The Adventurer's Son(87)

Somehow, through all the ordeal while looking for Roman, I had come to see the tamandua as a sort of spirit creature for him, ever since the first day when Thai and I had driven to Carate and seen one climbing along a fallen roadside cecropia tree.

We stopped at the supermarket for ice cream and tamales full of moist cornmeal and seasoned pork wrapped in a banana leaf, then headed for Carate. We made it only as far as the third river crossing. The water was high. We could have used the current to cross, but returning at the same level or higher would have been impossible.

We parked there by the water and watched a half-dozen dainty little squirrel monkeys with black-capped heads, white faces, and straight tails. They watched back, curious and gentle. Chris and I helped a young guy get his dirt bike across the deepest channel, where the wheels floated and the current threatened to pull it away.

Driving back to Puerto Jiménez, we inspected a freshly dead armadillo and watched through binoculars as white-scrotumed, cat-sized male howler monkeys roared at each other. Chris’s boys delighted as we drove through a noisy flock of red-shouldered green parrots. It had been great to have the excitement and enthusiasm of Chris’s boys, a throwback to our own tropical trips with our own kids, and I felt we had come full circle—almost. Almost, because what I would have really wanted was something like this with Roman’s kids.

AFTER OUR TIME on the Osa, Peggy and I went back to San José to view Roman’s remains before they were cremated and we could bring the ashes home. I had brought a poem that resonated with Roman and his life and his death and reading it aloud over him held some meaning for me and for Peggy, too, I hoped:

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

Its poignancy set me sobbing, the words capturing how I imagined his final time had been. The funeral director in his shiny black shoes and neat mustache slipped out the door, closing it behind him to leave Peggy and me alone with Roman.

We stood over a stainless-steel bin that held the physical remains of his life. The smell of decay touched our hands as we poked and probed at the bones, soiled and brown, held by the forest for nearly two years. The source of the odor, I could see, was the head of a tibia, cut clean by a saw for the marrow’s DNA.

“It’s a little smelly,” Peggy said.

She was so brave, as always, holding her heart together more strongly than I, checking to be sure this was her little boy. Peggy looked closely at the teeth, holding her eyeglass case as if it were lips to see that the teeth were right.

“I don’t have my phone. Do you have a picture?” She wanted to see his toothy smile.

I fumbled through my phone’s photo stream but could find no picture of Roman to use for an impromptu dental comparison. I thought of Peggy’s strength when she bore him the day we had first seen him, how I came apart then, too. This was the same.

She grabbed the bones, pushing the skull this way and that to get a better view, to be sure it was him. I was already sure, had been sure, and said something like, “What good would doubt bring here now?” At first, she thought that these teeth, these bones, were not his. But the sealants on the teeth were there, she said, and when she finally found a chip that she recognized in one of the incisors she confirmed this was our son after all.

I was relieved that the funeral director had left so we could pore over Roman’s bones, looking for something, a story, or maybe just that connection to him that I missed so achingly, that I still miss writing these words now.





Epilogue: Meat, Ravens, and Seeds


Back in Anchorage a few weeks later, we held a memorial for Roman on the winter solstice, December 21, 2016. He had often thrown summer solstice parties for his friends, with food, bonfires, wrestling, and storytelling. During the short daylight hours before people arrived, I shoveled and cleared snow, positioning four fifty-five-gallon burn barrels. Peggy handed Jazz and her cousins big earth-toned Christmas ornaments to hang from trees in the yard. I lit the barrels’ firewood and friends arranged icy luminaries lit by candles that cast a golden glow across the snow. We had thawed twenty pounds of moose meat and two sockeye salmon to barbecue on our grill. Friends brought dishes that they arranged on tables overflowing with food in the living room. Our home was warm and crowded and felt full of love.

Using a friend’s plasma torch, I had cut out images and symbols on the burn barrels. The cutouts of DNA helices, moose, insects, bicycles, and Dungeons & Dragons motifs glowed brightly in the darkness of Alaska’s shortest day of the year. The barrels were hot and threw their welcomed heat at eighty of us gathered round under the cold, clear night sky of winter. Then, one friend or family member after another came forward to tell stories about Roman, stories from twenty-seven years of an adventurous, affectionate, and fulfilling life. Some stories made us cry. Most made us laugh. They all reminded us of the love we had for him and the love he had given us. It felt good to have brought him home, to share in the memory of his life with family and friends.