Chasing the dark

Finally seeing totality

On August 21, 2017, I woke up at 5 am to my small son patting my face with his hands. He always did this when he was little, woke early then toddled into the room to find me. He’d pat my face and I’d crawl out of bed and scoop him up into my arms. Together, we’d go downstairs, and I’d make coffee with him — him pressing the lid of the coffee maker closed and pressing the button to turn it on. 

Then, we’d sit down on the couch, me with my coffee and him with his blankie and Curious George on TV. But that morning, as I passed into the kitchen, I looked out the front door. It was cloudy. The weather app on my phone said it would be cloudy all day. I was devastated. 

I wanted to see the eclipse.

I frantically checked more weather apps. Where would the sky be clear? 

When my husband came downstairs that morning, I told him the sky was not cooperating. I wouldn’t get to see the eclipse. I felt like I was whining. A child, stomping her foot. He shrugged and headed off to work. He hadn’t wanted to go on a trip to see the total eclipse. We had children. He had work. There would be other eclipses, he reasoned. They happen all the time. Maybe we could chase one someday. He headed out.

But I didn’t want to wait for someday. I wanted it now.

I was tired of waiting. Tired of waiting for my turn to do things. I was tired of waiting to go to the places I wanted because we had small children or because money was tight. I was tired of waiting because he’d gotten his job and we’d moved to this town. I was tired of waiting to do my work because we didn’t have childcare or we needed milk. Or someone had to decide what was for dinner or to fold the laundry.

My life was falling apart that summer. I was holding onto the pieces. And I needed to see the moon pass in front of the sun. 

My husband left for work. So, I made a decision. I put my kids in the car and left town.

It’s madness to toss two small children, ages 6 and 3, into a car with no plan other than to drive toward the dark. 

So many things could go wrong. Tantrums. Vomiting. Someone could pee themselves. Poop themselves. Someone could hit someone else and everyone could end up in tears. None of those things happened this time. What happened was my daughter played on her iPad, my son ate fistfuls of goldfish and eventually fell asleep. We made it to Hannibal, Missouri, where we found a restaurant and enough sun to watch the moon pass in front of the sun. It was near totality. And as I held my kids on the street, a woman told me that I seemed like I was having fun with my children. I was. That moment felt like the first time in that entire year I’d had fun. I’d felt so consumed by the weight of my life, by work and children and keeping it all together, that I hadn’t really enjoyed myself. But that day, I let go.

We came back, full of McDonald’s french fries and souvenirs from the gift shop in Hannibal.

One week later, I asked for a divorce.

April 8, 2024, was a perfect day. 75 degrees and sunny in Mount Vernon, Illinois, clouds low on the horizon. My kids, now 13 and 10, sat beside me on the ground as we held hands and watched the eclipse.

This time, I would not miss it. I would see the whole thing — the moon completely in front of the sun and I wanted my children there, again.

Long-term memory is fuzzy for a 3-year-old, and my son remembers nothing from that trip. Here are some things my daughter remembers from that year: seeing a dead cat on the side of the road on the way to kindergarten. She remembers peeing her pants in school. Being a mermaid for Halloween. Her face pressed against the oak railing, listening to us fight. She remembers me putting her to bed and crying. She remembers going to a gift shop and getting a ball on a string that bounces into a cup. She doesn’t remember the eclipse.

Two years ago, I told my brother Zach I wanted to see the 2024 eclipse. I felt desperate to see it, in a low-ache kind of way that’s hard to describe as an adult. As a child you can just say you want something and kick the ground. But as an adult, wants have to be articulated, held up to the light, examined, and analyzed against a backdrop of responsibilities and finances. I couldn’t do that with this. I simply wanted. And I wanted in the way the waves want to move. It was the pull of the moon. 

I didn’t have to say this to my brother. I just said I wanted and he said he’d go.

I booked an Airbnb in St Louis for our families 18 months beforehand. We’d make a weekend of it. It would be fun.

We’d go. We were going to go.

Getting there almost seemed impossible. My life became full with a book launching and my kids in sports and school. I was traveling and trying to juggle dog sitters and music teachers and schedules. I was overwhelmed and it became hard to answer emails. Hard to plan. Hard to see further into the future than a day or two. I was dating someone who became frustrated with my travel and the distance created by my book’s success. Two weeks before the eclipse we finally broke up because he kept wanting and I had nothing left to give. The next week I was harassed online after a DailyMail hit piece. And my kids were sick and crying because I’d been gone too much. I canceled a trip. I canceled some interviews. I am burnt out completely. I keep thinking about Andrew Scott as the hot priest in the TV show Fleabag. How when Phoebe Waller-Bridge tells him she loves him he says, “It will pass.” When I first watched the show that line felt so cruel. But now it feels like a kindness. It will pass. All of this will pass: the good and the bad, the highs and the lows. They will pass. And what a gift it is to be smoothed over by time. To let time pass.

I am 41 now and my children seem to change every day. My daughter’s face flashes between a woman’s and a child’s in an instant. My son’s cheeks have lost their baby roundness. I am confused by the passage of time. Everything seems to be happening all at once. They are both babies and adults. And then they are neither. I tell a woman I just met, who drives me to the airport on one of my trips, that I feel like time feels like something solid and is passing through my hands and I want to hold it and cradle it and tell it to stay. But I know that letting time pass is precious, too.  My children can age. They can grow. So many children can’t. That is something too. Allowing time to pass. That feels just as important as holding it. The woman nods. We get to the airport. It’s time for my flight.

Somehow we got to St Louis. I forgot to plan and didn't pack fruits or vegetables. Or a picnic blanket or chairs. My sister-in-law does plan and she has those things. 

We leave for the eclipse on Monday morning and the trip to Mount Vernon takes an hour longer because of the traffic. Because so many people are being pulled to see this moment. I think how in the past, solar events like this heralded something ominous. War. The death of a king. I jokingly told a friend that I hope it will change everything for me.

“Like what?” he asks.

I don’t have an answer.

Time passes. Now we are in a park. The moon is passing in front of the sun. The air gets cooler, the wind changes. The world is off-kilter. The shadows seem to have come alive and the light turns gray. My brother says that all the light is because of the shape of our sun and what if our sun were shaped differently? I can’t imagine it. I try. He makes a joke and I playfully shove him. Suddenly we are children again — an older sister and a younger brother. We are children again. We are also the parents of two sets of kids — older sisters with younger brothers. We are laughing. And I am confused by time. How it has passed and how it actually hasn’t passed at all. 

But the moon is moving and my kids keep shouting about the way the sun looks like an eyeball, now a fingernail. My son wants to know the percentage totality. He keeps guessing, 73%, 81%, 92.4%. He thinks we have answers. But we don’t. So we keep saying, “Yes, okay, that’s the right percent.”

I bump my son as I scoot in closer and he, with his eclipse glasses on, thinks it’s his sister. He whines. She fusses back. Not now, I tell them. We can’t fight now. Not when the world is going to change. They stop. As we get closer — 98.2%, my son says — I think that I want this eclipse to be about the past seven years, I want it to be about my joy, about my heartbreak, my love for my children. I want it to mean everything.

We are at 100%. People in the park scream. Someone begins blasting Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I laugh and hold my kids. I start singing along. We rip off our glasses. I cannot believe what I am seeing. A hole in the universe.

I think of limitless things. Love. Sadness. I keep singing to Bonnie Tyler. I hug my kids. I wanted to toss everything into the universe, to have this moment mean everything, but it’s pointless. The universe doesn’t care and I shouldn’t either. There isn’t a right way or a wrong way. There are no signs. Only life. Only wonders. There are just the things we’ve chosen. And what I have chosen is this — these hands holding mine, this adventure of light and darkness. 

This lasts for three minutes. Three beautiful moments. Time passes. The moon moves. The sun flashes. And then it’s over. We have to pack. We have to go so we can get home before too late. Because there is school tomorrow. And I have to work.

As we walk back to the car, my daughter says she can’t believe things have to go back to how they were. “This should have changed everything,” she says.

I know what she means. I’ve felt this before in moments of grief. The way your world changes with loss, but the stock market doesn’t stop, school buses still arrive. The world ended, but it didn’t. I wonder about all the small world-endings. All the apocalypses we see and walk by. How grief and miracles are the same. A brief rip into the light. We peer into it and then we are expected to return to the same. Together we’ve seen the light change. We’ve seen the sun disappear.  I know they’ll remember this one. Together we will remember the tear in space, how it felt so vast, how we held hands through every minute of it as it passed. 

I think about the last eclipse and I tell her I think everything is different. We just don’t know the shape of it yet.

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Further reading

You might remember me talking about seeing the partial eclipse with my kids in my book. That chapter was an adaptation of this essay I wrote for LitHub in 2019 about looking for the night sky, darkness, and my kids. And also, shitting my jorts on the highway.