What Astronauts and Explorers Share: The Longest Goodbye
After the Longest Goodbye: What Re-entry Takes
The first few nights home after an expedition is always strange. The walls feel too close; the air is too warm. I wake at 3:14 a.m., wide-eyed, as if an Arctic wind just rattled the door. There’s a kind of static humming in my nervous system—part vigilance, part longing. It’s the echo of months—sometimes hundreds of days—where every sound meant something, where silence itself had weight.
I watched The Longest Goodbye recently, the documentary that follows NASA’s psychologists and astronauts like the amazing Cady Coleman as they confront the invisible payload of long missions: isolation, latency, distance, and the knot in your throat when it’s time to come back.
On paper, a Mars flight is thrust and trajectory, oxygen and fuel. NASA's goal to send astronauts to Mars would require a three-year absence from Earth, during which communication in real time would be impossible due to the immense distance. But the movie makes clear the mission also lives inside the people who fly it—and in the families who wait for them, and the clinicians who try to stitch both worlds together when the capsule lands.
I recognized that story in my bones.
I’ve spent long stretches unable to communicate with my family and dear ones as I did on our South Pole Expedition at a time when the Internet was not a thing and in the polar night and day—months where the sun departs or refuses to set. Out there, you engineer your own weather inside: routine, ritual, meaning. You stabilize the cabin pressure of your mind. NASA calls this “behavioral health and performance,” and their Human Research Program treats it as a central hazard—right alongside radiation and microgravity—because crews will be “isolated, confined, and highly autonomous” for months or years. The risks are real: mood shifts, sleep disruption, interpersonal friction, degraded cognition. The countermeasures are practical and human: careful selection, high-trust teams, purposeful work, steady communications, and thoughtful decompression on return.
What struck me most in The Longest Goodbye was the way Cady Coleman talks about distance. She’s been to the International Space Station, floating above the only home any of us have ever known—and yet the hardest vector isn’t up; it’s back. The film lingers on that liminal space where mission ends and the rest of life begins—the tender handover from acute purpose to ordinary days. That edge is familiar. I have stood there many times, still half in the field, half in the kitchen, trying to metabolize everything the ice taught me without breaking what I love at home.
Jack Stuster calls these edges out with a historian’s eye. In Bold Endeavors- a book I have cherished for years- he mined polar expeditions, submarine patrols, Antarctic winter-overs, and previous space operations for behavioral lessons—how groups cope with confinement, monotony, and fear; how leaders ration workload and celebration; how small rituals prevent small problems from becoming big ones. Astronauts liked it enough to carry pages into orbit. His premise is simple and stubborn: humans can endure isolation if we design for the mind, not just the machinery.
The ever wondrous Northern Lights dancing above “Bamsebu” Svalbard, Norway 78’n
Designing for the mind became my work. In isolation I built a scaffolding of habits: coffee in the blue hour; daily weather sketches; data logs for citizen science; a “good thing” list in my journal, 3 things I was grateful for daily, turning on the chain of small lights, lighting a candle for each meal. These weren’t niceties; they were tiny rituals that kept meaning more prevalent than fear and loneliness. NASA’s evidence maps list similar countermeasures: structured schedules, protected sleep, light exposure, connective communication, and purposeful tasks that match skill with challenge.
But no matter how well you engineer the out-there, re-entry has its own weather. Polar teams know the “third-quarter phenomenon,” or third -quarter sundrome where morale dips in the late middle stretch; something we experienced during the 6 month mark in the Arctic when we thought we would be preparing to go home- we also know the hollow that arrives when the news traffic returns to normal and everything you need is often just a second away. Meta-analyses of Antarctic winter overs show spikes in psychological symptoms tied to duration, latitude, and that notorious third quarter. Other studies describe a “psychological hibernation” during the dark months—sleep fragments, positive affect thins, and then rebounds when the sun comes back. Coming home, you carry that seasonal shape in your body. You don’t step over a threshold so much as migrate—slowly—back into yourself. And with fall knocking on our door we honor seasonal transitions both inside and outside our bodies- a slow retreat in hibernation.
People ask, “What was the scariest moment?” They expect the polar bear at the door. Sometimes, honestly, it’s the supermarket aisle—thirty feet of cereal, loud noises. Or the calendar—dense with meetings. In the field, constraints were clarifying; at home, abundance can be dizzying. Expeditions end; the human transition is ongoing.
The Longest Goodbye puts families at the center. The distance is never only measured in miles or minutes of comms delay; it is counted in missed birthdays, in the thousand small domestic moments you can’t beam up or down. In my own returns, I’ve learned to widen the definition of team to include those who weren’t on the ice but bore its weight: the friend who answered a midnight sat-phone call; the sister who steadied the home front and meticulously packaged goods to be shipped when our stay was extended; the partner who fell asleep in the room carefully sorting all of my resupply items for Antarctica; the colleagues who made room for the slow thaw of my attention. The film’s questions—about AI companions, virtual reality, even induced hibernation as care tools—are provocative, but the constant is ancient: we save each other. We need each other.
As I age into this work, I am more honest about the costs paid in my body. Sleep can take months to regulate. My startle reflex is high for a while. In the dark season, cortisol writes in a bolder hand. Studies of over winterers echo this pattern: mood dims, sleep fragments, cognition fatigues, and social friction flickers when the sun disappears. Then the light returns and things lift, but it’s not magic; it’s maintenance. I learned to treat light like medicine, to move my body daily, to eat with intention, to keep a tight circle of people who tell me the truth and make me laugh. None of that is heroic. It’s plumbing—keeping the lines clear so meaning can flow.
Meaning is the key.
One thing NASA’s Human Factors team knows—and Bold Endeavors illustrates through history—is that people will suffer almost anything if they can suffer for something. I’ve read so many stories of early explorers that prove this very thing. The Belgica trapped in Antarctic ice; the ISS crews out of step with Earth; modern analog teams in volcanic domes rehearsing Mars—all of them organized their days around a purpose larger than discomfort. That arc is what saves me. When the peaks and valleys of re-entry feel too steep, I walk the thread back to why I went—to witness, to learn, to bring back stories that turn fear into curiosity and loneliness into a call for connection.
There’s a scene that stays with me from the film: the simple act of preparing an astronaut and a family to say goodbye for longer than any military deployment, longer than any Antarctic winter, and to do it with nobody picking up the phone on the other end for minutes at a time. Delay is a character in this story. As a polar traveler, I know delay in a different form: the hours a storm holds you, the days you wait for the ice to form on the fjord. Delay stretches the heart. It demands new muscle: patience, humor, rituals that keep relationships alive across the gap. We built those muscles in our cabin and on the Ice—reading the same book out loud, celebrating small odd holidays (Stuster recommends this too), setting a time each day to name one beautiful thing or one person you miss. It sounds quaint. It works.
I often get asked for tips: What would you tell someone about to spend a season in the cold or in the void? Here’s what I’d say, distilled from experience and from the research that has run parallel to it:
Design your days before they design you. Build a tower of routines that are flexible but reliable—work blocks, meals, movement, light, rest. NASA calls these countermeasures. Human Research Roadmap
Name the third quarter. Morale will dip. That doesn’t mean you’re failing; it means you’re a human in a long story. Make a plan for that stretch now—projects, celebrations, small rituals.
Train for return, not just departure. Book decompression time, line up medical and psychological check-ins, and brief your family on what you might be like when you walk in the door: foggy, bright, tender, quiet. Give them permission to remind you to rest.
Carry purpose like a 10 Essential. Know why you’re going and decide in advance how you’ll share it when you’re back—journal, talk, teach. The story is the bridge.
Our amazing world as seen from space!
When COVID locked the world down and we were without a pickup and decided to extend our stay to 19 months, I thought of crews in space and scientists in Antarctic stations. In a sense, the pandemic became the largest isolation study in history—a global analog that revealed the same old truths: sleep went strange, moods shifted, stress found the seams in our days. It also revealed what helps: routine, sunlight, movement, connection, meaning. The astronaut is not so far from the person on their couch; the ice, not so far from our neighborhoods when fear closes in.
People sometimes tell me I look strong when I come home. I appreciate that. But strength isn’t the only measure. What I hope you see is softness carefully protected—a softness that can notice the jay on the cedar branch, the smell of rain on pavement, the hand that helps another. Isolation and time away sharpened me in ways I never expected, but re-entry is where those edges have to learn to touch other lives gently.
Maybe that’s the real longest goodbye: not the moment you leave, but the long, patient returning to the person you love and the place you belong—without discarding what the hard places gave you. I think that’s what Cady Coleman is pointing to in the film, and what NASA is trying to engineer for crews, and what Stuster learned paging through the journals of people who survived the most remote corners of our planet: that we can design for the human, and that the human, if respected, will carry us farther than we imagined.
As for me, I’m still practicing. I still wake at odd hours after a long trip. I still cry at happy stories in a movie. But I also know how to breathe in my kitchen and listen for what the silence is offering now, in this ordinary room, in this not-so-ordinary life.
And I know the expedition isn’t over when the plane lands. It ends in the way we re-enter each other’s orbits—slowly, carefully, with humor and grace—until the hum subsides and we are home again.
“ Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle”
BTW- My TEDx talk is now live on youtube- you can watch it here - I would love your comments : https://youtu.be/lfqzSJAyrMA?si=SBv6B5qlLmsDFMtk
