A pilgrimage of love...
Carolina passed away on 15th November 2022, almost 5 years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 48 years old. Our two kids, Cyprian and Xavier, were 8 and 10 years old. We said goodbye at the hospital. We said goodbye at the funeral. We celebrated her at the memorial. In the short time that we had together on this earth we loved deeply and lived fully, grateful for every moment - and that was even long before the cancer diagnosis.
It is hard to imagine that the huge amount of adventures and life moments we have experienced together - from falling in love to having a long distance relationship, to moving in together, to rocking the world of our work as a team, to getting married, to having kids, to raising kids, to adopting animals, to sharing life's greatest joys and most extreme pain (and everything in between) - that all this, a whole lifetime of love - was squeezed into only 16 years.
And now, just like that, our time together on this earth is over. We can make no new memories together. We can never look into each other's eyes. We can never hold hands, or hug, or dance, or talk. We can never share ideas or news or worries. We can never go for a walk together. We can never take comfort from each other. We can no longer be together to watch our children grow. No more family selfies. No more snuggly family movie evenings. Our wonderful boys have lost their amazing mama. Just the thought of it cracks the thin solid surface of an ocean of sadness inside me.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve or to handle a loss as devastating as this one, not least because of the complex dynamics of having young children involved. As we feel our way through the dark, we decided to fulfill one of Carolina’s wishes and get the kids to her parents' place in Switzerland for a traditional Christmas. By fate or serendipity or some freakiness of the universe, things worked out such that we could use the trip as a pilgrimage of sorts, and visit some of the places and people most special to us. This is now an attempt to roughly document some of this pilgrimage of love and to try to tell just a bit of our story along the way...
To get to Europe the boys and I used the KLM direct flight between Cape Town and Amsterdam. When Carolina and I fell in love we lived on either sides of the world - her in the Netherlands and me in South Africa - and this specific flight was our primary means of getting together. We shared more "airport moments" than I can remember, filled with either overwhelming joy during reunions or overwhelming sadness during partings.
We were met at the airport in Amsterdam by Pedro and Tibisay. Pedro was the coordinator of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, an event that brought Carolina and I together often, as we each coordinated a different cornerstone project of this global celebration. Our shared passion for astronomy and its impact on society, as well as our (reputably) boundless energy, not only brought us closer to each other, but also made it obvious to most of our colleagues, even before we cared to admit it, that our incredible chemistry would eventually turn us into a couple.
We had lunch at Pedro's flat in Leiden, a place we had stayed over at when Xavier was just over a year old (he didn't remember it of course). Only a short walk from here was Carolina's Leiden home, where we had shared so many magical moments together between 2007 and 2010. It was while she lived in this flat that we fell in love and it was from this flat that she moved directly to Cape Town in July 2010.
Also nearby was a very special tree that I was able to miraculously find (I thought I wouldn’t because she was always there before to show me where it was). I first went alone, and then with the boys. It was the tree under which Carolina and I became best friends, and where our love story actually began. We met for the first time in October 2006, at the first international Universe Awareness (UNAWE) workshop, which Carolina had organised. She had heard of my work in South Africa and invited me to attend the workshop. At first I turned it down because of costs (even though I really wanted to go because I had read about and was inspired by it - through words Carolina had actually written but I didn’t know at the time). Then another person recommended me to her and she and her boss George Miley found a way to fund my attendance. By the end of the workshop Carolina and I had developed such a strong friendship and collaboration that on the last night, after we had dropped off all the participants at their accommodation, we just walked and talked for hours - we just didn’t want to say goodbye. We ended up under this tree, chatting until the early hours of the morning, and with a hug that contained more love than we could have possibly realised at the time.
Pedro took us to George and Hanneke Miley’s house for supper. George Miley is the founder of Universe Awareness and he had hired Carolina to lead it. He is also the father of the Office of Astronomy for Development, and has thus played a major role in both our careers, which overlapped considerably over the years. When Carolina and I finally gave in to the immense love that had developed between us, George and Hanneke were the first people we told, in that very house, over a memorable lunch in 2008. We were nervous to say anything since we were professional colleagues as well, and weren’t sure what people would think. But the reaction we received from George and Hanneke was one of pure elation and love, with the tone of "AT LAST!" (funnily enough, we received similar reactions from just about everyone we told thereafter).
After the boys and I spent the night at the Mileys, George drove us into the Sterrewacht (at Leiden University), where we met several friends and colleagues that knew either/both of us. We visited Carolina’s old office and the Lorenz Centre (the venue of that first UNAWE workshop in 2006). During that 2006 workshop, Carolina and I would be the first ones in and the last ones out. On the first day both of us independently arrived at the venue well before anyone else and then never ran out of conversation for the next 16 years. In the years following that workshop, as we grew closer, I would share her office during my visits and we would do amazing work together - our respective bosses would thus get an output from each of us that was far greater than the sum of our individual output.
That evening my brother Devan arrived from the UK and the next morning we set out by road towards Paris. Along the way we stopped for lunch at Sarah Kendrew’s home in Brussels where we met her dad and Katrien Kolenberg (a close friend and colleague). Brussels was a big destination for Carolina as she spent a lot of time and effort lobbying in the EU parliament for projects like UNAWE to be supported (and I assisted her occasionally). But more importantly for that visit was meeting Sarah, who was at Leiden during Carolina’s time there. They both were part of the founding of the .Astronomy (dot-astronomy) conference series which contributed hugely to the astronomy field and something Carolina was very proud of. She and I attended a few of these conferences together, most notably one in Heidelberg where Xavier joined us as a baby - one of his first hackathon experiences (though his contribution at the time was mainly cuteness). But the .Astronomy community was always very very special to Carolina and in recent years she was super proud that it was hosted in Cape Town.
It was good to connect with my brother on this mini road trip after seeing him in South Africa recently. He had flown to Cape Town from the UK in November, when Carolina went to hospital for her final stay. During that difficult period, because he was there to drive the boys to school etc, I was able to stay by her bedside for the maximum time possible - I was with her 24 hours a day for a week, then only left her side to connect with the boys while driving them to school once Devan had to return to the UK. Carolina and I had asked him to be legal guardian for the boys should we both die too soon, so maintaining that already strong bond with the boys was really important.
That evening we arrived in Paris and met with more close friends from Carolina’s younger days. We stayed in a hotel close to the Eiffel tower which enabled us to walk (first me alone then with the boys) to the spot where we effectively got engaged in January 2008. We were well in love by 2007 but just never let ourselves go for it fully. This was mainly my fault actually because I was hard headed about all the cool work we were doing together and didn’t want to mess it up with a romantic element. I also didn’t want to risk losing my best friend through the strain of a long distance relationship (there was no option at the time to live in the same country because of our huge work commitments). It was only in January 2008 that we finally let go fully, regardless of where we lived or what the future may or may not hold, and our commitment to each other was sealed with a kiss at the UNESCO Peace Monument in front of the Eiffel tower. It’s hard not to regret my momentary hesitation when every second we’ve enjoyed together is now a priceless remnant and no more moments can ever be shared with her. But who knows, maybe we needed the hesitation to maximize on the rest of our time together - who knows what the universe was planning and as Carolina and I always said to ourselves during such conversations, "everything as it should be". About a year or so later I gave her a gold ring at the same spot (it was a mere formality for fun - that kiss in 2008 had already sealed our love to infinity and beyond)...
(A side note: I was sorry to see that the peace monument has been taken down and replaced with a large temporary museum/exhibition)
The next morning Devan dropped off the boys and me at the train station to catch the TGV to Geneva. This was the route Carolina and I used when I first met her parents in January 2009 (we went from a conference at UNESCO in Paris to her parents place in Switzerland for a few days). That first meeting with her parents was so big because by then we already knew we were in it for life. We’ve laughed so often at the memory of that first visit to her parents - Carolina had prepared me so much, even trained me in proper table manners, and I was a nervous wreck. But all worked out beautifully and I was warmly welcomed into the family.
The boys and I arrived in Switzerland on the 21st December. We were fetched at the train station by Carolina's dad and taken to their home in Préverenges. It was the first time being in that house without Carolina and it was devastating. It was also the first time for us to see her family after she had passed away. Her parents had visited Carolina in Cape Town in October, making the huge trip in spite of their age, and serendipitously had had 10 quality days with her at our home. A week after they had left Carolina's condition worsened and her final hospital stay began on the last day of October.
We spent the next 13 days in Switzerland, experiencing a traditional Christmas as Carolina had had growing up (except the weather was unusually warm), and getting a whole lot of good quality time with her parents, sister Micaela, and niece and nephew (twins who are just less than a year younger than Cyprian - the four of them bonded instantly and got on so so well together). We also met many close friends of Carolina’s (including from childhood, from EPFL, and from more recent times), as well as some of her cousins who we had never met before (also including people’s kids). We visited many special places, the old ones all gushing with memories of Carolina taking me/us there on previous visits, and some new places where we made new memories with friends and family. It was a bittersweet time, opening the wounds of Carolina’s passing but also forming different bonds with the family now, necessarily more direct than it used to be via Carolina. Every meal and conversation was special and although tears always lay just below the surface, the smiles and laughter were pure and symbolic of our lives going on with love and family closeness, as Carolina had wanted it to.
Thanks to the kindness of Carolina’s childhood friend Jean-Philippe and his wife Sylvie, we spent two nights in Verbier, a place Carolina had spent many happy times during her childhood (many with Jean-Philippe himself). She had always tried to share these memories with us during our summer visits, and she always wished to show us the winter snow one day (the boys and I are snow novices). Then a very special thing happened. For a week before there was little to no snow (and in fact everywhere in Switzerland was abnormally warm during our whole trip). Then on the night we arrived in Verbier it snowed - a lot! Which meant that during our only full day there we were treated to a spectacular and magical display of snow-covered pine trees and chalets nestled among pristine white mountains - something Carolina had always told us about but which we thought we would not get to see this time. And the highlight for the boys was that Jean-Philippe and Sylvie arranged skis and the boys got to learn to ski on fresh snow - another thing that Carolina had always wanted to give them. It could not have been more perfect and we could not be more grateful to our hosts and to the universe! (it never snowed after that one magical day either, at least not for the rest of our Europe trip).
On our last day in Switzerland Carolina’s university friend Frédéric Montfort arranged an incredibly special day with a group of friends (and their families) who had studied Physics together with her at EPFL. Carolina was a beloved member of this very special group of friends who had all stayed in touch over the years. We walked through the campus with all our kids, and visited their old Physics buildings, reminiscing about their university life, before going for lunch and ice skating outdoors. This group of exceptional individuals emanated kindness and love, not to mention intellect and humour, and one could easily see how well Carolina had fitted in here and how the bonds between them were always going to last a lifetime.
On the last evening we had a meal at home with Carolina's parents, with good conversations and reflections, and then went to bed, to wake up in time for a very early train which Carolina's dad kindly drove us to at 4am on 3rd January.
This whole "pilgrimage of love" was one of the most painful things I have ever done, filled with tears and memories, from both me and the boys. There were moments of epic sadness, like one night when Xavier said to me through tears that it feels like every day we are getting further away from mama. At the same time it was also one of the most special trips, because besides being a long and deep goodbye to the love of my life and mother of Xavier and Cyprian, it was also about creating new bonds with Carolina’s family and friends - bonds that now have to be directly with me and the boys, because our dear Carolina is no longer here. Bonds that she wanted me to develop and maintain. Bonds that will help the boys to know their mama as they grow up without her. This was her wish, and I think we are slowly managing to fulfill it, thanks to the immense kindness and love that was so generously and unconditionally bestowed upon us during this trip.
And now I write this on the same long KLM flight to Cape Town that used to bring us together, knowing that she won’t be there to meet us when we land, and hoping that the boys, who are sitting right next to me now, are distracted enough by the screens not to notice how much their dad is crying yet again. Carolina and I will never have another airport moment, and that shatters me every time I think of it, but I will take comfort from every other couple I see, every other family I see, every other pair of friends I see, who celebrate those airport moments, and in fact every moment, with love and gratitude. And I will do my best, along with the boys, and hopefully along with you too, to spread more love and kindness in the world, just as Carolina did, and just as she wanted us to do.
