Endurance

18

December 24, 2015

TODAY IS Christmas Eve, my third in space. This isn’t a number anyone would envy, especially a parent with kids: a holiday that celebrates family togetherness can be the toughest time to be away. On top of that, the last two weeks have overextended us. The previous crew leaving, the new guys arriving, helping them get acclimated, preparing for and executing the emergency spacewalk—these have all been demanding, and they have come one right after the other. I have worked nearly two weeks without a day off, so my mood going into Christmas is less than festive.

Holiday or not, today is just another workday on the schedule, one that becomes more difficult when the resistive exercise device breaks down. This is more urgent than it might seem, because exercise is nearly as important to our well-being as oxygen and food. When we skip even one exercise session, we can feel it physically, as if our muscles are atrophying, and it’s not a good feeling. Tim Kopra and I take nearly half the day to fix the machine—a broken damper, like a shock absorber, is the culprit. Because of this, we don’t wrap up our workday until eight p.m., by which time I’ve missed both my exercise sessions, which only adds to my crappy mood.

I call Amiko before heading over to the Russian segment for dinner. I’ve felt like something has been bothering her for the past few days, and I’m starting to get the sense that I’ve done something to upset her. Maybe it has taken me longer than it should have to figure this out, since it doesn’t seem like there is much I can do to annoy her from space.

I reach her on a checkout line at the grocery store. Not ideal for an emotionally honest conversation, but we don’t have much time left on this comm pass, so we have no choice.

“I get the sense that something has maybe been bothering you,” I say. “Have I done something to upset you?”

She thinks for a moment, then gives a long sigh. She sounds exhausted.

“I feel like when you get back we will have to reconnect,” she says.

Of course we will have to reconnect, I think—I will have been away for a year. “What does that mean?” I ask. “You feel—disconnected?”

Amiko explains that the holidays are tough because she is missing not only me but my daughters. She is carrying a heavy load watching over my father and her own sons, taking care of our house and the many things I can’t be there to help her with. Her already demanding job has become more stressful—she is being edged out of her social media management position, and her supervisors have made clear that she cannot help me with my social media on work time—a counterproductive policy when I have over a million Twitter followers and similar numbers on other social media platforms. She is forced to use her own time or take annual leave to conduct interviews about my mission or even just to walk over to the astronaut office to drop off items to be included in my care packages. All of her hard work and sacrifice go completely unrecognized by her management. (By contrast, my colleagues in the astronaut office have been unfailingly supportive of Amiko as my partner, for which I’ve been grateful.)

The strain of all these pressures has been taking a toll, and Amiko has hidden it from me. She enjoys working with me on my social media campaign and takes pride in how successful it’s been, but lately many of our conversations revolve around things I need her to do to the exclusion of everything else. At times she can feel like my coworker rather than my partner. Worse, she tells me it’s starting to bother her that she no longer remembers how I feel or smell, what it’s actually like to be with me face-to-face. She says she is craving real human touch. Then the satellite drops out and I lose her in midsentence.

I float by myself in my crew quarters for a few minutes, knowing I won’t be able to get her back on the phone for a long while. I have full confidence in our relationship, and Amiko has been nothing but loyal and honest in the six years we’ve been together. But hearing the words “reconnect” and “real human touch” feels simply awful. Amiko is attractive, and she would have no problem fulfilling any cravings for human contact she might have on Earth. I’m not the type of person to get jealous, and jealousy isn’t exactly what I’m feeling. It’s more like I’m letting my imagination run wild while orbiting the planet, as physically far away from Amiko as I can be, and letting the reality of the situation sink in. She wants something very simple, and I can’t give it to her.

I make my way to the Russian segment and put a fake smile on my face. The Russians don’t celebrate Christmas at the same time we do—the Orthodox calendar has Christmas on January 7—but they are happy to host a festive meal for the rest of us nonetheless. I discover that the nutritionists in charge of our food have not bothered to create a special holiday meal, so I eat turkey cold cuts doused in a salty brine as Christmas Eve dinner. We do, however, have some hard salami that came up on Cygnus and some of that black, tarry caviar from the Russians, as well as some fresh onions and apples that came up on Progress yesterday. Many toasts are made by all. We listen to Christmas music and the new Coldplay album I was recently uplinked, which everyone enjoys. We toast our privileged spot in space, how lucky we are to be here and how much it means to us. We toast our family and friends back on Earth. We toast one another, our crewmates, the only six people off the planet for Christmas.

An hour and a half later, I get my scheduled videoconference with my kids. Samantha has traveled from Houston to Virginia Beach to be with her mother and sister for the holiday, and I’m pleased to see my girls together. They seem happy to see me, though they also seem uncomfortable. From what I can tell, the apartment doesn’t seem very Christmassy, and I hope the girls are having a better holiday than I am.

Later I’m able to get Amiko on the phone again, and she tells me something she has never told me before—that because I continue to make an effort to make this year in space look easy, it can seem as though I don’t miss her and don’t need her. We both take pride in being strong and making difficult things seem easy. But by keeping the strain to myself, I shut her out. I tell her that making it look easy is the only way I can convince myself I can do this, but in reality it isn’t easy at all. I have figured something out recently: Amiko has only me to miss, and all the other aspects of her life are more or less unchanged. I have her to miss, but also my daughters, my brother and father, my friends, my home, showers, food, weather—literally everything on Earth. Sometimes my missing her can be obscured by how much I miss everything, and I can see how this would make her feel that she is somehow more alone in this than I am. And she is right.

I don’t get much sleep, and in the morning I float awake in my sleeping bag, putting off starting my day. Christmas mornings when I was growing up in New Jersey, my brother and I used to leap up even before it was fully light and run to the living room in our underwear to find our presents. When they were little, my daughters did the same. Later today I will do some public affairs events, and I will be asked what it’s like to spend Christmas in space. I will answer that being here at this special time gives me a chance to reflect on the holiday and how lucky we are to be able to see this view of our planet. I will say that I miss being away from the people I love. For now, I’m just floating here while my crewmates are still asleep, a glowing computer in front of me and the fan humming loudly beside my head.

AS WE GET toward the end of long-duration missions, our trainers at the Johnson Space Center start to slowly ramp up our resistance exercise in order to acclimate our bodies to the stresses of being back in gravity. I remember this from my previous mission—and I remember not enjoying it—and though I understand the necessity I’m also concerned about injuring myself. If I had a serious injury and couldn’t exercise, it would make life far more difficult when I get back to Earth’s gravity. The next afternoon, I’m doing squats with a heavy load when I feel a searing pain in the back of my leg. It doesn’t take me long to realize what’s happened: I’ve torn a muscle in my hamstring. The pain doesn’t go away, and now I can’t work out.

My flight surgeon, Steve, prescribes the muscle relaxant Ativan. We have a stash of drugs—including Ativan and many others—secured in a bag on the floor of the lab module with our other medical hardware. The bag contains medications of all types: painkillers, antibiotics, antipsychotics, just about anything you would be able to find in a hospital emergency room. The controlled substances have warning labels from the DEA authorizing access only under doctors’ orders. NASA plans for everything—we even have an early pregnancy test and a body bag.

The next morning, I email Amiko a picture of an orbital sunrise. Because we use Greenwich Mean Time on station, I have a five-hour head start, and I know this will be waiting for her when she wakes up. I tell her that this photo is not for social media, but just for her. Later she tells me this is just the sort of virtual hug she has been hoping for. I can’t be there to make things easier for her, but I can at least let her know I’m thinking of her.

In the afternoon, I’m preparing some lunch when Tim Kopra floats by looking for something to eat.

“This chicken soup is really good,” I tell him.

“The chicken soup is really good,” he says as if I’d never spoken.

“Yup. I’m also going to have some of that barbecue beef,” I say. We watch CNN together for a few minutes while eating.

After a bit I say, “You know, on second thought, I don’t like this soup.”

“Yeah, I don’t like it either,” Tim says. When we finish our food, we each get back to our respective tasks. It takes me a few minutes before I realize I’m not annoyed by Tim’s repeating what I just said. It also doesn’t bother me when we lose the satellite signal and the story I’m following on CNN cuts out. It doesn’t even bother me when a tiny brown sphere of barbecue sauce propels itself onto the thigh of my pants. I feel calmer and more content with my surroundings than I have in months, maybe all year.

That evening, I tell Amiko about this strange effect of the muscle relaxant.

“You’re under a lot of stress,” she points out. “The drug will affect that.”

I tell her my flight surgeon mentioned that the drug is sometimes prescribed for mood and anxiety disorders. “I haven’t felt that stressed out,” I tell her. In fact, I’ve felt pretty normal, all things considered. But I guess just being here has been getting to me. I have to set aside stress so I can concentrate on what I need to do, but when stress is always there, it can come out in unexpected ways—like feeling annoyed by a colleague. I also have to keep in mind that I’ve been living with high CO₂ for almost a year, which is known to cause irritability. At any rate, it’s nice to feel better, and I try to enjoy the positive side effect of the drug while it lasts.

That night, I read a few pages of the Shackleton book in my sleeping bag. On Christmas 1914, the first officer of the expedition wrote in his journal, “Here endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder how and under what circumstances our next one will be spent. Temperature 30 degrees.” He couldn’t have imagined how he would spend his next Christmas—camping on an ice floe with minimal provisions after their ship, the Endurance, had been crushed by ice. For all the suffering of their ordeal, the men discovered they enjoyed the self-reliance they had found. “In some ways they had come to know themselves better,” author Alfred Lansing writes. “In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.”

I turn out the light and float for a while before falling asleep.

NEW YEAR’S Eve is a bigger holiday than Christmas on the space station because it’s celebrated by all nations on the same day. We gather in the Russian segment for the festivities. We all have something to eat, someone makes a toast. We continue that way on into the night. We briefly turn out the lights to see whether we can glimpse any fireworks on Earth—on my previous long-duration flight we were able to see the tiny specks of colored light, but this year we don’t see any. It is still a privilege to be spending my second New Year’s Eve in space, and I’m glad I’m still able to appreciate where I am and what I am getting to do. The next morning I get up early to call my friends and family in the United States to wish them a happy 2016—the year I will come home.