Call My Name By Laura J. Oliver

If it weren’t for the fact that we have had overlapping lifetimes, I’d think I’m a reincarnation of the celebrated astrophysicist and poet of the cosmos, Carl Sagan. Except that, well, he was a man and could do math.

And his IQ was 170. And he was famous—Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson without the ego. Then there’s the 30 books he authored and the Pulitzer…

Details.

I’m talking about similar sensibilities. Sagan’s work was a hymn to the universe and although he was a scientist and an agnostic, toward the end of his life, he acknowledged with poetic yearning the mysterious possibility that existence transcends the physical.

See? Subtract agnostic and scientist, and same-same! We also shared one very unique experience I’ve told almost no one till now.

Sagan died at 62 of pneumonia, a complication caused by a rare bone marrow disease he’d been fighting for two years. By that time, the man who studied the stars had long been a star, and my astronomy class, which meets on Zoom, was watching a video lecture he had made toward the end of his life.

“My parents died years ago,” Sagan explained. “I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are – really and truly – still in existence somewhere.”

Sagan continued, “Sometimes, I dream that I’m talking to my parents, and suddenly – still immersed in the dream – I’m seized by the overpowering realization that they didn’t really die, that it’s all been some kind of horrible mistake. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.”

This from the man who said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

I was watching this interview from my office, my microphone muted so the rest of the class wouldn’t hear my black-and-white terrier mix going off like a bottle rocket at every other dog walking by when Sagan shared, in an off-hand way, an inexplicable experience I could relate to.

As the interview wound up, Sagan reported that on at least three distinct occasions in the years since his parents died, he heard them call his name. In their exact voices, clearly and emphatically, not once, not twice, but in three separate instances– “Carl!”  But, although he swore it to be them, rather than explore how that might be possible, he dismissed the experience as a hallucination.

I listened to him negate his experience and thought, I’m glad I’m not your mother. Because isn’t that what parents do? Try to connect with their kids? Get them to pick up the phone? What’s the country code for life from the other side?

“I don’t want to believe,” Sagan said of life beyond physical death, “I want to know.” And yet, he espoused a profound belief that humility is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Sagan would be the first to say, ‘We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Shortly after my grandfather died–the carpenter, the numismatist, the amateur paleontologist, and astronomer— shortly after he was killed on the side of the road almost in front of his home in a hit-and-run accident, I awoke one night in my too-yellow, yellow bedroom on Dutch Ship Court to the sound of my name. Just one word, “Laura,” in a distinctly male voice.

I sat up and saw nothing but the shadow of books by the bed, the door to the hallway standing open, but I felt the mattress at the foot of the bed rise as if someone had just stood. Someone saying goodbye or saying hello?

Figuring out how to test and measure things we can theorize but cannot see is a challenge, such as the search for gravitational waves, black holes, and the Higgs Boson, often called the God Particle. As for how to test for the nature, source, and extent of human consciousness, well, we’re working on it, and until we can, as the man with the IQ of 170 famously said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

I can’t measure or test my experience, but I don’t dismiss it. The one thing I know for sure is that I share with Carl Sagan the belief that questioning is a form of reverence—a way of honoring the complexity and beauty of the world. He suggested that it takes courage to embrace the unknown, but I would say it takes not courage but trust. Trust that the core of creation is good.

I like to think Carl Sagan’s mother greeted him upon his transition to whatever is next. I can imagine her saying, “For Pete’s sake, Carl, we’ve been calling you!” I like to think that, at last, he had his extraordinary evidence.

I deeply respect Sagan’s agnosticism—his saying, I see no evidence that indicates a divinity, but …I can’t rule out the possibility–as opposed to atheism: an assertion that there’s nothing else and no reason to look. Because certainty assumes we know all there is to know. That strikes me as both naïve and presumptuous.

The theory that life transforms energy states but does not end in no way requires a belief in God. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,” was 50/50 on the existence of any divinity and later became a practicing Buddhist. And yet…

One way or another, Carl Sagan now has the evidence he sought, and I hope his experience at the end of his life was full of the same awe he shared as he gave us the stars. An awe similar to Jobs in the hours before he took his last breath. Surrounded by family, he gazed into their eyes, then abruptly looked past them to exclaim,

“Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.