Buzz Aldrin Returned From the Moon. Then His Real Adventure Began.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/apollo-11-moon-return.html

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The chutes popped open and they splashed down in the Pacific. They’d been to the moon. Now — 50 years ago Wednesday — they’d returned to Earth.

Floating upside down in the command module, its exterior blackened from the flames of re-entry, they waited for the capsule to right itself. “It was over,” Buzz Aldrin would write. “We sat in silence, three men alone together with their private thoughts.”

They’d accomplished, arguably, the most extraordinary feat in human history. And now they were home, asking themselves the question for which the computers in Houston had no answer.

Now what?

They were picked up by a helicopter from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and placed in quarantine, to guard against alien contagions. Later there was a ticker-tape parade in New York, a good-will tour around the world. They received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They spoke to a joint session of Congress.

At last, each of the men — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — walked through the doors of their homes, embraced their families and plaintively said — like Samwise Gamgee at the end of “The Lord of the Rings,” “Well, I’m back.”

“It would take a couple of years for it to become clear to me,” wrote Mr. Aldrin, “but that day on the USS Hornet was actually the start of the trip to the unknown. I had known what to expect on the unknown moon more than I did on the familiar earth.”

What do you do after you’ve had a transcendent experience? Do you just go back to work? Do you change the way you live? What if the experience you’ve had is so remarkable that the rest of your life feels like an anticlimax?

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer,” says Alan Rickman’s character in “Die Hard.” As it turns out, neither Alexander the Great nor Plutarch (his biographer) said this, at least not exactly — but it’s still a sentiment we can all understand. Isn’t it at the heart of the song of that other great philosopher, Peggy Lee?

“Is that all there is?,” she sang. “If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.”

For Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins, their experiences back on earth reflected their differing characters. Post-Apollo, Mr. Armstrong resigned from NASA and quietly took on a teaching job at the University of Cincinnati. He died in 2012. Mr. Collins became director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Today, at 88, Mr. Collins says he doesn’t think a lot about Apollo 11 — “I can’t say I wake up every morning thinking, Oh, Apollo 11, blah blah. I may, in normal times, go a month or two without thinking about it. But when I do, it comes back with a great deal of clarity, more than I would have guessed.”

Of the three, Mr. Aldrin, now 89, seems to have had the hardest re-entry. He drank. He had affairs, and got divorced, and remarried, and divorced again. He wound up in the hospital, crushed by depression.

At one celebratory banquet, Mr. Aldrin was breathlessly asked, “Tell us how it really felt to be on the moon!”

Afterward, he rushed outside into an alley and wept.

It’s a heartbreaking story, but it’s hard not to recognize something familiar in this moment. Only 12 Earthlings have known the exhilaration of standing on the moon. But most of us know what it is like to feel despair, to wonder whether we are up to the challenges that our lives demand.

It’s not just Buzz. It’s all of us.

Mr. Aldrin is a hero not only for his work as the lunar module pilot, but for his work in destigmatizing depression. One night, while he was hospitalized, he looked up at the full moon. “What I said to myself was simple enough. ‘You’ve been to the moon. You did it,’” he recalled. “‘Now get the hell out of here and live the kind of life you want.’”

I’ve never stood on the moon, but I have had a couple of life-altering experiences, and I’ve wondered, now and again, how to live my life in their wake. In June 1988 I watched my bride walk down the aisle of the Bethlehem Chapel at the National Cathedral, wearing her mother’s wedding dress. “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” played upon the pipe organ. At that moment I felt myself transformed by love, lifted out of the life I had been living and into a new world.

We left the cathedral. Our friends threw rice. We went on a honeymoon, moved to Maine and began the adventure of the rest of our lives. Like Michael Collins, I don’t wake up every morning thinking, Bethlehem Chapel, blah blah.

But I carry that moment with me. Sometimes, on a hot summer night, I look up at the sky, and remember what it was like to be that young, and so in love.

“Standing on the moon,” wrote the poet Robert Hunter, “With nothing left to do. A lovely view of heaven — but I’d rather be with you.”

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