Epilogue
Bantam published The Grand Design in September 2010. The artist never fixed the too-long straw, but it didn’t matter. On the morning of September 2, I was walking my daughter Olivia to school when my cellphone rang. It was Judith, and she was agitated. “Leonard!” she shouted. “We need your help!” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Haven’t you seen The Times?” she asked.
“The New York Times?” I said. Yes, I’d read it.
“Not The New York Times,” she shouted. “The London Times! Haven’t you seen it?”
“Judith, who here reads the London Times?” I asked.
“Well, Google it and look at the headline! It says ‘Hawking: God Did Not Create Universe.’ It’s created a furor!”
“That’s wrong,” I said. “We said God isn’t necessary for creating the universe, not that physics proves he didn’t.”
“Well, the press is all over it, and Stephen can’t handle it all. We need your help! You need to take the interviews.”
And so it began. We knew the book would get some attention, but we had no idea how much. You know you’ve reached people when a physics book gets talked about on ESPN and in Men’s Health magazine.
Grand Design had obviously captured people’s imagination, but though most of the reaction was positive, we were also vehemently denounced in some quarters. Apparently provoked by our views on creation, some of those attacks were personal. People who had little idea of what Stephen was really like assumed that they understood his motives. Stephen was accused of scheming to use his disability as a marketing tool, and of trying to profit by attacking God. Stephen just smiled at the criticisms. I suppose that on an annoyance scale ranging from one to “I can’t move anything below my neck,” those ad hominem attacks scored pretty low.
In 2013 Stephen asked Diana to marry him. She had long since moved out of his house, but they had remained as close as ever. The proposal came one night after dinner. Stephen began by saying, “I cannot get down on one knee,” and then went on to declare his love for her and to ask if she would be his wife. Soon after, on her birthday, they went to a jeweler and chose a ring together. Then they went to a restaurant to celebrate over dinner.
But the marriage never happened. Stephen craved Diana’s companionship, but his desire for family harmony proved even more powerful, and it seemed his children couldn’t get past their issues with Diana, or their more general concern about gold diggers. I didn’t agree with that assessment, but I knew it came from their love for him.
When Stephen married Elaine, of his children, only his son Robert—who lived in Seattle—attended the wedding. During their years of marriage, there continued to be tension between Elaine and his other two children, both of whom lived nearby. It had at times made family occasions awkward and been unpleasant for both Elaine and Stephen. Stephen didn’t want more of the same, so he backed out of his proposal to Diana. Though she was devastated, they stayed dear friends. He asked her to keep the ring. She still has it.
In time the commotion over the book gradually faded. So, alas, did my contact with Stephen. As I’d feared, as the years passed it proved difficult to keep up our connection. His computer assistant, Sam, moved on. Joan, his oldest, most faithful carer, died. Judith retired. I didn’t know Stephen’s new personal assistant, so a critical source of news and communication had vanished. Stephen and I would email on occasion, but the couple of times I’d been in England, he’d been away. And so I saw him only during his yearly sojourns at Caltech. After 2013 even those ceased due to his declining health.
In my final visit with Stephen I dropped by the house in Pasadena where he was staying and spent a Sunday with him, Kip, and a few others who came and went. One was Buzz Aldrin, the former astronaut, the second person to walk on the moon. It was a lazy afternoon, with a little food and a lot of idle chatter. Stephen’s communication speed had dwindled by then to less than a word a minute. As a result, even simple sentences now took five to ten minutes to emerge. But Stephen could still smile and growl. And so, on that last afternoon together most of our conversation was a big game of twenty questions. But not all our conversation. At one point we—mostly I—reminisced a bit about our work on Grand Design. I drifted to the subject of his career and asked him which, of his many discoveries, accomplishments, creations, had been his favorite. A few minutes passed before the answer came. When it did, what he said was “My children.”
I was staring at a computer screen when the news flash came: Stephen Hawking is dead. He died at his home on Wordsworth Grove on March 14, 2018. It had been more than four years since I had seen him. Kip had last seen him the previous November, Robert Donovan that past December. He said that though Stephen hadn’t appeared particularly sick, he seemed to be expecting death. He’d hired a lawyer to get his affairs in order.
I’d expected to see Diana at Stephen’s funeral, but she wasn’t there. As it turned out, she hadn’t been put on the family’s guest list. The interment occurred a few months later. She wasn’t at that, either. That morning she traveled to where it was to be held—Westminster Abbey. She got there early and attended the morning mass at 7:30. That was a public event that, as usual, drew a couple of dozen of the faithful. The interment, which would be attended by over a thousand people, came a few hours after it. By then there were guards, armed police, and various officials there to usher the invited in and to keep the uninvited out.
Again Diana wasn’t on the guest list, so she was barred from entering. She pled her case to one of the officials, but he denied her. “We have to keep this dignified,” he said. And so she stood, shut out, among the crowd gathered outside. She felt lost in a sea of strangers, none of whom had read to Stephen for hours, wiped the sweat from his brow, worn his engagement ring, or lain in bed with him, holding him in her arms. As she strained to hear a trace of sound emanating from the service inside, she felt her sadness mingle with an immense feeling of rejection.
When the interment was over, the crowd dispersed but Diana lingered. Stephen’s friend Neil Turok spotted her as he was walking out of the church. He approached her, vouched for her, and walked back inside with her. She cried as she paid her last respects.
Like Stephen’s other loves, Diana was a woman of deep faith. He once told her, “Religion is for those afraid of the dark.” He didn’t mean to insult her; he was just being roguish. She replied that everyone is afraid of the dark. He accepted that, at least as an approximation. And when he died, she took comfort in her faith. “I have to believe I’ll see him again,” she said. “I can’t believe there is nothing outside the universe. The universe couldn’t be so cruel. I look forward to the time when I’ll join him, wherever that is.”
People sometimes ask me how Stephen could have won the battle, for so many decades, over the hopelessness that is natural when your death continually seems imminent. I answer that faith was his greatest weapon. He may not have had faith in a god, but he had faith in himself. He had faith, when he went to bed each night, that he would wake up in the morning. He had faith that when he entered the hospital, he would come out; that despite his doctor’s orders he could travel the world and survive. He had faith that those who loved him loved him for who he was and not for his money or fame. He had faith that his continued life would bring more reward each day than the punishment he endured each night, with his restless and painful sleep, and the indignity of having to be spoon-fed and bathed by others.
After Stephen died I dug up some of the material I had saved from our time together—old notes, rough drafts of chapters I had printed out, annotated with the comments Stephen gave me. I ran across the get-well card he had sent after that brush with death I’d had in the hospital. I remembered his concern and the strength I had felt simply by thinking of how he had so regularly weathered equally threatening storms.
I missed Stephen. We’d been through much together, and it had left me a better person. We never spoke about his philosophy of life. But knowing him and sharing parts of his life reinforced my belief in my own hopes and dreams, and in my ability to fulfill them despite the hardships that will inevitably come my way, as they come to all of us. Often we limit our chances at success by limiting the goals toward which we strive. Stephen never did that. Even the example he set by simply showing up at the office each day influenced me. It made me more tolerant of the problems in my own life, and more grateful for all that is good in my life, however small.
We can get used to anything, and we can accomplish, if not anything, then at least much more than we give ourselves credit for. To grow close to Stephen was to understand this, and to realize that we need not wait for a debilitating disease to inspire us to make the most of our time on earth. And so I continue to do physics and to write my books.
To those who knew Stephen from afar it could appear that, for him, just to live was to climb Mount Everest. After I got to know him it struck me that he was Mount Everest. An immovable giant, immune to the passage of time and able to withstand even the most violent storms nature hurls at it.
I know that time eventually slays us all, but to observe the power Stephen exerted over his life gave me the feeling that he could also control the timing of his demise. Hearing of Stephen’s passing, I couldn’t help but believe that death had not overpowered Stephen, but rather that he’d simply decided to cease repelling its attacks. He’d done enough, seen enough, lived a good life full of friends and children and love, and physics. He’d found meaning in his life, and even in his suffering, which inspired him to help others with similar needs. And so, at the end, he said his goodbyes, and when his disease again came at him, he lay down his arms and rested in peace.