Though she'd had her fair share of partners, Eileenalana had never been married. There hadn't been any children. She had thought she felt enamored on several occasions, but she wasn't sure about real love. In her field, encountering intelligent, even brilliant men, was over the years inevitable. Some of them were charming, too, and most of them - quite like herself, she suspected - eccentric enough to be difficult to live around for very long. For all but a lucky few, it seemed like a business of short, intense relationships.

And there was more than that. Men, she knew, deceived. She recalled how, after her father's death, Stephen Reynolds had appeared excessively charming while courting her mother, and how that charm had fallen from him like a cast-off snakeskin once they were married. Some new and monstrous side, hitherto unseen, could emerge in men shortly after you married them. Or in some cases, just shortly after you'd started sleeping with them. Her mother had made that mistake, and Eileen wasn't going to repeat it.

There was that, and there was something else. Their line of work - her line of work - as an astronomer and an astronaut, a Space Explorer, was a dangerous one. In space, there were a million known ways to die. And, just in case you'd be subjected to any one way not yet experienced, perhaps a long, lingering demise far from everything you held dear, you were equipped with standard issue suicide tablets. That wasn't much to offer a family.
Also, she couldn't be sure she would want to offer very much to a family. Despite the dangers, it was the only life she could imagine. Whenever she came back to Earth again, it would never be more than a few days before her eyes turned skyward once more.

It reminded her of a story called The Rocket Man, written over a century ago by a man named Bradbury, and nowadays long forgotten by most.
As the story went, she recalled, Doug's father had been a pilot of a rocket ship, being gone from his wife and son for long stretches of time, while out there exploring the unknown. Every few months Dad would return home again for some real, quality family-time. Doug would look at his uniform and gather all the dust from it. Stardust, dust from comets' tails, meteors and faraway planets. Dad would be content for awhile, having missed Mother and Doug, a blue sky, the beach, the ocean, all the things you can't have on a rocket ship.
After a couple of days though, he would stand out on the porch after nightfall, his eyes on the stars. Dad thought he'd always be a Rocket Man, that he would always keep going back out there, which naturally pained Mother greatly. So one day, he had made up his mind. He would go for this one last trip, and when he came back home, he would be home to stay.

Mother had lived with Dad's comings and goings for a long time, so over the years, she had developed a defense against all the longing and missing. While Dad was out there, he didn't exist to her. She would think of him as dead. She had to, because Dad was up risking his life among the planets. Mother had worried that if his ship would crash into Venus, she would never be able to go outside while Venus was in the sky. And if Dad were to die on Mars, she wouldn't bear ever looking at Mars again.
In the end, the final journey proved to be even worse than that. In the end, it hadn't been Venus, and it hadn't been Mars.
Dad's ship had fallen into the Sun. And from the Sun, there could be no escape.

Eileen remembered the story well - perhaps because her father, also dead before his time, had told it to her - or perhaps because its contents struck so many chords in her and in what she was doing. She often found herself thinking of The Rocket Man while she was up there, wondering if he would have preferred to die years later, warm in his bed, or if he, in the end, came out happy with his last trip.

- What's it like, out in space?
- It's the best thing in a lifetime of best things.