The Ash of Dead Stars

The water carries oxygen; your blood carries iron; your bones are laced with calcium. None of it could have existed in the young universe, which came out of its beginning able to make only the lightest, simplest atoms — hydrogen, helium, a trace of lithium. Everything heavier, everything interesting, did not yet exist anywhere.

It had to be built, and the only forges hot enough were the cores of stars. For billions of years stars cooked light atoms into heavier ones, and when the largest of them died — collapsing, then detonating — they flung that new material out into space, where it drifted, gathered, and eventually became planets, oceans, and you.

So you are not figuratively made of stars. You are, almost literally, ash: the cooled and scattered remains of stars that lived and died before the Sun was ever lit. The iron in the blood pulsing through you was made in a catastrophe.

And if you are the ash of dead stars — what was made in the very worst of their deaths?