Missing at Catarata de La Paz

What Grandparents Know

One of us is not here. The tour guide counts again, to be sure. Yes, only 23 of us; there should be 24. We have just finished walking up and down trails to view the La Paz waterfalls. The chartered bus is waiting to return us to the nearby lodge. We cannot leave until all are present and accounted for.

“Does anyone know where she could be?” asks the guide, standing in front of the bus. It is the second day of a 10-day Costa Rica educational travel program for grandparents and their grandchildren. It is one of hundreds of such programs created and run by Road Scholar, founded in 1975 as Elderhostel (in juxtaposition to ubiquitous youth hostels).

Again, louder this time, the guide asks, “Does anyone remember seeing her on our walk?”

No one says anything. We know nothing, not even her name. Though we all wear name tags, we haven’t been together long enough to connect names with the bodies to which the tags are attached.

Old people, especially women, become invisible, it is said. Not exactly invisible, I think; rather, we’re simply no longer recognizable as separate individuals, blending under the generic label of “old.”

I tell the guide that I recall walking with the missing woman from the last waterfall viewing platform. So one of the other guides goes there to look for her. Then a woman sitting in front of me on the bus volunteers that I must be mistaken since it was she — not the missing woman –who was with me at the viewing platform.

The guide asks the granddaughter if he can try to call the missing woman. In a quiet, barely audible voice, the granddaughter says she has her grandmother’s cellphone. She had been using it to take photos.

The bus motor is idling. We are tired, need to go to the bathroom, and want to get back to our hotel rooms. These are selfish thoughts, we realize, and should be overridden by worry: what could have happened to her, here in the cloud forest, 5,000 feet above sea level? Is she lost? A fall over the railing? A cardiac event?

Across the aisle in the same row of seats I’m in, I glance at the granddaughter. She is not crying. Not yet.

No one she loves has ever died. Not yet. But she knows it must happen one day; how she knows, she’s uncertain. Death is part of life, she’s been told. But that’s different from true knowledge.

The grandparents know. We think we do.