Blood Moon and Totality – One Eclipse at a Time

I unlocked a lifetime of secrets thanks to the Total Eclipse 2024. For this once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, I took the day off work because I just couldn’t be bothered. This isn’t the first total eclipse I have witnessed. And how those events have impacted my life played out in the hours leading to the momentous event. And still I was not prepared for what happened.

Eclipse, how it began

The first one I remember was the eclipse in 1991, which I saw from Mazatlan, Mexico. As a teenager, that was a big deal. We made the journey to Mazatlan. We were ideally situated at a spot by the sea. But to our dismay, clouds rolled in and obscured the sky on the day of the eclipse. What could be seen was only visible through a thick haze of cloud cover. It wasn’t as moving as it could have been. Any darkness that day, was it the eclipse? Or was it just the clouds passing over the sun? Underwhelming.

Every other eclipse has been a big deal, for me, any of the ones I could see from where we were. Total eclipses that pass over your home are rare. I’ve had to travel for some. And that worked out with varying degrees of success.

Unfortunately, due to certain events that took place in 2017, my eldest son won’t watch an eclipse anymore. That year, I planned a trip to St Louis to see the Great American Eclipse. I planned it in secret; it was just a few months after buying the house, and I was still pissed off at my mother and brother for the shit they pulled in 2016 during the trip to the Grand Canyon.

Even though there had been talk of watching the eclipse together, after the bullshit they pulled, and the fact that I had not forgiven them, I was not going to include them in my plans.

That year, the path of totality wasn’t going over Texas, and St Louis was one of the totality areas that also had sights that I wanted to check off my bucket list. The Arch, in particular. That was reason enough to book the trip.

Eclipse, how it went

Long story short, that eclipse was eclipsed by the tragic happenstance that it was also the day that we found out their older brother died.

We flew because I was at a new job. I had only been there a year, and I wasn’t trying to take too much time off since the job sucked and didn’t offer sick time. I just had to always use my PTO. I was excited, my sons not so much. Probably because we were going to St Louis.

Tragedy strikes.

The day of the solar eclipse, Monday, August 21, 2017, began in the worst way possible. We were at the hotel, and my phone rang with a call from mr horrible. It was four years after the divorce, so speaking with him was still too much emotionally, so we only really communicated through text.

His phone call came very early. Before 8 am, and I was like, if he is calling me this early on a Monday morning, he isn’t calling with good news.

It wasn’t. He was calling to tell me that there had been a collision of the USS John McCain in the Strait of Malacca at 5:24 am (4 pm CST on Sunday), and my stepson was unaccounted for.

Sunday night, in the hotel room, I was watching the news, and at the time, it was reporting another collision of a Navy ship with a tanker. There had just been one at the start of summer in June, so I was pissed. I was like what is going on over there?

I don’t remember if I heard the name of the ship that was involved, or if I even made the connection. But deep down, I already knew: when the phone rang that morning, before I even answered, it was my stepson’s ship on the news—and something terrible had happened.

History of painful moments

I’d broken hard news to my boys before. My sons were 17 and 15. Life has been unkind to them.

• Delightful moments from the past:
• I was divorcing their father.
• We were going to have to move 1400 miles away from everything they knew.
• We were going to sell the house because it had become a burden on me, and it was too far from work.
• We were moving in two weeks, not in two months.
• Brutal milestones, each one my task to say out loud. But nothing compared to that eclipse morning in St. Louis. That was the worst. Their older brother, unaccounted for in a Navy ship collision halfway around the world.

That trip had been my idea; I wanted to be there. Probably an attempt to recreate my trip to Mexico when I was their age. And now here we were, far from home, I had to deliver the bad news, and we had to keep going. We couldn’t pretend to have a good time. We were in an unknown environment, unable to process. So now this trip, which they were already reluctant to be on, became the worst time of their lives. And I can’t help but bear the burden of all of it, even the parts that I had no control over.

Eclipse, how’s it going

I don’t blame my son for being ambivalent about eclipses after that tragic year. So when the eclipse rolled through Texas in 2023, we didn’t even get out of bed. Something compelled me to make an effort in 2024.

We didn’t even have to go far. My youngest and I sat in my truck with the sunroof open and watched the moon cover the sun. In that moment, I finally understood the significance and magnitude of a solar eclipse.

The darkness that spread, it was unreal. I have never in my life experienced that, nor can I completely describe the profundity of feelings it elicited in me. See, I am a rational adult and have access to an abundance of knowledge at my fingertips. But in that moment of totality, I understood the hysteria.
If I didn’t know that the moon would eventually move out of alignment, that the sunlight would return, that this was temporary, and more importantly, that the sun had not disappeared forever, I too would have panicked and run mad. Ancient communities gave literal blood to keep the sun or the world alive during eclipses.

And I understand. I am irrevocably different. Something reset inside, and change was coming. As usual, painful change. Two years later, everything I knew is no longer the same. I am no longer the same person I was during that eclipse.

Tonight there is a blood moon on the horizon—a total lunar eclipse where Earth’s shadow stains the moon eerie red, like a wound across ancient stories and cultures. And here I am in Guatemala, right in its path of totality. Trepidation settles in like a weight. I want to trust the mysticism, to see the blood moon as a threshold moment of transformation, a time to release old patterns and step into a new phase of life. That would be amazing. Yet doubt lingers, the scars from past alignments signal caution: death, divorce, displacement. Is it an omen of bad tidings? Cosmic karma has a way of unraveling me just when I show up for it.

The sky will mark this turning point. Either for good or bad. And a small part of me is hopeful, despite the pain, that this time it will be for good. That I can emerge on the dawn, evolving into my final form.