Lisa Boice
20th Annual Solas Awards Gold Winner in the Travel & Transformation category
A trio of zebras kicked up plumes of orange Kruger National Park dirt as they crossed the road in front of our Land Cruiser. We had stopped to look at the impala hanging lifeless from the branch of an acacia tree ten feet away. It hung like meat in a butcher’s freezer. The leopard that killed it was likely hiding nearby, our guide told us, watching over its kill. What looked like an oval brown bag about the size of a 10-pound sack of rice was slung over the limb near the impala.
“What’s that next to its head?” I asked.
He checked through his binoculars. “It’s the stomach,” he said. “Leopards don’t like it, so they pull it out. It’s full of grasses, which don’t interest them.”
I could feel my own stomach turn as I looked at the morbid tableau. I didn’t expect grief to follow me into the bush.
I looked away and pulled my phone out of my pocket. No messages. That was good.
* * * * *
“I may not be here when you get back,” my mom had told me over the phone the day before I left for holiday in South Africa.
“I heard,” I said.
My eyes watered and I took a deep breath so my voice wouldn’t shake. My sister, who was taking care of my mom, had told me she was declining. My other sister, a nurse, also confirmed it. Everyone wanted to know whether they should contact me while I was away if our mom passed.
“Of course, let me know,” I told them.
This wasn’t the first time we thought our mother would pass. Last Christmas, she was in the hospital’s cardiac and stroke unit, unresponsive, as my siblings and I rushed to her bedside and said “goodbyes.” Six months later, same thing. Much to our relief, she rallied each time and was able to go home. After her last hospital stay, she made us promise we would carry on with our lives as normal.
So, I was carrying on.
I assured my mom I would be back for her birthday.
“Hang on to that,” I told her. “I’ll bring your favorite ice cream.” We shared some “I love yous,” and hung up.
Then I packed my suitcases as tears streamed down my cheeks.
My husband and I were off on a long-planned four-week trip to South Africa to find birds and mammals. Both excitement and dread wrestled in my mind.
* * * * *
On safari I expected to see amazing wildlife, but forgot I’d also see death. At home, Steve and I had always enjoyed African nature shows, watching lion cubs tussle, wildebeest migrate, and thousands of flamingos paint the Great Rift Valley bright pink. In the televised savannahs, when a pride of lions spotted a kudu herd, music with pulsating basslines and energetic percussion began. A chase was about to start. The lions targeted the youngest or weakest in the herd, adding intensity to the dramatic pursuit.
I had always hated this part. I’d hold my breath and yell at the TV, “Run, run! Faster, faster!” expecting my cries to champion the kudu to safety. When the soundtrack came to an abrupt halt, the prey got away, and I exhaled. But if the music turned into a slow, mournful cello solo, it signaled the inevitable. I’d leap from the couch and go into another room to avoid the catch and kill. If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.
In Kruger, there were strict warnings against leaving the vehicle. I was not in the safety of my living room watching nature play out on a screen. The dangling impala punctuated that. Mortality was omnipresent here, in the bush and in my mind every time I checked my phone for messages from home.
* * * * *
“How long do you think you have?” I had asked my mother six months earlier.
“Ohhhh,” she pondered, “no more than two years, tops,” she said.
End of life seemed to accelerate as the two years she had forecasted soon dissolved into weeks and days. My mother was prepared to die. She was 82, and her health had been deteriorating for some time. It was too high a risk for doctors to repair her heart. She would never survive the surgery, they told us.
“I’ve done everything I wanted to do,” she had told me. “I don’t know why I’m still here. It’s time for me to go.”
Her dignity disbanded into tiny pieces as her organs and limbs betrayed her. The clock seemed to be going backward with her body rapidly reverting back to its infant state. She relied on others to help her with the basics—walking, using the bathroom, bathing. Her mind, however, was still sharp, aware of the physical reversal.
She had once danced through life—ballet and tap lessons as a child, errands done in a blur as she raised five children. Her movement was her signature. Now she needed help moving from her bed to her recliner. She had become the weak one. Death would snatch her up like a pride of lions.
It shattered my heart into a million fragments.
* * * * *
The next morning, our driver stopped the vehicle. We paused to see a group of mother elephants gathered closely together. A baby calf peeked out amid the cluster of giant grey legs and trunks. I remembered my mother protecting me when I was young. She held my tiny hand when we crossed the street. She’d always plop an ice cube into my hot soup to save my tongue. And when she drove me 800 miles to university, she squeezed in every last bit of life advice to protect me from my own mistakes, always with a positive spin.
“Don’t overthink things,” she’d tell me. “You’re going to do great things and see amazing places. Make sure you take every opportunity thrown at you.”
* * * * *
Camera shutters clicked and then our guide shouted, “Lilac Breasted Roller!” as he pointed to a tree near our Land Cruiser.
The songbird perched, clenching a limb.
The breeze splayed its spectacular feathers – gold, blue, teal, pink, and lilac. This remarkable roller was one of my targets for the trip and I kept missing it all day. Every time someone would see it, it flew away before I could get eyes on it.
After a much-anticipated search, the bird had appeared right when I needed it. I rested my elbows on the car door from inside the vehicle as I gazed through my binoculars. My breath slowed to steady my view through the lenses, fully absorbing this perfect bit of brightness against the backdrop of sun-scorched plains where predators lurk.
Throughout our explorations at Kruger I vacillated in this way, between the thrill of discovery and the quiet terror of loss. My emotions resembled the undulating African landscape, traveling through savannahs, rocky cliffs, and deep valleys of emotion. Each curve revealed a new vista of feeling.
We smelled death too. On one of our forays, a wake of white-backed and hooded vultures scavenged a giraffe carcass killed two days earlier. The putrid stench assaulted us. The giraffe was sprawled out on the embankment sloping down from the road a few feet away. I aimed my binoculars at the vultures resting in the trees above the giraffe. A bandana shielded my nose, and I turned my eyes away from the awful scene.
“Lions hunted it,” our driver said. “They chase giraffes to these banks. They know the terrain makes it too wobbly for the giraffes’ legs, so they stumble.”
The lions had what they needed from the kill, and it was the vultures’ turn.
It seemed every time we encountered the grim evidence of fatality, I reached for my phone in anticipation of the dreaded message. Still nothing. Instinctively, I covered my eyes and hoped the threat would go away. But it lingered. This was the sorrow that precedes death—the slow unraveling and the ache of not knowing.
I didn’t expect grief to hit before my mother died. I thought sorrow would come later—after the final call, the funeral, the sorting of her things. But it had already arrived. I just couldn’t see it.
A friend once told me, “You can’t read the label when you’re inside the jar.” That was me. Grief had begun, and I hadn’t even named it.
Each morning, we scouted for wildlife when most were active. Three male lion brothers sauntered next to our vehicle as my heart pounded with excitement and fear. A three-foot-tall black, white, red, and yellow Saddle-billed Stork fished in a river. Unafraid iridescent blue, turquoise, and violet Cape Glossy Starlings bounced around on the ground near our feet at lunch, hoping for handouts.
So many winged creatures I’d never seen before: ostrich, the Secretarybird, bee-eaters. Each pulled back the curtain to reveal this new place. But I was moving through a landscape where the music of birdsong was interspersed with the silence of graves. How can I hold on to the melody before it fades? I’d wonder.
Birds and peril collided when we found a pair of crested barbets. The songbirds the size of a robin fluttered their wings desperately over their nest in an acacia tree.
“A monitor lizard!” our guide called out.
The lizard, three feet long and armored in scales, clawed its way up the tree with slow, deliberate force. It flicked its tongue, tasting the air—tracking the scent of life.
The barbets shrieked and dove, their wings slicing the air in frantic arcs. One struck the lizard’s back, another grazed its snout. The lizard blinked, but didn’t flinch. I wanted to believe they could stop it. That sheer will and noise might be enough.
But the lizard kept climbing. It reached the hollow. Paused. Entered.
The dive-bombing stopped.
Thirty seconds later, it emerged licking its mouth.
Silence.
It had eaten whatever was in the nest—eggs, nestlings, hope.
It was over.
We don’t escape death. Not in Kruger. Not at home. Yet it feels as though it comes to us as a surprise. I wanted to shake my fists at the sky and yell, “Unfair!”
It’s unfair that my mother’s decline was slow, humiliating, and painful. It’s unfair that life you away, regardless of readiness. It’s unfair for giraffes, impalas, and crested barbets—none of them prepared, all of them exposed.
Was traveling through these scenes of loss supposed to prepare me for what was to come?
Having lost my father 28 years earlier, I thought I was ready for my mother’s passing. I had already endured the pain of saying goodbye at her hospital bedside.
Grounded with a religious belief in an afterlife and the hope of reuniting with loved ones, I told myself I was prepared. Yet nothing could brace me for the profound void that grief leaves in your heart.
Maybe, the way to survive grief is hope, I thought. Like searching for birds where terrain is tough, or predators lie in wait. I needed that hope to rise over the dark terrain of sorrow and despair to propel me forward. Walking through grief would be unavoidable and I was already on that path. The perfect brightness of hope, though, was beginning to light my way.
We drove on the bridge over the Olifants River. The sun lowered toward the horizon, casting its golden reflection across the water. White-rumped swifts pirouetted in the breeze against the orange-blazed sky.
“Turn around,” our guide said. “Look!”
It was the moon at the same level as the sun in the sky, casting its own monochromatic yet brilliant light.
For a moment, my mom’s image flashed through my mind.
Two lights hung in the firmament.
One fading, the other just beginning.
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Lisa Boice writes about what happens when you say yes to the unfamiliar. As a travel writer, she explores reinvention and the art of noticing. She journeys the world alongside her husband in search of birds, a practice that transforms each trip into a quest. Her work has appeared in The Statesider, Wildflower Magazine, There She Goes podcast, and Deep Travel: Souvenirs from the Inner Journey anthology. She’s a multi-time recipient of Solas Travel Writing Awards and was honored with first place for Best Travel Essay at the 2023 Annual Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. Her serial illustrated memoir The Accidental Birder can be found on Substack. Lisa and her husband live in Austin, Texas, squarely within the Central Flyway, one of North America’s major migratory bird routes.