IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER

July 18th, 1969: a speechwriter named William Safire prepared a statement for President Nixon in case the Apollo 11 flight went catastrophically awry. He wrote, Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. He wrote, In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes. We do the same. And, They will be mourned by their nation.

The speech was never needed, but William Safire was ready. He noted the president should call the widows-to-be, said a preacher should perform the prayers for a burial at sea, imagine if that was our history. What the moon would mean as a cemetery. Imagine being the one to say what if, what if this dream is a nightmare? What will you tell us, a country desperate to know how to grieve, watching two men on the moon unable to leave, their slow loss of air. The cold and darkness. The despair that leaves you silent and stops you from looking away. What do you say to that?

I know what it means to spend your days drafting worst-case scenarios. I cover receipts and recipes and the margins of books, I scrawl on envelopes and old bus tickets, I write in paper-bag creases and recite the ingredients of hope like the nutritional facts on wrappers left along the highway. If you look around, you know Break Glass in Case of Emergency just doesn’t cut it these days, and because we live in the age of enlightenment I could suffocate you with numbers

like 14.98. That’s degrees Celsius, last year’s average global temperature, the highest ever recorded. Or 1.8, the number of daily mass shootings in the United States. Or  8.5, the percentage of humanity living in extreme poverty, meaning less than $2.15 per day. Numbers like 1.9 million, the people We the people incarcerate, tens of thousands of whom are estimated to be innocent. Numbers like 28,576. Palestinians killed between October and Valentine’s Day. Like 49,449. Americans who killed themselves in 2022, and if you’re crunching the numbers that’s about one every ten minutes, which means between when I wake up and when I get out of bed somebody is already dead because life got a little too loud or way too quiet. Ten minutes—that’s less time than it takes to run out of oxygen on the moon. 

William Safire died in 2009. But when I catch myself carrying the heaviest headlines in my pockets, when the breaking news just seems too broken, I wonder what he’d compose for us now, as if grief is only a math problem on a chalkboard, an equation awaiting results, an accident of orbital mechanics and bloodied hands. I’m a happy person. I swear I am. Sometimes the world seems simple, as gorgeous as a full moon robed in radiance and not a single corpse. I stop and smell every fucking rose. I collect statistics like flat stones and hurl them as hard as I can into a lake while the wind falls off the mountains and tries to teach me how to fly. And if you and I still can’t ignore all the rest, all the lost, I say maybe that’s what makes us alive.

Imagine Armstrong and Aldrin, baptized by moondust, gazing up, up at the bruised body of the Earth, her blue incredulity, the constancy of the continents and all our mistakes so small they might not even exist. When you’re that far from home, there’s no word for the amount of alone that curls up in your lungs. It’s one small step for man, one world made witness, holding our breath and counting backwards from ten to lift-off like a kid playing hide and seek. Hoping when we open our eyes, they’d still be there.

And there on two pages of double-spaced typewritten contingency, a guidebook to the parallel universe of what if they weren’t. William Safire titled the statement, In Event of Moon Disaster, and if he was a prophet of unhappy endings, he was also an architect of expectation, a poet of what would come next in an era of optimism we wouldn’t recognize these days if it crash-landed right in front of us.

Maybe everybody who dies deserves a eulogy that lays them in the constellations. Every body bombed or starving should be a martyr to humanity, and everyone sitting in a cell should still have a chance to see the seas from orbit. In every note I threw away half-written, I was trying to say we could save each other if we work at it half as hard as we fight not to see each other, if we realize a disaster only becomes the end of our story when we give up telling it, if we remember that sometimes, we do come back to Earth.