Over the Edge

by Pam Mandel

Liv Fun: Vol 4 – Issue 2

Here are the things I was afraid of:

The height.

The heat.

Holding everyone else up.

Getting all the way down, and not being strong enough to make the trip back up.

The way I’d feel the next day if I made my body do things it was not up for.

So I didn’t go. I stayed behind with the guy with the new knee. We watched our travel companions strap on their harnesses, clip in to the ropes, and drop over the side of the sinkhole. Most of them would rappel to the bottom, then climb back up the ropes to the halfway mark. Then, they’d hike out.

I hiked to the halfway mark along the ledge. Me, and a guide, and the guy with the new knee. It wasn’t hard. There was a little bushwhacking, a little swatting at mosquitoes, and it was humid. We reached the halfway point and waited. We looked up at pictographs and down at the bright green birds circling below.

Sima de las Cotorras — “Parakeet Sinkhole” — is in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It’s about 500 feet across and 500 feet deep and takes its name from the hundreds of parakeets that make their homes here. The pictographs on the sinkhole walls are attributed to the Zoque people, indigenous to the region.

When I told friends I was off to Chiapas, they asked me if it was dangerous, this traveling to Mexico. “I’m not planning to buy drugs or run immigrants,” I said. “So what should I be afraid of?”

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Liv Fun

by Leisure Care
Summer 2015
View Table of Contents

The Hero Within
by Deborah Grassman

“I could never do what you do!” I hear this often, when people learn I am a hospice nurse practitioner at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). “Isn’t it depressing?” usually follows. I used to think the same way. No one told me I could find peace, joy and fulfillment in caring for people at the end of their lives.

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Over the Edge
by Pam Mandel

Here are the things I was afraid of: The height. The heat. Holding everyone else up. Getting all the way down, and not being strong enough to make the trip back up. The way I’d feel the next day if I made my body do things it was not up for. So I didn’t go. I stayed behind with the guy with the new knee.

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Leaving It All Behind
by Sue Peterson, CFA

As a wealth advisor, I understand how deeply rooted our personhood can be in proof of financial success. Yet as we age, one of the most courageous acts we can take is to begin intentionally reducing the size of our estate and prepare for that time when you leave it all behind.

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