Loss

The camera I brought from the States stopped working, so I bought a new one here in Costa Rica. I was excited to make a “big purchase” and work out all the details and ask al the questions in Spanish. Just a week later I went to Tortugero with some students from the Spanish Language Institute and it fell in the water at the end of a boat ride. We had been looking for animals, and I had just seen a few toucans, monkeys, crocodiles, etc.

I was standing on a narrow wooden platform next to the boat tossing my poncho back to the boat driver because the ponchos belonged to the hotel. I moved to the side of the platform so other people getting of the boat had room to walk by, and as I did my hip brushed against a large wooden pole holding up the roof of the boat dock. My camera was in my pocket one second... and in the river the next. Luckily the man standing next to me had very long arms and fished it out while I was standing there with my mouth open thinking, “I have not even owned that a week. There are pictures on there of Miriam and Culture Day.”

Someone suggested putting the camera in a bag of rice so the rice would absorb the moisture. We tried it. It didn’t work. We tried blowdrying it with my tico mom’s hairdryer. Jimena couldn’t stop laughing. It didn’t work. We set it in the sun to dry out more. It didn’t work.

Overall, it was actually nice to have something to grieve that was so visual: the camera was in the river. Other things that I have to grieve, like the sense of family and home are much more abstract and the loss is harder to identify, grasp, and process.