My father dies shortly after midnight on a Friday. Eight weeks after he is diagnosed with stomach cancer. Three days after he finally decides to tell us.

On Sunday night, a few days before my father’s death, I set up my camera at the edge of the Grand Canyon preparing to watch the Perseid meteor shower with my husband. After I am done fumbling with the gear, we turn off our flashlights and for a few minutes are plunged into darkness. It hugs us tightly—so dense and impenetrable, it appears solid. The canyon down below is a gaping chasm, almost two billion years in the making, filled with an emptiness mirroring the uncharted immensity of space.

About 69% of the universe consists of dark energy and close to 26% is dark matter. That leaves only 5% for familiar atomic matter, including stars, planets and us.

We fill the vacuum with stories. In the Ukrainian sky lore, each star is a candle that is lit for every person born on Earth. When we die, our star falls.

As we wait at the edge of the Grand Canyon, stars start popping up on the black canvas—first slowly, then all at once—until a silvery band of the Milky Way arches above our heads connecting the South and North Rims. According to ancient Greeks, that’s the milk Zeus’s wife Hera spilled when she pulled infant Heracles away from her breast, denying him god-like powers. Instead, he had to earn his place among gods the hard way—through twelve labors that eventually landed him a spot in the stars. There he is, across the sky from his great-grandfather Perseus, who gave name to one of the year’s most prominent meteor showers.

My husband and I watch the streaks of light crisscross the sky. An occasional sprinkle, increasing in frequency and intensity as our eyes adjust. Falling stars. One of them will soon be my father. I don’t know it yet.

Around the world, the Milky Way comes by many different names. Birds’ Path. The Way of the Grey Goose. The Way of the Crane. Emu in the Sky. Silver River. River Ganga in the Sky. The River of Light. The River of Heaven. The Heavenly Seam. The Road to Santiago. The Straw Way. The Shadow Way. The Way of the White Elephant. The Winter Street. The Deer Jump. The Great Fence of the Stars. Each name reflects our earthly surroundings, connecting stars lightyears away from each other in hopes of creating order out of chaos and making the dreaded vastness of the universe more familiar.

A call from my brother. Dad was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer a few weeks ago. He didn’t want to tell us. The last phone conversation with my father, somewhere at the gas station in Utah. You are coming all the way here? For me? No need, darling. It’s not safe here. I’ll be okay. Nothing but pained groans on his side of the line after that. An ocean of unsaid I-love-you’s between us.

In Ukrainian, the Milky Way is called Chumaks’ Way. Chumaks were merchants who traveled to Crimea to trade for salt. They used this band of light for navigation. Their oxcart can be found just above the northern horizon—the world’s most recognizable asterism known in English as the Big Dipper.

If you draw an imaginary line between the two stars at the edge of the Big Dipper and continue it upward, it will eventually reach Polaris, or the North Star. A symbol of constancy. The center around which other stars seem to revolve. My father taught me that trick decades ago.

*

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Eight years later, in the early hours of February 24, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Darkness torn apart by explosions, stillness pierced by cries. Since that night, the Ukrainian skies have been streaked with falling stars and burning shrapnel.

The train station in Lviv smells of sleeping bodies and waiting. Almost three days of driving from Arizona to Toronto, a flight to Warsaw and a bus ride across the border separate me from watching the Perseids at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I am a train ride away from my father’s funeral.

One of the stars in the constellation of Perseus is called Berehynia, a Ukrainian deity of the hearth and guardian of the land.

The curfew, one of the war-time measures imposed by the Ukrainian government at the start of the invasion, kicks off at midnight. I can’t leave the train station area. I escape outside into a warm August night. A hard stone bench. The dark sky up above. I search for Perseus hoping to catch the tail end of the meteor shower. The stars are invisible, drowned out by city lights.

A station janitor sweeps the tiles around the bench, then finds a spot next to me. She talks about her marital problems, about her cancer treatment, about a small town in the Carpathians where she comes from. I tell her about my father. I should have asked for her name, I think later.

The human body is 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, 3.2% nitrogen, 1.5% calcium, 1% phosphorus, 0.4% potassium, 0.2% sodium, 0.2% chlorine, 0.1% magnesium and a smattering of trace elements. The building blocks of all matter in the universe. Each one born in the nebulous clouds of first supernovas—the final act of creation by dying stars.

Sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows of the church. It bounces off a chandelier and transforms the dark-blue ceiling into a twinkling dome. People I’ve never met before tell me how much they loved and respected my father. How generous and gentle he was. So quietly unassuming. You are coming all the way here? For me? No need, darling.

The hot August air hangs above the cemetery like a cloud. A freshly dug hole in the ground. My father’s shrunken body swallowed by darkness. I want to hold on to him. Sift through the dark matter—seven decades of hurts and hopes buried under his always optimistic veneer and attempts to escape with the help of alcohol. Things I never asked him about. Now forever hidden under six feet of earth.

Near the cemetery’s entrance, I pass rows of fresh graves covered in flowers and Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flags. Each one contains a universe of thoughts and dreams, years of interrupted future stories buried, ground to dust by the inexplicable brutality of war.

I stop by the one closest to me. A simple wooden cross. A small rectangle with a name, a short life compressed into a dash between two dates. The same age as my older son, the same name as my younger one. I carry the pain of this soldier’s parents—people I’ve never met—with me.

*

A few days after the funeral, I go fishing with my uncle. A smooth surface of the lake stretches out before me. Berezhany, a small town in the west of Ukraine, rises on the other side of it, its reflection shimmering in the water. White storks draw circles in the sky, preparing to follow the Birds’ Path to Africa. Centuries ago, when people knew little about migratory routes of birds, they believed storks spent winter months in the realm of gods and spirits. In the fall, they accompanied the souls of the dead into the afterlife and brought newborns in the spring. I ask them to take good care of my father.

I sit by water’s edge and watch the encroaching darkness reshape the world. I wait for the stars. Instead, an almost-full moon drills a hole in the dusky vault and floods it with borrowed light. My uncle and I talk about my father. Air-raid sirens blare in the background, announcing death and destruction somewhere across the country.

A white storks’ nest on the house signifies good luck and protection. During the first few weeks of the war, my Facebook feed was flooded with images of storks returning to their nests atop half-burned buildings.

I remember fishing with my father. A small pond in the village where he grew up, not too far from where I am sitting right now. Weeping willows kissing their reflections in the dark-green water. A jubilant frog choir in the background. Fish soup for dinner.

*

The plane starts its descent toward the Toronto Pearson Airport. A network of lights down below, the Milky Way spilled across the ground. Specks of stardust, connected by our fear of the inevitable. Accidental collections of our ancestors’ dreams and the memories of our descendants. Strangers bound by our desire to escape the oblivion, by our yearning for an epilogue.

Polaris hasn’t always been the North Star. Because the Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles like a spinning top, the celestial pole wanders in a slow circle past different stars. Thousands of years ago, when pharaohs ruled ancient Egypt, the North Star was Thuban in the constellation of Draco the Dragon. Twelve thousand years from now, the title will pass on to the blue-white star Vega in Lyra the Harp. Eventually, the axis will make a full circle, pointing at Polaris again.

Your great-grandfather was once a migrant worker at a wire factory in Toronto. My father loves telling this story. We are hanging out on a park bench in my hometown Chernivtsi, six feet between us while I am recovering from COVID. It’s been six months since the start of the war. A year before my father’s death.

When the First World War started, my great-grandfather took a long, grueling journey back home hoping to bring his family to Canada. He didn’t know that for an immigrant from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was no longer an option. Almost a century later, I stepped off an airplane at Terminal 1 in Toronto with my husband and son, our lives packed into six checkered moving bags.

I could have been born in Canada, muses my father. But then I wouldn’t have had you or your brother.

The night sky will not always look this way. The universe continues to expand. Stars move away from each other. New stars are born. Old ones die. Some may already be dead, but we still see their light, making its way toward us.

A year after my father’s death, I watch darkness seep into Wasaksina Lake in Temagami. Loons’ mournful calls bounce between the jagged shores. A shimmering river dissects the sky and pours its silver light into the water.

I search for my father’s star.