They discover life on Mars the same day the doctors tell us Willmae is dying. Tiny cryostatic frozen extremophiles that look like microscopic jellyfish are both alive and not-alive deep inside the Martian ice-caps. The doctors still don’t know what’s wrong with her. Their best guess is that it’s some kind of gram-negative antibiotic resistant bacteria. 

A nurse joins us in the examination room and adds a medicine we’ve never heard of to her regime. “Did you guys hear the news?” she asks. 

“We’re not alone,” Willmae replies with a beaming smile. 

It doesn’t feel that way.  

Willmae is staying as still as she can inside an MRI machine. It’s hard with the fever chills, but they want to see which of her organs the infection has spread to. I sit next to the MRI tech, trying to ignore the impulse to break through the glass and hold Willmae’s hand while the machine reads her insides. I don’t know how much longer I have with her. Instead, I scroll through a news feed on my phone. If I’m not distracted, I will ask the tech what he sees, and by now I know well enough that he can’t tell me, even if I’m certain he knows what a dying person looks like from the inside.

Every article about the Martians talks about the future. What will we learn about life from these distant, solar neighbors? What technologies might we derive from them? But the future is a haunted place for me. Flying cars, floating skyscrapers, azolla ponds that will finally suck up all the carbon. What do any of them matter without Willmae? I can’t even imagine renewing our lease, which is up in a few months. Without her, my future has no cell wall, no membrane, nothing that holds the pieces of our life together in place.

When the machine releases her, I am shaking. I try to steady myself so I can hold her hand. I only half-succeed.

Not wanting to be outdone by their Mars-focused colleagues, university researchers studying Venus make their announcement in front of a flock of journalists a few weeks later. They’ve discovered life there, too. 

The meds don’t work. By now, Willmae is dying in earnest. The infection has spread to her blood. Her fever had dropped a little but it’s back up now and the visits from doctors are tinged with a sympathetic distance. 

But floating chemoautotrophic whisps live in the high Venusian atmosphere, churning sulfate into sulfide, living, thriving, in aerosolized communities. I wonder if their lack of bodies means they can’t get sick. I grow acrid with jealousy. 

Each afternoon they put her in an ice bath to lower her core temperature. 

“It’s an incredible time to be alive,” some newscaster says on the TV in the empty room next to Willmae’s. “Two discoveries of this magnitude within a month of each other. Just remarkable.” 

When she returns from her bath, we play checkers. 

“Are you letting me win?” she asks. 

“Never,” I promise, placing my hand across my chest. 

Pondering which of my checker pieces to take, Willmae presses an eyebrow up with her finger. “Do you think the clouds are sentient?” she asks, feebly jumping one of my black with one of her red. “ I mean obviously they’re alive, but do you think they’re, well…really there?”

“Who cares?” It finally slips out. Everyone, everywhere is talking ceaselessly about life on other planets when all I care about is the life ending here.

“I wonder if they make music. I wonder what it sounds like,” she says. I look up and her eyelids are fluttering. She’s tired. I wheel the table with the checkers board away from her bed and lower her resting angle until she’s comfortable. Despite my pessimism in the face of her leaving finally slipping out as she floats off to sleep, I can’t help but close my eyes and try to imagine the ethereal, twinkling noises the Venusian clouds might consider music. 

Somewhere between consciousness and sleep I hear it. I want to grab Willmae and share the sound with her, but when I crack my eyes open, I see she’s deep in sleep. She’s humming something that sounds a lot like my dreamsong. It’s beautiful, I want to say. You’re right. 

Europa’s next. They found CO2 in the atmosphere almost two decades ago, and they’ve finally finished drilling through the ice layer. The ocean beneath it is teeming. They keep using that word in all the press releases: teeming. It’s the third announcement in two months of alien life, and the exuberance of the public is already beginning to waver.

“If it’s just more bacteria, or bugs, or clouds or whatever, I don’t see what the huge deal is,” I hear one of the ultrasound technicians outside our room complain. Willmae rolls her eyes. 

“It’s time to discuss hospice,” the pathologist tells us. She does so with the heaviest of hearts. Her face makes all the right shapes of grief and empathy, but there’s also a glazed-over look in her eyes that she can’t suppress. I don’t really blame her. She’s got better bedside manner than any of the other doctors we’ve worked with at the hospital so far, and this has to be an impossible job to do with the full openness of one’s heart all the time. Still, I hate her.  

They find seven distinct bacterial strains on Europa, something analogous to plant life, and a lichen-like species that is a symbiotic relationship between an aquatic fungi and a methanotrophic bacteria. The lichen-species covers most of the ocean floor. They think its role is decomposing everything that dies there. 

I look at the doctor like she is something under a microscope, real in a sense, but at such a different scale from my daily concerns that she’s otherworldly. 

“What if we’re not ready to give up?” I ask. I touch Willmae’s hand and it's sweating. 

“Well, then we will keep testing, but the truth is, at this point, even if we find the exact strain, the exact bacteria that’s doing this, we’d be where we already are. It's run its course for a long time, and I’m not sure there’s a way back from it, even if we get answers.”

Willmae sighs. We’ve talked about this moment lots in the last month and half. We checked her into the hospital thinking she’d be there for a week at most. This was the story where they’d find whatever was proliferating inside her, target it with some pedestrian medicine and we’d walk out the door. By the second week and the fifth doctor, we knew we were in a different story, maybe one like the search for extraterrestrial life. We’d need some extraordinary measures, there’d be speed-bumps and false starts, but after a brilliant idea or two, a miracle, then the future. 

It’s not either of these. It’s not a story at all. The future disappears, the present disappears, and life itself becomes something that belongs only to the past. 

It goes like this: We take her into hospice care that afternoon, at her request. The nurses are kind. They touch Willmae and look at us both as if we are really, actually there. For two weeks they give her medicine to sand the edges off her symptoms. When her vitals start dropping, they give her more meds for the pain and anxiety that come with dying. When the sickness finally takes her, she’s calm.  

On a satellite orbiting Mars, tiny extremophiles are gently unfrozen, yawning back into life for the first time in millennia. On Venus, clouds of life careen and whistle while scientists try to understand just what exactly they are. On Europa whole colonies of living things breathe, eat, expire, and are digested by the carpet of symbiosis that drapes the whole moon. On Earth, Willmae dies. Whatever the undiscoverable thing that killed her is, dies shortly after, and life as I knew it, on Earth at least, simply stops. 

In the detritus the dead leave behind, I find the first signs of life here on Earth four months after Willmae passes. Getting everything of hers into boxes and a storage unit is quick enough: Painful, ruinous, cathartic, and somehow more boring than I anticipated, but quick. Ending her digital life is far more painful. Her vibrant, living smile, frozen in pixelated profile images bears unbearable pain into me. I open and shut and open and shut her computer where she’d saved every one of her passwords a dozen times before I muster the courage to close down a profile. 

In one of her email inboxes, as I finally summon the strength to delete this last vestige of her, a promotional email for an orchestra she had season tickets to pops up, fresh off the fiber optics. An image of a floating cloud against a smear of planetary blue advertises a “post-modern” suite inspired by recently discovered alien life. I almost delete it, but something, maybe Wilmae, stops me. Here, as I sweep up the last bits of her from Earth, it is like she touches my hand, whispers in my ear, charts a path forward—not through the rest of my life; I still didn’t know how I can possibly face something that long and wide and forever without her—but through this weekend, through the next five days. I will wait for Saturday. Then I will listen to music and I will think of Wilmae. Just a hint, like the phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere, of life, but it’s enough.

I sit in the small theater while the mix of instruments—strings, trumpets, large soundboards, mics, and pedals—and musicians slowly gather on stage. The lights go down. The composer walks on stage and turns to the audience.

“We begin on Venus,” he says. The twinkling music of Willmae begins. Strings rise behind the ethereal synth and there is an order and rhythm to it now. The whole symphony plays together and I feel them, the wisps of alien life, the songs that undergird their life, like a thousand pinpricks across my skin. 

“It’d sound like this,” I whisper to her memory. I close my eyes while the music takes me. It’s still here, life. Even on this little planet, so empty without her. It’s still here.