.pilgrimage.

His grandparents are making the pilgrimage home, after many years abroad.  Their last stop before their ultimate destination will be the shrine of the never aging boy.    

They will find no live grandchild here.  For that they will have to keep moving.

Would you like to see him?  These are all we have.  No one else has seen them before.  Three photographs.  Only one with a flash.  Too dead, that one.  Don't spend too much time looking at that one.

Would you like to hold him?  The copper box fits nicely in the palms of your hands.  Don't worry about oily fingerprints, they are easy to clean off.

His grandparents talk about him freely.  A gift to us.  The best gift.  He is real to them without ever having laid eyes upon him.  I wonder if that will change once they see just how unreal a dead baby looks in photographs.

I wish they had seen him and held him when he was still in possession of all three dimensions.  I think they would have kissed him and rocked him and been good to him in the midst of their grief.   How sad for them to have missed his life and death completely.

For them there is only a copper box, three photographs, and an ink print of a foot.  

For them there is only their very sad son and his very sad wife.

Inadequate.

.heal.

I haven't changed a single aspect of the layout of this blog since George died.  But it hasn't felt right for months.  A large part of my life was missing from this place.  So I've finally added a list of other blogs whose authors write about loss as well.  If you are on the list and don't feel comfortable with me sharing it on here, please send me an email and I will remove it right away.

.islas bahia, the one about the beach.

I won't bore you with tales of our day of traveling from Copan Ruinas to the Bay Islands, except to say one thing.  The only part of our trip when we felt physically unsafe was during our layover night in La Ceiba (a port town that most people pass through on their way to the islands).  To make it brief we ended up in La Ceiba after dark, in the taxi of a very unhappy and uncommunicative man, driving for what seemed like way too long to an area outside of the city.  There were dark alleys involved in very industrial parts of the city and one particular moment of driving through a back street next to a facility of some sort where Leif and I both thought we would be robbed and left stranded.  It turned out that our highly rated hotel in La Ceiba -don't believe all the ratings on trip advisor- was in a sketchy part of town.  The hotel itself was actually more like a compound complete with high walls and a guard tower.  Seriously.  We didn't sleep well that night.  

But things always look worse at night and in the morning, while in the cab of a very nice and very chatty man, we realized that although the area was clearly not one of La Ceiba's nicer parts, it wasn't as bad as we had imagined in the dark.

One ferry ride and one cab ride later we were in our hotel in Roatan.  We only spent one night here before we left for the smaller of the more populated islands, Utila.

.B.

The lights of West End, Roatan.  

.L.  

Juan, the "watchie," as watchmen are referred to as on the island.

Utila is only twenty five miles from Roatan but there is no cheap, fast, convenient way to make the trip over.  You could make the ten minute flight for a couple hundred dollars, take a ferry back to the mainland and then another ferry back to Utila, or you could pay 55 dollars and take a four hour catamaran ride with Vern.

.B.  

We chose the catamaran. 

When you tell the ex-pats who live on or the people who are vacationing on Roatan that you are going to Utila for a week they automatically assume that you are a diver.  It is one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified and has, what many professionals consider, diving which is ranked in the top three around the world.  When you tell these same people that you aren't diving they then automatically assume you are a drunken part-goer or an idiot or both.  People just don't go there unless they fit into one of those three categories, I guess.

We had quite a few people trying to convince us that we had made a bad choice and we should try to cancel our plans and stay on Roatan.  Utila, they would say, is kind of a shit hole.  One in particular would said this -having us trapped in a shared taxi- sporting a blond ponytail and relaying his wicked gnarly diving trip and telling us how he lives in Santa Cruz and he just loves to surf and listen to Jimmy Buffet, man.  

There seems to be some sort of rivalry between (many but not all) ex-pats and vacationers on the two islands.  Roatan vs. Utila in the ultimate Parrot Head face off.  Winner takes all the weed and all the oxygen tanks.

Our place on Utila was only accessible via boat and was as far away from the hard partying of Utila Town as was possible on such a tiny island.  Other than the security guard and his family we were the only occupants on a strip of sand called Treasure Beach.  

No phone.  No television.  No internet.  If we needed anything we either had to use a CB radio or kayak across the channel to one of the cayes.

.L.  

Our house on the beach.

It was perfect.

Except for the sand fleas.  Or No See 'Ums as they are often called.  A little word to the wise, just because they are sand fleas doesn't mean they are relegated to the sand.  They love living rooms and bedrooms and laugh in the face of Deet and mosquito netting.  There is no escaping them.  They bite and they hurt and they itch much worse than any mosquito bite.  By the time we left I had close to two hundred bites.  Leif had maybe ten.  

So even though the house was really nice the sand fleas made just hanging out in the house or on the beach nearly impossible.  Which was why we spent much our days swimming and snorkeling in the ocean off of the deck in front of the house.

.L.  

View from the deck.

.B.

It was spectacular.  There was life everywhere and a constant sound that was reminiscent of Rice Krispies in milk.  We saw baracuda, yellowtail (delicious, delicious yellowtail), massive amounts of various other fish, shrimp, moon jellies, lobster, an octopus, conchs, rays, and cuttlefish.  

One day we also saw hundreds of little inch long jellyfish floating along with the current.  Stupidly we decided to continue snorkeling.  I must have been stung at least a dozen times.  Luckily they didn't hurt that badly -like little shocks- but they could have been really poisonous for all we knew.  It was stupid but pretty amazing at the same time.

.L.

A large school of thousands of silvery fish, maybe two inches long, was always hanging out by the dock and if I jumped in and stayed still for long enough they would get curious and surround me in a funnel of silver arrows.  

.L.

I can see now how people fall in love with diving.  

Evenings, if I could tolerate the swarms of biting bugs, we would spend time on the dock watching the sunset and waiting for the stars to come out.  

.L.

.B.

That tiny island in the back is available for rent.  The entire island, and the little house that sits on it, can be yours for 120 dollars a night.

.L.

.B.

Pigeon Caye, as seen from the deck top observation tower.

.L.

.B.

Next up:  What do five British families from the 1850s, a one mile long island off of the coast of Honduras, and the Mayan culture all have in common?  Pigeon Caye.

.pages, two ways.

As it happens frequently in this part of the world, the summer heat never received the memo that it is passed its expiration date and that it is time for autumn to come out and play.  So the summer heat is giving a great last showing with 100 degree weather as we are nearing the start of October.  

Because of the oppressive heat, last night night Leif and I were sprawled out on the couch watching the first episode of Boardwalk Empire in our underwear.  We were motionless, melting into our couch, afraid to touch one another.  On the television screen men in their woolen suits walked around Atlantic City during January of 1920 -the start of prohibition- and women strolled in heavy dresses while wearing deep hued lipstick.  We tried to think cool thoughts.

One scene was of a sidewalk show of babies in incubators.  White and yellow lettering in the style of art nouveau -or was it art deco- bade the passerby to come and see the babies who weighed less than three pounds.  Tiny babies in metal incubators on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.  Close ups of small infants, wrapped in swaddling, being weighed on ancient contraptions.  Leif grabbed my hand.  Our skin melted together.  I turned to him to say, "I've never seen faker looking babies" only to see his eyes shiny and watering.  I saw an attempt to pull at the heart strings of the viewer and Leif saw our son.  

"You will grieve differently,"  our counselor told us in our first session so many months ago.  "You must understand this and not be judgmental of one another.  Judging each other's grief is often the start of the decline of a relationship."

It is hard to tell when we are on the same page with our grief.  I think it happens more rarely than normally I allow myself to believe.  Most days Leif is the one comforting me.  Holding me close while I sob and repeat the four words that have become my mantra over the last six months.  I Want Him Back.  I Want Him Back.  I Want Him Back.  He feels the loss of George as deeply as I do but the way he processes it is not in the same sobbing-writing-about-it-on-my-blog way as I process it.  

Last night I was unmoved by what I saw on the screen.  Leif was not.  

Different pages.  

And that is fine.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was recently -as in this morning- brought to my attention that after the kidnapping and murder or her son in 1932, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a series of works on grief.  

She writes in Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, 

"One must grieve, and one must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief...., On the other hand, there is the temptation to self-pity or glorification of grief.  'I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,' Constance cries in a magnificent speech in Shakespeare's King John.  Despite her words, there is not aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.  There is no highroad out." 

and later,

"Courage is a first step, but simply to bear the blow bravely is not enough. Stoicism is courageous, but it is only a halfway house on the long road. It is a shield, permissible for a short time only. In the end, one has to discard shields and remain open and vulnerable. Otherwise, scar tissue will seal off the wound and no growth will follow. To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable-- open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering."

A wise woman wrote to me in an email once how since the death of her child she has imagined that she has joined a long procession of weeping women (and men) who stretch all the way through history and across space.  A sadly beautiful image.  An image that I feel closely attached to.  An image that now includes Anne Morrow Lindbergh in procession as well.  

This morning, for seventy cents plus shipping and handling, I bought a used paperback copy of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead.  In the description of the book it says that while the condition is good it has dog-eared pages and some highlighting.  I wonder what it is that its previous owner thought important enough to highlight.  I wonder if he or she was just an admirer of a skillful and poetic author of if he or she is, when I see what was highlighted on those pages, someone whom I will recognize as a member of the procession as well.

.one appreciative blogger.

Thanks to Angela, who shares her story and the story of her daughter Charlotte over at Little Bird, I am now the proud owner of this here award.  It says that I have One Lovely Blog.  Pretty sweet.

So thank you Angela, for thinking of my little blog in this tiny corner of the internet.

The rules...

1. Accept the award and post it on your blog with the name of the person who has granted the award and his/her blog link.
2. Pay it forward to 10 other bloggers that you have recently discovered.
3. Contact those blog owners and let them know they have been chosen.

I would like to pass it on to the following corners of the internet and the lovely people that occupy them. Whether or not they know it, by sharing their stories they are helping to keep me sane while I am waiting for the bus to arrive.  

Barbara of burble
Janis of Ferdinand's Gifts
Jenn of Jenn's Den
B of non geordie mum
Sarah of Nerd Nuggets
Mandy of One Good Thing
Catherine of Between the Snow and the Huge Roses

.copan ruinas; the pueblo edition.

We had to wait a few minutes in the lobby of the bus station with the handful of other people who were traveling to Copan Ruinas for the night security man with the blue trousers to shuffle over from his office to unlock the front gate.  As soon as he did we were met with a handful of upturned faces, in the foreground of a wash of red mototaxis, and shouts of "Taxi! Taxi!"  I don't think we chose a particular taxi driver in so much as he chose us by physically corralling us into his golf-cartesque vehicle.

It was dark outside and as we moved along toward our hotel we quickly left the narrow cobblestone streets of the pueblo and found ourselves traveling along a sort of main road out past the ruins.  Our mototaxi's driver was named Daniel (pronounced Dan-yell, like Danielle) but because, I think, we were English speakers he told us to call him Danny.  He was younger than us, but in the dark it was difficult to tell how old he was.  I guessed he was in his late twenties and as I later found out I wasn't too far off; twenty-six.

.L.

.L.

I may have mentioned it before but my Spanish is pretty basic.  I spent a total of five years studying the language in high school and college but I never used it and so much of what I learned was lost like the rest of the information from my early college years.  American History, Anthropology, Calculus, Astronomy, Spanish...were all cleared out to make room for other things and the spaces which they once occupied in my brain now house Causes of Infectious Diarrhea, Blood Pressure Management, How to Perform a Pap Smear, and (my favorite) Who Got Booted From Project Runway on the Most Recent Episode.

Up until three years ago Spanish was almost completely evicted from my brain.  But, because of my graduate program and the fact that pretty much wherever I was at least half of my patients were Spanish speakers, the language has begun to creep back in.  I can, in fact, access the part of my brain that is responsible for How to Perform a Pap Smear While Speaking in Only Spanish without much difficulty at all.  This is all to say that while I can speak fairly decent medical Spanish, my conversational Spanish is somewhat lacking -unless you are one who talks about Pap Smears conversationally, and in that case I am quite an exceptional conversationalist- and so it was a huge relief to have a taxi driver who was sympathetic of my difficulty in the communication department.

He didn't, at least to our faces, ever laugh at anything I may have said that was incorrect or could have been interpreted in a way that was socially unacceptable.  He took my Spanish for what it was -remember, drunk toddler?- and communicated with me on the same level.  And so, we were able to carry on fairly decent conversations in the way only two drunk toddlers can.  So, by the time we reached the hotel Danny and I were already fast friends and we had made a play date for the following morning where he would pick us up and take us to the ruins.

.B.

Over the next two and a half days the three of us spent quite a bit of time together.  Danny drove us around, I was able to practice my Spanish, and Leif took photographs from the inside of the mototaxi.  The second day we were there, after we spent an entire day at the ruins, we arranged with Danny a trip to go up to some natural hot springs some distance away from the pueblo and into the mountains.  It took about an hour to get up to the hot springs but as it turned out the actual drive was the best part of the day.  I don't mean to say that the hot springs weren't great, because they were -all hot, watery and in the jungle, just as advertised- but as we drove up Danny gave us an interesting narration of all the smaller pueblos we passed along the way.

.B.

.L.

.L.

On the way back from the hot springs Danny asked if we wanted to stop at his friend's house for lunch, which we did, and so we had lunch in the back of his friend's house/restaurant.  It happened to be on a coffee plantation and although Danny offered to give us a tour, we were anxious to get back to town before the museum closed (stupid, should have stayed for the tour).  Instead we quickly ate our lunches and talked about last year's coup, Danny's girlfriend, his brothers in America, and how hopefully by the next time we came he would be married with children and he would finally have his American Visa.  Pretty sophisticated Spanish for a waterlogged drunk toddler.

.L.

We spent the last evening before we had to get back on a bus to travel six hours to the port city of La Cieba wandering around the streets of the pueblo.  I wondered what it was like for people growing up in that place.  For me and Leif, coming from a city of nearly five million people and barely being able to recognize our neighbors because no one talks to anyone around here, it seemed very quaint and peaceful.  A place where people not only knew their neighbors but also knew their neighbors' cousins and knew their neighbors' cousins' cousins.  It was that small.  Which made me think that at a certain age kids must grow to despise it, similarly to how I grew to feel about the town I grew up in.  But still the pueblo is, relative to other similarly sized places in Honduras, in a much better situation economically mainly due to tourism and money from archeological grants.

.B.

.L.

.L.

.B.

.L.

.B.

.B.

.L.

Danny was at our hotel the next morning to take us back to the bus stop, the same place we met him a couple of days earlier.  Before we got too far from the hotel he stopped the mototaxi and handed us two small packages wrapped up in newspaper.  They were gifts, he said, for us to take back with us to Los Angeles.  Two statues made of green clay.  The first, a representation of the Mayan God of Health (I had  explained to him earlier that I worked in the health field) for me, and the second, a representation of the first Mayan King of Copan for Leif.  They're great.  Leif and I so rarely buy ourselves mementos from our trips.  Now we have two that have sentimental value to them.

Leif and I joke that if we were to have stayed in Copan for much loner we would have probably ended up spending time with Danny and his family at some point.  The people of that town were so incredibly kind and generous to us.  If we ever do make it back to Honduras I know that I want to spend more time in Copan and I will surely go looking for Danny when we get there.

.B.

.fromage.

This site is very fun when you are stewing over stupid shit that you really shouldn't be letting upset you.  Well, it is also fun when you aren't stewing over stupid shit that you really shouldn't be letting upset you.

And you can practice you're counting skills.  As you can see Leif and I are still having trouble with what comes after "one."  

Looking back at what I wrote yesterday in my fit of frustration I am surprised anyone actually got through it all.  Thank you for letting me vent.