star cluster after another we watched, and took turns looking through the focal lens to look back in time. Nebulas are the star nursery, where matter is fused together by God. Even the anomalies, the black holes are the unknown that bend time itself. Is it the beginning or end of light, energy, matter as they just gobble up entropy?
But one of our favorites and perhaps her favorite was when we zeroed the focal eye on Betelgeuse in all its glory. Betelgeuse, red, volatile, unstable and part of Orion, the hunter
Star Colors:
The color (technically the wavelength of light) that the stars emit, can tell so much about what is going on with the star. As Maisa would so eloquently teach us, stars have phases of their life.
Blue Stars: Blue stars are the hottest among the stars the impetuous teenagers burn hot and bright, and they exhaust their nuclear fuel more quickly and can evolve into other types of stars, including red giants or supernovae.
White Stars: The Middle Agers
Yellow Stars: Our sun, they are in a stable phase of their stellar evolution.
Orange Stars: They are often in a later stage of their life cycle, with some expanding into red giants.
Red Stars: Beetlegeuse is a RED SUPERGIANT STAR others are dwarfs. Betelgeuse is one of the largest known stars. If it were in the place of our Sun, its outer layers would extend beyond the orbit of Mars. It is classified as a red supergiant, which means it is in the later stages of its stellar evolution.
Similar to stars, I realize now we have different versions of ourselves. We change through life and the new versions, stack over ourselves similar to Matryoshka dolls. Overlapping, changing the perception of us from the outside, but the inner versions are still there. They sing and call and cajole to be heard. They are our child, the wonder, and at times the pain that we wall behind the next version. We change, sometimes by our own design. We just want to be better. Maybe we just don't want to be that version anymore, but oftentimes it is not our choice or design. Maybe tragedy, mortality or a stroke make us stack over the next version. Like a Phoenix, we are reborn through fire and forge the new version. There are times that we don’t even accept these different versions of ourselves, it is hard to keep these internal tradewinds in balance. I am not the same person I was before we knew Maisa, and I will never be the same after her death.
Back to Moab, we bundled together and each of us took our turn gazing on Beetleguese, its bright red light, flickering and smoldering in the dark night sky. The internal nuclear chaos of the supergiant stretches our understanding of the physical world, temperature, size, and energy. Wikipedia says1 it is 600 light years away. Maisa would say that Wikipedia isn’t a reputable source, but I am going with it anyway.
As we stared up at the dying star we discussed that it may have supernovaed already, but we can only know when the light lets us know. It will have a 600 year journey through space and time before the message reaches us, the light and energy. Supernovaes are often such massive events that they are visible in the daytime. But for most of their story, their glory, it takes darkness to see the light, the messenger, to hear and perceive this message from the past.
Maisa accepted the chaos of the red star for what it was, for the tumultuous battles that were being waged and was comfotable contemplating that the star might not even be there anymore. That we might wake up one day and see and feel its message getting radiated upon us that the conversion of its matter to energy had happened. Personally, I am also going to believe that Beetleguese is no longer the same, that it has entered the next stage of its metamorphosis, that it has supernovaed. I will take on faith and choose to believe that we on Earth (and maybe Mars) will see that Beetleguese supernova 600 years after November, 2 2023. The light and energy will rain down from the heavens on us.
Everything demands connection
Another Cliff Claven fact is that there are more neurons in the brain 100B than stars in the Milky Ways, they form their own connections and clusters and galaxies from which the "me" that is us is born. There is both so much and so little we know about how these neurons chat, how they make up the “me” that is us, how we route around our dark matter, which stars get illuminated and where we get black holes in our mind. I will never understand why what happened, happened, but I will try to convert the loss, the matter, into light and energy somehow. Maybe we all can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse