There are no readily available numbers for the number of foreigners, meaning non-Ticos, who die in Costa Rica each year. Between drownings, car crashes, drug overdoses, homicides, and just plain old age, the number is likely somewhere in the hundreds. One of these years, odds are I will be among those unkept statistics, whenever my number is called by that doorman who runs that club we must all someday join, ready or not.
I have lived through an almost two-generational cycle here. Kids I taught in one hectic semester at the local bilingual private school are now dentists, attorneys, municipal workers, housewives, many with kids and young grandkids of their own. Thirty years down the road, the aging group of expats I gathered with in the late 1990s for Sunday NFL games have all died. I am now the age they were then, and I realize there is likely no 30-year window in Costa Rica remaining for me.
I call myself an expat, but in truth, I have always lived more like an immigrant in Costa Rica. Most of my life here has been spent in rural zones and small cities away from tourist routes, among middle-class Ticos, speaking Spanish exclusively, except when I talk to myself. I spent a recent weekend at the coast. I joke with friends that I like to go to the beach towns once a month so I can practice my English. I twice ran into old friends who go back more than twenty-five years.
We have walked these same streets, eaten and drunk in the same cantinas. We have aged in front of our own eyes, all of us well into our second half century, and our conversations quickly turned to who among us were no longer among us. Heart attacks, strokes, catastrophically failing organs. Our contemporaries’ deaths initially shock us, though I am not sure why. It is not like we are still in our twenties and thirties.
Our lifestyles include plenty of good food, drink, smoke, sun, and sex, things that are great in moderation but can become hazardous when pursued on a regular basis. Quite a dilemma, because those are among the reasons many of us came here and will stay here, declining dollar be damned.
Some of us came to Costa Rica to live, and some of us came to Costa Rica to die. I have always counted myself in the former group. When I chose to move here in my early thirties, a better and longer life were my goals. I have no doubt that had I stayed with my limited-upward-mobility phone company job in a northern climate, where I would fatten up like a prize hog during the frozen winter months, eating and drinking my misery away, I would likely not be here to write this.
From my first college winter break trip to Fort Lauderdale in the 1970s, when in 24 hours I drove from a frozen-over Lake Erie to sunny, balmy South Florida, I knew there was no good reason for me to live where it ever got cold. A bit over a decade later, I was in Costa Rica.
Year-round warm weather, friendly locals, fresh food options, a longer life expectancy than my home country, what is not to like? Yesterday I hiked the local hills. Today I might take a bike ride. Or go to the gym. Or swim in the ocean. My own way of not only delaying the inevitable, but keeping myself strong in the meantime.
Someday I will be buried on my property in an egg-shaped pod and serve as fertilizer for a tree growing above. I have already left specific written instructions. For me, Costa Rica has always been a great place to live, and it will be as good a place as any to die.
Read more of Don Mateo’s writing from his newly published ebook.
