The crunching of wet leaves isn’t quite like that of dry leaves. It is mellower; less crushing, and more swooshing. I remember listening to the sound of these leaves while walking through a narrow trail encumbered by vines, bushes, and tropical canopy undergrowth as I followed my father’s footsteps. I carefully placed my small feet where his had been just a blink of an eye earlier, playing a game of follow the leader with myself. My dad carried a black mesh bag with shoulder straps filled with all the apparatus required for an immersive adventure: two juxtaposing sets of snorkeling masks, snorkels, and fins, color and size coordinated for good measure. We hiked through the dense, stifling Costa Rican jungle attempting to find our way to a well-known snorkeling spot on the farthest reaches of the Punta Uva headland, past acres of fully-grown rainforest. The path was covered in green-brown leaves that hid the soft, mushy mud under our sandals and captured every one of my dad’s footsteps as it gave under his weight.
My dad was in his early 70s, built tall and slim except for his melon-shaped belly that had been cultivated by a lifetime of casual beers and chicharrones. He had very little hair left in his head, and what remained sat in a circle around the top, white like the foam of breaking waves against his clay-colored skin. His tan face was a canvas for the creases of time, weathered into place by a lifetime of smiles and struggles. Yet, even if his appearance hinted at a long life lived, his mind and energy evidenced traces of a youthful soul.
I followed him up the headland, carefully climbing the cracked layers of rock as he showed me where to place my hands and feet, up to the top where the trees were denser and the ocean’s restless song harmonized with the chaotic jungle symphony. The tropical air permeated through his shirt. Tiny, invisible droplets condensed around us, secretly metamorphosing into salty beads on our foreheads. The descent from the headland was equally as treacherous—but it led to the ocean, where a treasure of life awaited. I descended first, using my father’s teachings from the ascent to place my hands on the nooks and crannies created by thousands of years of tropical downpour, eventually making it to the edge of the water. My dad followed this time, descending slowly as he placed each foot and hand on pre-meditated spots along the rocky face. He had made it almost all the way down before I turned and leaped into the water, jumping in from the perfect entry point—a dark protruding rock slab, extending like a finger from the headland, next to clear 10-foot-deep waters.
I instantly felt my body breathe—the sea cooler than the humid jungle air, and the taste of salt on my cracked lips. I waited for my dad to join. He was confidently taking his last steps towards the edge, until, a few feet away from the edge, he slipped on a wet rock and fell flat on his tailbone. My breath fell short; a rapid fire of thoughts pulsed through my brain. What if he broke something? What if he can’t get up? What should I do? I stared directly at him as he paused for the smallest of instants before looking back with a cheeky smile, holding his head and laughing in disbelief. “All good, just a little slippery around here.” I hesitated to believe him, was he actually okay? I swam to the rocks and started to climb my way out of the ocean, hoping that we could resume our snorkeling adventure, and that he hadn’t seriously hurt himself. Yet before I had even finished pulling myself out of the water, he was jumping off from the same slab of rock that I had used, diving head-first into the turquoise-green ocean.
Throughout my childhood I had a recurring dream. It would come to haunt me in the least expected moments and feed on my deepest fears. It always started with a cartoon-animated devil that came to visit at night, befriending me with small talk as I avoided making eye contact. At some arbitrary point in this curious exploit of my subconscious, my father would appear out of thin air, immediately forcing the devil to pause his words. My dad’s entrance into this dream always unveiled the devil’s true purpose: to take my father somewhere—anywhere—away from the world and reality I lived in. In some dreams, I would find myself standing up to the devil and keeping my father with me—outsmarting or tricking him into leaving my dream—and avoiding the unthinkable pain that he was tasked to inflict on me. Yet, in most other versions of this dream, I would wake up in a torrent of despair, thinking my dad was gone forever. A bone-crushing, paralyzing sense of loss would absorb me for the next few seconds, knowing that one day I would not wake up from such a dream, before falling back asleep. I told my dad this story every time it happened, as if searching for some hidden comfort I hoped he could provide. But he could only hold my head against his round belly, heroically attempting to soothe my anxiety and simultaneously hide the emotions flushing his face, while the scent of oaky old age lingered as an inconspicuously brutal reminder of the truth.
“If the wave already broke, duck under it,” my dad said the first time he was teaching me the art of catching waves. We were at the edge of the breakers, with water deep enough to make my feet dangle above the ocean floor when I swam over the gentle whitewater created by the breaking waves. After each wave, I would get pushed towards shore, effectively neutralizing my progress forward, while my dad kept strolling along, walking out past the breaking waves like a giant ripping through a forest[EP8] . I struggled to swim behind him, holding my breath and ducking under the whitewater for the first time—unsure about how long I had to spend underwater before surfacing to avoid getting a nose-full of saltwater. I coughed several times, water flowing out of every cavity in my head as I cleared my sinuses, but my vision remained blurry with seawater intruding behind my eyelids.
After the two seconds it took my eyes to clear, I saw my father swimming towards me, and behind him a quickly rising wave. It was speeding up and bending over itself as it swiftly approached where my dad was casually stroking, moving one arm past his head, then the other, and back to the other, and so on, in his usual swimming rhythm. Suddenly, the wave caught up to him, pulling him higher on its face as it morphed into a two-foot rushing cascade. He seamlessly transitioned his swimming stroke into a stiff projectile position. He put both hands together by stopping his left stroke in front of his face—with a fully extended arm—and allowing his right stroke to join it, bringing both of his hands together in a unifying motion that shaped him into a pointed arrow as he calmly accelerated towards shore. He rode the turbulent wave’s foam as it bounced up and down, threatening to toss and turn him at every instant, but sustaining his arrow-like shape throughout. He traversed the five body-lengths towards me before disappearing behind the white water as I ducked for dear life under the oncoming surf. I came back to the surface rattled and, to my great disbelief, my dad had somehow surfaced right next to me. “Come,” he said confidently, without acknowledging the mind-boggling nature of his display with the waves. How do you do that?! I wondered. But the knot in my throat locked up my words, and all I could do was smile and follow him into deeper water.
I was 13 years old when my father passed away. It happened towards the end of his third bed-ridden week at the hospital. Pneumonia—a common ailment in his family. Not a big deal, I thought when I first heard the news of his unexpected hospital trip. But it soon became a big deal. Within two days of his admission to the hospital, he had lost most of his ability to breathe and machines were pumping into him the necessary oxygen to stay alive. That second day, I remember my mom calling me when I was done at school, saying we had to go to the hospital again, that my dad was not doing well. It seemed strange to me—my dad and I had conversed like any other day the night before, and it had made me feel confident that he would have a short stint at the hospital. A short and somber drive later, I was standing in that same hospital I’d been in the night before. I walked up the three flights of stairs, impatiently following the winding hallway among nurses, doctors, and patients that led to his bed. I eventually got to his room and saw him. Immediately, my stomach dropped the three flights of stairs under my feet and a massive, hollow pit filled its place inside my body. I must have taken a wrong turn, misread the floor number, confused hospitals altogether; this really couldn’t be. But his now brown-yellowish skin proved that I was in the right place, despite at first not being able to see his face through the breathing mask. He slept, or at least his eyes were closed—keeping them open might’ve been too much to ask of his body. The feeling in my gut didn’t sit right. Deep down, where things that matter are felt—where the human heart, body, and soul connect, and the essence of who we are is shaped—, down there, I knew a part of me had begun to wither away.
Two long weeks later, the whole family was summoned to the hospital. Despite the comatose state my father was in during those two weeks, I paid him a visit every day. Every afternoon after school, my mom would drive me over, and I would come in to the hospital hoping for a miracle. I hoped and prayed that the doctors would have a last-minute epiphany, a Hail Mary to save his life. But on that last evening, anticipating that the lifeless machines sustaining his beating heart would finally be unplugged from their energy source, hope was gone. I stood there almost frozen, in that white, cold, beeping room where I’d already spent more time than I ever wanted, surrounded by soon-to-be strangers, as the only person who connected all of us laid under the white sheets, his eyes to stay shut forever. As if gathered in ceremony, we all waited for the final moment—what most kids only get to see in sad movies—while more time elapsed between each spike in the heart monitor. To call that gathering sad would be disrespectful to my father’s role in all of our lives; the soul-sucking energy that I felt in that room was a testament to everything that we were about to lose with his departure from this world. In that agony, we stood waiting eternally while the monitor’s spikes kept drawing out longer and longer, until they completely disappeared into a merciless flatline accentuated by a long, screeching beep.
It was a few years after his death that the recurring dreams returned. I had constant dreams with my dad, usually feeling his presence right beside me and smelling his oaky scent. But these new, recurring dreams were different. They placed me somewhere we had been together—a beach, a café, an office—all by myself, having a seemingly normal day—watching the waves, looking at the menu, walking up a set of stairs—before he casually appeared in my dream, like any other character. I would immediately approach him and start a regular conversation—like we used to do every day, usually focused on me, my school, my life, my interests. At some point in the conversation, inevitably, I would remember that he had been dead for a while. But in my sleep state I could not tell dream apart from reality, and thus I experienced the bittersweet deceit, if only for seconds, of having my father back with me. How come he was alive? Where had he been this whole time? Why was he hiding? Why had he staged his death? I rapid-fired with these questions, seeking much needed answers, all while his lips curled into his typical cheeky smile. Dream after dream, he never responded to my livid questioning. More often than not, I would boil myself up into exasperated wakefulness, terminating the dream as tears filled with intense anger streamed down my cheeks and into my pillow. This dream, due to its repetition, always had me asking new questions. And every time it came back, my subconscious was prepared for it. Unknowingly, my brain prepared new sets of questions to ask my father that built on last dream’s unanswered ones. I asked about where he was hiding, what he had been up to since I last saw him, why he had left, or why was he doing this to us? With time the questions evolved, but he never responded. He just smiled and looked into the distance, as if there was something I just wasn’t getting.
One of the last birthday presents my dad gifted to me before passing away was a surfboard. He surrendered to my countless requests during a bodysurfing session on a weekend escapade to Punta Uva, our usual getaway. I had longed for a surfboard since the day I understood that dancing with the waves could be more than just bodysurfing, many years back watching surfers ride waves alongside my father. And while both of my parents feared that I would be in extreme danger floating alone in the ocean, I had finally convinced my father, and this last gift turned out to be his final nod of approval.
I began taking surfing seriously after he passed away. Before that, it had been a once-every-six-months type of activity. I had barely ridden waves on my board—spending most of my time faceplanting or dodging the onrushing whitewater and getting trampled by it. But at the age of 14, my mom opened the floodgates of surfing by offering to drive me to the beach almost every weekend. This was our escape from the onrushing storm—our eye of the hurricane—where we could simply be while chaos ensued at a safe distance away from us. It also became our time to be together, driving 50 minutes every Saturday at dawn, sharing tears filled with sadness and grief, memories of our time together as a family, and hoping that, one day, this pain would be over. But most importantly, it turned into our time for clarity; for her it was the time to read and meditate while sitting on a folding chair in the sand, and for me it was the time to learn this coveted and intricate dance with the waves.
Surfing’s learning curve, much like grieving, is never-ending. Finding comfort in countless hours of repetitive struggles, only to become marginally better at catching a wave, or adding one happy moment to every day, becomes basic survival. In the months after my father’s death, I learned from the turbulent waters around me—carefully nursing the scar tissue in my heart with saltwater and perseverance. The gentle whitewater I had learned to dive under with my father turned into steep, pitching waves crashing right over my head, threatening to push me into the darkest depths and smack my board in half. Strong currents and rip tides pulled me out to sea, closer to the rocks—miles away from the person I’d once been.
Facing the raw power of the ocean as a teenager—energy traveling thousands of miles, breaking over a shallow stretch of sand—I grieved humbly. Watching the pitching lip of a wave bending from a distance equal to the height of my house directly into my lower back, soon to sandwich my body between the seafloor and the most turbulent motion on Earth, I experienced uncertainty in the flesh. The set waves, breaking in deeper water and with more energy than all other waves, locked me in a saltwater washing machine for longer than I thought I could withstand and forced me to adjust. I had no say, no power, and all I could do was to try my best at survival. It was in this fear that I found comfort away from thought. Challenging my body with troubles much like those in my mind converted my life into a single fight. I was no longer dealing with learning how to surf and mourning my father’s death separately—I was simultaneously struggling with both. And when the crippling anxiety of not knowing when I would surface from a large wave’s grip, or when the dreams and the forsaken smell of oak would go away, became too strong to bear, I floated along with it, instead of fighting against it—hoping that, like any wave, it would soon fizzle out into soft, sandy run-up.
Paddling on my surfboard, with the thrashing energy of the Pacific Ocean pushing its piercing brine through the fibers of my deepest fears, I was forced to keep living with these feelings—my father’s seal of approval as my sole guiding light. Duck-diving with my surfboard under countless rows of whitewater, feeling turbulence rushing through my board and body neutralizing my progress forward, I had to dig deep for the willingness to keep going. I had to talk myself into believing that wonders laid in front of me if I could only keep paddling for another five minutes, and they often did. Soon, I would find myself paddling into yet another perfect wave, peeling slowly towards the shore with a slight offshore breeze holding its crest up for a split second longer, and I would forget the tribulations of getting there. This short-lived reward was a memory eraser—wiping out any traces of exhaustion and frustration from my body by pumping more adrenaline through my veins—and a much-needed reminder of hope—as long as there was something to live for, I could push through.
This struggle-for-reward mentality developed into a consistent mantra for my time in the ocean—one that began to permeate my daily battles. I began to see my dad’s absence as opening doors that would have otherwise remained unopened—doors that I would’ve never known existed had he lived longer. Being humbled by his loss widened the scope of my learning beyond what he could have ever taught me. For every moment of joy I experienced—sharing family stories with my mom, visiting new parts of my country, surfing better waves—there were stockpiles full of baggage that came with it—months of sorrow, escaping a chaotic life, a desire to belong. I now knew that there was always a reason to fight, to hold my breath for a second longer, to paddle through the next set. And as I learned to ride the waves of my home break, I began to understand the gifts that my dad had left behind in my dreams with his distant looks and soft smiles.
I recently dreamed with my father for the first time in a while. It was sometime near the ten-year anniversary of his death. We were sitting in an open area, next to a bar built from clay bricks where we had procured some red wine to drink as the afternoon sun began to disappear behind the distant mountains. We sat enjoying the company of each other, the warm sun in our skin, and the tangy wine. For the first time, I did not question, I did not get mad, I did not throw a tantrum, I just sat and relished his presence. The evening had a golden tint to it, and a group of guys in their late twenties sat next to us. They had taken some interest in us and had started asking my father some questions. How were you so successful? Why did you never retire? What was the Civil War like? They asked admiringly, as if they knew who he was and what his life story had been. But he just replied with a nod and a soft smile, leaving the puzzled young men sitting back on their chairs. He was neither here nor there, almost like a hologram—seemingly present but his mind long absent. This was the first time I noticed this—the numbness of thought and speech that he had carried through all of our dreams together. He needed no words and no explanations for his presence to spark emotions that were solely his to ignite, and by teaching me how to decode these feelings over many dreams, he had also taught me to see with more than just my eyes.
I walked by myself down the empty dirt airstrip. The stiff offshore breeze blew all kinds of particles into my face, protected by an old sarong and a pair of sunglasses from the blazing desert sun and flying sand. I could see the lines on the ocean stacked to the horizon, like rows of soldiers slowly marching against the wind towards shore[EP16] . My pace quickened and my heart started to beat faster. I began an awkward run towards the beach, attempting to keep my surfboard from flying off in the wind and doing my best to avoid tripping with my flip flops on a loose rock. I reached the edge of the small cliff where I knew I would see the waves for the first time on that day—the day I had been tracking since I first saw the hurricane forming on the radar, a thousand miles south—and immediately changed into my wetsuit. There was no time to wait. The hurricane’s energy was shoaling into the shallow sandbars and each wave bent over itself into a perfect A-framed barrel, large enough to fit myself fully standing inside its curl, magically sculpted by the offshore breeze.
I ran into the sky-blue ocean, and thirty seconds of paddling later I could not help but stop and look around. Next to me, freight-training waves were contorting into perfectly circular barrels, churning on their insides like laundry machines, and peeling perfectly towards shore, with squadrons of pelicans and colonies of gulls as the only other witnesses of this glorious sight. The sheer power of such a nearby storm was unlike anything I had seen. Despite not being the tallest of waves, each set packed more punch than any other spot I had surfed. I sat on my surfboard in admiration, frozen in place by the overwhelming joy electrifying my entire body. My trance was broken when I saw a set coming straight towards me, as if it was a personal gift—a gift from the hurricane, the ocean, the planet—in the form of moving energy. I turned around on my board and paddled with all my strength into the first wave of the set, standing up on my surfboard as the wave quickly began to rise, veering to my right as I saw its top—the lip—beginning to fall three feet in front of me. I aimed towards the gaping hole forming between the top of the wave and the surface of the ocean and tucked under the oncoming lip. I suddenly felt its embrace around my entire body, encapsulating me into a warp of time and space, where I stood still, feeling the wave’s own breeze, while aiming for the curling exit. An unknown amount of time later that could’ve been milliseconds or eons, I emerged unscathed and dry, as if it had all been a dream. I broke into tears of joy. Never had I been in the company of such a strong presence while so undeniably alone. I looked around and saw nothing but desert hills, a scorching sun, and the bright blue sky. I instinctively looked up, to someone or something, feeling gratefulness and joy radiating from every atom in my body, and gave thanks. Then I turned around and paddled back to sea for another one.
