I had a wonderful hike this weekend with P&K. Their joyful talk about remembering each other’s hiking shoes through the years of marriage prompted me to remember about my ex’s, Kate the Greenhouse, father, and his boots.
He was dying of a brain tumor and I didn’t know how to deal with it, what I should do and how to conduct myself. I was not human enough to neither relate nor participate to the degree the situation was inviting. I had my troubles of the youth and dying man in his fifties, whom I barely knew, was not the biggest one of them. I want to say “I could barely fathom what he was going through”, but that would not be true to my past self: to say that I would need to have tried, but I don’t remember making serious attempts. What I remember is distancing myself from this trouble, for whatever reason I found to be viable.
He was fading fast, but not momentarily. It took a few months between losing the ability for coherent speech to not being able to move at all, not a little walk, not turning oneself on the bed.
His eyes though, were telling and alive, sparkling throughout all these months. He smiled, too. He had one of these uneven smiles that you see in cowboy movies where one side of the mouth smiles to the fullest, while the other allows itself only a glimpse of it. This smile let everybody know that this is a controlled joy to last just a few moments, to be treasured as a rarity. While dying, he was smiling plenty, with his eyes watering, as it was one of little ways of communication he was left with.
When he was done suffering and funerals were through, to which I haven’t participated, even though being in a relationship with his daughter for some years now, his wife, and Kate insisted that I take his hiking shoes. They were really good and sturdy, probably expensive too, never worn: he hadn’t found an occasion before the sickness took him captive. Each shoe weighted like a brick, one of those that makes the owner feel like an all-terrain mammal, never to be worn without significance, profoundly transformative to the personality.
I had some hikes with them, and the feeling of wearing dead man’s shoes never left me. It was almost superstitious, like his spirit is after me while I have them on my feet, and I must not wrong him in any way, or shoes will betray me. I don’t have these shoes now and my memory fails to report what happened to them. I probably never took them with me in between moving countries: having to reduce my life to 23kg on multiple occasions shaved off a lot of artifacts.
Those were the best hiking footwear I’ve ever had. And now, having to buy a new pair, wearing it, I know I will compare it to those, the best ones. I will be returning to the moment of my life where I didn’t know how to be human enough to fit and maybe help, looking back, measuring the trek behind, wearing the dead man’s shoes I no longer possess.