The Cure

Grief before the Deep

Grief is strange. It doesn’t descend all at once like the darkness of the trench. It seeps in—quiet, persistent—until everything you touch reminds you of what you’ve lost.

After Luis died, I couldn’t sleep. Not because of the dreams, but because I was afraid of waking up without them.

In the quiet hours on deck, with the ocean stretching black and endless beyond the ship's floodlights, I found myself drifting—back to the first day Luis joined the project. Back when none of us knew just how deep we would go.

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He arrived two years ago, mid-monsoon season, boots soaked and eyes full of curiosity. Tim had recruited him from an ROV development program in Baja, raving about his field improvisation skills. I was skeptical at first—he looked barely thirty, all wind-tossed hair and sunburned cheeks.

“Is that my sub?” he asked on day one, peering at our prototype with a kind of reverent amusement. “You actually want to dive this into the Mariana?”

Tim grinned. “Not without you first signing the waiver.”

Luis winked. “I’ll sign two if I get to rewire the ballast array.”

He threw himself into the retrofitting, pouring over every system. He had a particular fascination with our archaic depth gauges. I remember him holding one up like an artifact, eyebrows raised.

“These analog units? You're trusting your life to a bourdon tube?” He shook his head, laughing. “We need a backup system—preferably piezo-resistive sensors with ocean-depth calibration. Look at what HMA’s doing with their subsea gauge integration. Their dual-mode redundancy could literally save our asses” (HMA Group, n.d.).

What set Luis apart wasn’t just his engineering mind—it was his empathy. He didn’t just modify systems; he listened to them. Machines, people, environments—he treated everything as if it had a soul worth respecting.

When I showed him the first coral samples under the scope, he’d stared silently for minutes.

“It’s like they’re thinking,” he finally said. “Not just reacting. Thinking.”

That’s when I knew he believed in it. In the possibility that the reef wasn’t just an ecosystem—it was a partner in this impossible fight.

He and Noah butted heads at first—Noah’s methodical rigor clashing with Luis’s instinct-driven adjustments—but they found their rhythm. I’d catch them late at night arguing about power converters one second and marine biology the next.

And then there was the night I found Luis teaching Danny how to pilot the sub in VR. My son, frail and wrapped in blankets, was giggling at every simulated crash.

“Lesson one,” Luis said, flashing Danny a grin, “never trust your depth sensors during a squall. They lie more than scientists under funding pressure.”

He made this world accessible to people who never thought they belonged in it.

And he made me believe we could go deeper than the blueprints allowed.

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Now, as the deck sways beneath me and a thousand stars reflect off still, mourning waters, I carry that memory like ballast—heavy, necessary, grounding.

Luis believed in the work. But more than that, he believed in us.

He knew the risk and took it anyway. Because he understood what we stood to lose—not just one boy’s future, but the coral’s song, the trench’s secret, the integrity of something not yet ruined by corporate hands.

The silence he left behind is deafening. But I can still hear him sometimes, in the hum of the sub’s engine, in the rhythm of ocean currents, in Danny’s stubborn laughter.

He was one of us. And because of him, we’re still here.

Still fighting.

Still diving.