Surviving

QUESTIONS WERE on Matthew’s mind. I’d seen that look on my grandson’s face many times. It was a Saturday evening—the beginning of a sleepover weekend—and the two of us were eating dinner. Stouffer’s lasagna, his favorite.

“What if our Milky Way galaxy got mixed up with another galaxy?” Matthew asked.

I’d grown accustomed to this latest line of interrogation. I placed my fork on my plate and lifted my gaze to meet his. We talked about Andromeda and how the stars in our galaxy and that one are moving toward one another, bit by bit.

Matthew filled in. “And we could crash?” Eyes wide, his face brimmed with the thrill and fear of such a possibility.

I nodded.

“And then what would happen to us? Die?”

I wasn’t prepared for that question—the end of life as we knew it. In a recent meeting with a financial planner, my existence was parsed in terms of how much money I’d need to navigate the life expectancy and finances chart. Though I am over seventy, the idea of “years left” slammed into my solar plexus, as if I were receiving news of my mortality for the first time. But at Matthew’s age—not yet seven—it would have never occurred to me to contemplate such a dire possibility.

in the mid-1940s, I spent my time outside of school roaming our small family farm and the surrounding fields in southern Pennsylvania. Most days, I climbed up the maple to sit in the tree house my father had built. My roost overlooked the barnyard, and I often imagined how the animals felt about life. The chickens didn’t seem a