"How To Begin Again" by Niamh Keating

One of the seven wonders of the world is Machu Picchu, Peru, a middle ground between the Peruvian Amazon and the high rocky Andes. This summer I backpacked far and wide across Peru - traversing from the oxygen-less 16,000ft+ Andes, where Quechuan herders bound up rocky cliffs, to the great monstrosity of the Amazon, where Howler monkeys swing and play above Tapir and Caiman. Where autopoiesis blossoms and blooms in the billions every single day, and a singular step off the path could lead to a new life, with millions of critters skittering over footsteps that fade into the leafy trees. 

From the vast Amazon rainforest, where life and death was ever present, feeding off of each other even, to Machu Picchu, trodden by thousands of people every day, a city built by the Ancients from long ago, whom modern society knows little of. Where did the Incans who built that city go? And how did the people left behind cope when they left?

I lost someone close to me two years ago, someone an ocean away but on the phone, someone who gave me my nose and half my DNA. For the first time since his funeral, two and a half years later, I visited the place where he slept, where my family and friends once placed white flowers on the fresh dirt where he lay. And I didn’t really feel anything. He was gone and the essence of him I used to feel around had faded away, dispersed into the likeness of a light summer breeze that gently brushes your face and barely lifts your hair. 

Life is delicate and ever-fleeting, just like the gentle breeze he now exists as. We learn about it in freshman-year biology, and maybe later on, on a deeper level, AP Bio and Anatomy. So there's the scientific part of it, the way you are alive and then cease to be, with cells fading and blood no longer pumping, life is present in this way in the Amazon Rainforest. And then there’s what we, as humans, remember and how we comfort ourselves with the situation. How our species uses our alive-ness and the blood pumping through us to propel the constant replay of the memories of the person we lost, originated from the hippocampus of our brains. 

I took a rock that had fallen out of place, from the foundations of Machu Picchu (something I’ll bet is probably illegal but don’t tell anyone) because to me, that rock represented not just a person who had passed, but an entire civilization from 600 years ago, whom we remember, but we don’t really know. And we guess how they built their houses and how they got their water that high up there on that mountain top, but we don’t know those people or their personalities or the people they loved or what they held dearest in their lives. 

I placed that pebble on my dad’s memorial, on a hill overlooking the brisk Irish sea, North of Dublin and just south of the border. Because maybe in 600 years, when life has moved on and my name and his are long forgotten, and if the grass and weeds haven’t overtaken the rocks on that Irish hillside, someone will wonder what it stands for, and maybe in the back of their minds they’ll wonder who it stands for. Just like I did at Machu Picchu. So that’s how I moved on, I “began again” if you will. Well, not “moved on.” But I learned how to live with it. That verdant Irish hillside is where my parents met, and where that fleeting breeze–the lasting presence of my dad–becomes like the winds of a tornado, except I’m standing in the middle, the calm of the storm. Because I grew into an acceptance, and I learned his presence is fading because I’m growing up, albeit without him, but as I grow up I don’t need him as much anymore. And he knows I am going to be okay. 

And if you, the reader, has lost someone close to you, I want you to know, that I know, from experience, that they will watch you grow up and guide you until they know you are going to be okay. And then they’ll watch you from a distance, like countless eyes in a rainforest, full of curiosity and wonder, and they’ll cheer you on when you score a goal or walk across that stage, and maybe then cheering is that breeze getting a little stronger. Because at the end of the day, life goes on, and millions of people begin again every single day.