Illustration by Rachel Wada
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Mom died just as the bitter cold was taking hold – one of the early nights of the vigil at her bedside was a snowy one. I remember cursing that the winter had arrived to make the driving treacherous. I remember wishing the sun would come out and shine into the window of her hospital room and, later, of the room in the home where she and my father lived for the last two years of their lives and where she died.
By now, three years later, most of her beautiful things have been dispersed. She always loved clothes and had spoken often about buying treasured things for herself when she was just a girl. For her last birthday, I gave her a fuchsia scarf and in the photos of that day, she grips it like it was a treasure. A week after her birthday, it was gone and, soon after that, it was forgotten. No matter, I think. No matter – there was that moment of joy.
I still have Mom’s shoes, though, the ones she was wearing when they took her to the hospital for the last time. They look new: She hardly walked in the last two years of her life. We’ll never know for sure why she took to a wheelchair. We know she had a terror of falling and that her wonky heart made her feel weak. Perhaps she was just plain tired. One day in her last year, when I visited, I came upon her in the line-up of people in wheelchairs, waiting for the elevator to carry her back up to her second-floor room. Lunch had just finished and Dad was already in his room, resting for the afternoon. He lived on a lower floor because he needed heavy care. That afternoon, she was weeping, quietly, folded into her small wheelchair. She didn’t know I was coming, so it was an unguarded moment. She lit up when she saw me. I never knew what she was crying about and I didn’t want to press.
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The shoes are heavy and black with a Velcro strap and a little bit of decoration so that the catalogue could call them “Mary Janes.” They are sturdy and stable, for a woman who was unsure of her steps. In them, Mom felt safe. For years before she had worn clogs, but, in time, those were not a good choice for an unsteady elder. When she first moved to the home, she slept with those shoes on and no one challenged her. In them, she felt steadier when she woke up to make her way to the bathroom or to walk to her corner armchair and talk on the phone to her sister in Ottawa, to my sister in the Yukon or to me. She wanted news, she loved politics, she relished jokes.
As her physical health faltered, Mom moved less and less. She came to love her room with all its beautiful things and the view out the window. Her last words to me were, “I love my pretty room. I am glad to be home.”
Shortly after she died, I opened the personal belongings bag from the hospital. I could hardly bear it. The day she went to the hospital, she was wearing her comfortable grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt and a fantastic blue vest that she bought years ago from a knitting store. I found her socks tucked into the toes of her shoes. One sock was polka dotted and the other had light stripes, but both were grey so they suited one another. I did not lift the clothes to smell them. I knew her smell on them was hidden by the heavy perfume of the detergent used at the home. I washed them and put them in the bag for donation.
But I kept the shoes. I wanted to make something meaningful from them, to lift them higher than the final story of a frail elder. I thought I might cover them with flowers or photos from the past or bright coloured paint. I dreamt of decorating them with maps. During my many sleepless nights this past pandemic summer, I made moulds of the shoes from papier-mâché. Immersed in the clutter of my office, I tore strips of newspaper and pasted them in layers onto those black shoes. My partner, James, and Donkey, our pup, slept while I made those moulds. Ghosts of my parents sat in the corner, watching me.
I am not, alas, a sculptor. I am a wordsmith, a teller of tales. These past few months, the moulds collected dust in my office and the shoes rested on my table, useless to anyone.
So, James and Donkey and I went to the arboretum. I brought the shoe moulds with me and tucked them at the base of trees: a magnificent birch tree that my father would have loved; a tall, old pine tree that my mother would have been amazed by; a maple tree that will turn red again next fall. I will return once in a while to watch what happens to them as the newspaper and glue break down, as the wind carries them away or squirrels burrow into them.
I have donated the shoes themselves to the charity shop. I hope they are Mercury’s wings to the next owner. I hope they will stride the wide world.
Linda E. Clarke lives in Guelph, Ont.