After the Longest Goodbye: What Re-entry Takes
The first few nights home after an expedition are always strange. The walls feel too close; the air is too warm. I would 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 where every sound meant something, where silence itself had weight.
I watched The Longest Goodbye recently, the documentary that follows NASA psychologists and astronauts – like Cady Coleman – as they confront the invisible payload of long missions: isolation, distance, latency, and the knot in your throat when it’s time to come back.
On paper, a Mars mission is thrust and trajectory. It could mean a three-year absence from Earth, with communication delays so long you can’t “talk” in real time. But the film makes clear the mission also lives inside the people who fly it – and in the families who wait, 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 in the polar regions where communication was thin or absent – 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” because in isolation, confined and highly autonomous, the risks aren’t abstract: sleep disruption, mood shifts, friction, cognitive fatigue.
The countermeasures aren’t glamorous. They’re human: careful team selection, high trust, purposeful work, steady communication, and -most overlooked – thoughtful decompression on return.
What struck me most in The Longest Goodbye was the way Cady talks about distance. She’s floated above the only home any of us have ever known, and yet the hardest vector isn’t up; it’s back. The film lingers in that liminal space where mission ends and the rest of life begins -the tender handover from acute purpose to seemingly ordinary days.
Jack Stuster understood those edges long before most of us had language for them. In his book Bold Endeavors, he mined polar expeditions, submarine patrols, Antarctic winter-overs, and early space operations for behavioral lessons – how groups cope with confinement, monotony, fear; how leaders ration workload and celebration; how small rituals prevent small problems from becoming big ones.
Astronauts valued his work enough to carry pages into orbit. His premise is simple: humans can endure isolation if we design for the mind, not just the machinery.
Designing for the mind became my work, too. In isolation, I built a tower of habits: coffee in the blue hour; daily weather sketches; data logs for citizen science; a “good thing” list in my journal; lighting a candle for each meal. These weren’t niceties; they were small rituals that kept meaning more prevalent than fear and loneliness.
But no matter how well you engineer the “out there”, re-entry has its own weather.
Polar teams talk about the “third-quarter phenomenon”, that morale dip in the late middle stretch when the end is visible but still far away. I’ve felt it. And I’ve also felt the hollow that arrives when the news traffic returns to normal and everything you need is suddenly a click away.
Coming home, you don’t step over a threshold so much as migrate-slowly-back into yourself. You carry the season in your body: hyper-alertness that takes weeks to soften, sleep that may take months to regulate, emotions that run hot or quiet without warning.
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, bright lights, too much choice. 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 film places families at the center, and I’m grateful for that. Distance is never only measured in miles or minutes of delay; it’s counted in missed birthdays and 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, the partner who helped sort resupply or gear, the colleagues who made room for the slow thaw of my attention.
The film asks provocative questions – about AI companions, virtual reality, even induced hibernation as a tool. But the constant is ancient: we save each other. We need each other.
As I age into this work, I’m more honest about the costs paid in my body. The startle reflex lingers. The tenderness comes with strength. I learned to treat light like medicine, to move 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 maintenance – keeping the lines clear so meaning can flow.
Meaning is the key.
One thing NASA’s human factors teams understand – and Stuster proves through history – is that people will suffer almost anything if they can suffer for something. Early explorers trapped in ice, crews out of step with Earth, analog teams rehearsing Mars in volcanic domes – all organized their days around a purpose larger than discomfort.
That arc is what saves me. When re-entry feels 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.
So if you ever find yourself returning from a hard season – a caregiving stretch, an illness, a divorce, a year that asked too much – please know this: coming home is not weakness. It is its own kind of work.
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. We can design for the human. And the human, if respected, will carry us farther than we imagined.
I’m still practicing. I still wake at odd hours after a long trip. I still cry at happy stories in movies. 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.”
Name: Sunniva Sorby
Professional Title: Translator Of Extremes
Bio: Sunniva Sorby is a Norwegian-Canadian polar explorer, educator, and citizen scientist. She was a member of the first all-women’s team to ski to the South Pole (1993) and later became one of the first two women to overwinter in the Arctic without men—19 months at Bamsebu, Svalbard (2019–2021), co-founding Hearts in the Ice and engaging 150,000+ youth through citizen science.
