Astoria Borealis

The night my father lay dying the sky above Manhattan, and indeed for miles around the city, turned a shocking, shimmering, bright blue-green. It was December 27th, 2018 and my siblings and I were gathered around the hospital bed that had been set up in my dad’s apartment. One of us, I can’t remember who, glanced out the window and exclaimed “oh my God. What’s happening!?”

My father lived on the 20th floor, and his apartment had a terrace with little obstruction from other buildings. It had great views to the north but also, if you leaned out and craned your neck a bit, to the east and west. We left his bedside and stood on the terrace in wonder.

My brother checked his phone to figure out what the hell was happening. “I can’t find anything,” he said, frustrated, and went inside to turn on the television.

“They’re finally here,” I whispered to myself, convinced that my long-awaited (and hoped for) extraterrestrials had arrived to teach us humans how to stop being such ungrateful savages.

The sky above us remained that bright fluorescent color for a whopping five minutes. It looked like what I imagined the Aurora Borealis would look like - but on steroids. For this was neither streaky nor wispy as I recalled the Northern Lights to be - this was a pulsing hypnotizing light, and it was getting brighter. It became, in those first few minutes, a flashing arc of light so intense that I had to shield my eyes as I squinted at it. The freakish glow lit up the sky and city for as far as I could see with its weird luminescence.

As I stood there dumbstruck, the cold winter air whipping around me, I waited for a booming voice. “People of Earth, do not be alarmed. We come in peace.”

What would happen next? I couldn’t wait to find out.

Suddenly my brother appeared on the terrace, looking at his phone. “It’s an explosion,” he told us, “out in Queens. They’re saying a ConEd plant over there blew up. That’s what the light is,” and then he went back inside.

My first thought was “I hope no one is hurt,” but that seemed impossible. Surely people had died. The light was still glowing, turning the terrace and all the streets below a ghostly daylight hue. My second thought was “when are those damn aliens gonna arrive and prove me right?” And then I went back inside to sit by my father’s bed.

I sat down and took his hand but I could tell he was unaware of my presence. I knew he was dying. We all knew it. I had never heard an actual death rattle before but I heard it that night, for what seemed like an eternity. My father, who loved life, was fighting to stay here, and he was fighting hard. That much was clear.

We had called a priest hours earlier for last rites. On this, his last day, my father’s eyes could not focus and they rolled and wandered to and fro like a newborn’s. It was evident that he was having a terrible time trying to communicate something to us, but I never found out what it was. What I remember most about the priest’s visit was his kindness, his business-like demeanor and my father’s very last spoken word once the last rites were over, which was “Amen.”

I wished my father wasn’t dying that night. I wished that I could have simply woken him up and walked him out onto the terrace. I wanted to stand next to him, my arm linked in his, watching this once-in-a-lifetime light show pulsing in the sky above the city he loved so much. He would have “gotten a real kick out of it,” which was the expression he always used when something pleased him.

My father died early the next morning. The New York Post, in classic New York Post fashion, had a brilliant headline that day recapping the previous night’s events. ASTORIA BOREALIS it shouted from the front page, with a photo of the eerie alien invasion sky glowing above the Manhattan skyline. Inside there were several pages chronicling the event and several photos. People had posted videos on YouTube from all different vantage points which I watched with amazement. How had we all stayed so calm?

Apparently at a ConEd plant in Astoria, a 138,000 volt capacitor failed, resulting in what is called an “arc-flash,” which illuminated everything for miles around. The explosion itself had been a blueish-white but the refraction from the low-hanging clouds turned everything that crazy blue-green. The mayor and the police had sent out a tweet to all citizens in New York and New Jersey “not to panic” as the hovering glow was not caused by “a terrorist attack or an alien invasion” but by an explosion at a power plant. “Ha!” I told my husband that night through my tears. “I’m not the only one waiting for them.”

The next few days, into weeks, into months were a blur. I cried through it all. It’s been eight long years since my dad passed. I think about him almost every day. I miss him and that missing still feels like a hole in my chest. A hole where he should be. But I have some cockamamie faith that I’ll meet him again one day. I even think it might be him who greets me when my own party is over, so that we can cross the River Styx together. More than anything, I will always be grateful that he was my father and that I had him for as long as I did.

Amazingly, not one person was killed or even hurt in that explosion. I take that as a sign. A sign that maybe the amazing show that lit up all of Manhattan and the world beyond wasn’t a "ConEd accident" at all. Maybe that awesome flash of turquoise light was simply my father’s soul leaving his human body. Perhaps it was his way of saying goodbye to Manhattan, to his children, to his human life.

And to this day I get a real kick out of that.