Several months after the landslide, we left the mountains and took a bus to the coast. We were on our way to northern Peru to see its famous ruins, and to find refuge from the rain, the mud, and our grief. We spent two days at an Ecuadorian beach town called Ballenita, meaning “little whale,” named for the humpbacks that migrate past.
We checked into a small white hotel propped on a bluff above the ocean. The children ran to the terrace to look for humpbacks. We saw gulls and dinosaur-like frigate birds, but no whales.
The next morning, I took the children to the beach, a half-moon of salt and pepper sand arcing between outcrops. We hiked to one end where we were alone.
I leaned against a rock, pulled out a thin mystery, carved a nest out of sun-warmed sand, and began to read. The children moved to the edge of the rocks to dig and play a game, I supposed. After a while I looked up to see them kneeling in a circle around something in the sand. I went over to look.
“It’s a shark,” Nick said gruffly over his shoulder.
Luke looked up at me. “It’s dead.”
It was the carcass of a gray, several feet long, mostly intact. Jaws open, as if in a final gasp, its double rim of pointed teeth, once deadly, chomped at thin air. Its eyes, dried up now, were flat and gritty as sandpaper. Its skin was torn in spots where sand fleas jumped, and flies touched down on exposed tissue. It reeked of rotting flesh. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the creature, once sleek and swift, now bereft of life, victim of old age, or perhaps some arbitrary force of nature.
A foot away, Stina had begun to dig a hole.
“We’re going to bury it,” she said.
I went back to my rock, lifting my head between paragraphs and plot twists, to check on their progress.
They dug all morning, starting over when they thought they were too close to the sea, arguing about how deep was enough, lengthening the hole because the shark wouldn’t bend. They found a plank to serve as a bier, and the three of them slowly lifted, then lowered it into the hole. They plucked leaves from a tree and layered them over the body until they had hidden the decay. Then they covered the corpse with sand and leveled it, running their small hands over and over the top until it was smooth as suede.
I felt a weight settle on me, but perhaps it was due to the tone of the mystery I was reading, a dark one, or the pillow of gray pushing in from the sea. A few drops fell on the page, and I looked up at the cloud above, but realized that, for no reason at all, they were tears. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, glanced at the kids who were still immersed in their work, found my place again, and moved on to the next chapter.
Stina went to the water’s edge and gathered broken shells. With a twig, she outlined a square over the grave, and with fragments of white, she wrote, “Here lies Mr. Shark.” Nick and Luke gathered sticks and stood them on end, affixing a horizontal piece with a string of dried seaweed in the shape of a cross.
Next to it, they set bunches of green sea grass and a blue bit of fishing line they found on the surf. Then they called me over.
***
Stina led the ritual with a solemn tale about Mr. Shark’s life at sea. “But for every fish, or whale, or shark there comes a time,” she concluded, “when it takes its last journey.”
We stood quietly; heads bowed. No one spoke the names of our loved ones lying beneath a mass of mud on the other side of the Andes, nor of our loss. No one asked why we never went back.
We left the shark and went for a swim. The kids chattered and splashed, while I floated on my back over gentle waves in the salty sea, staring up into a ceiling of gray.
In bed that evening, as I thought about the day, I realized the children had had the courage to undertake what I could not yet do. They had buried their grief.
This piece was first published online in 2017 in Obra/Artifact under the title, “Honorarium Selachimorpha”. The author retains publication rights.