Ode to My Husband’s Feet
I wish I had taken a picture of his feet. Though I can still see them in my mind’s eye. The unusually high arches. The envy of any ballerina. The way they curved almost forming a heart in the space between heels and toes, both feet mirroring one another, his legs twisting outwards from relaxed hip as his body rest prone on the hospital bed. I wish I had taken more care to caress his feet, run my finger down the inside of those staggering arches, pressed my thumbs into the highest reaches, run my warm hands against the cooling toes, held them like a tether to earth.
Please don’t fly away.
Please stay here.
Please, please don’t leave.
It’s easy to think after the fact what you would have done if only you were thinking clearly. I dressed his feet in dull brown cotton socks. I didn’t put on the pretty ones I got him in Vermont, the Solmate socks, all green and blue brightness, each sock knit in mismatched yet perfectly aligned splendor. Why didn’t I dress him in those socks? He could have gone out in style. What better metaphor than to have sent his body for cremation dressed in soul mate socks?
Here, I give you up to the fire.
Here, I send off your spirit dressed in my love.
The dull brown socks were sufficient. They did the job. As though I were trying to keep his feet warm. Which is silly because for one thing, he no longer could distinguish between warm and cold, and for another he spent a huge portion of his life barefoot—running through the soft redwood groves of La Honda in the Santa Cruz mountains, roaming the dry dusty land of his uncle’s Colorado wheat farm, evading rattlesnakes in the grass of the northern California hills where he lived in a geodesic dome along a creek.
Once, in high school, the vice principal stopped him in the halls.
“Where are your shoes?” said the man.
“At home,” he answered.
“Come on, let’s go.”
The vice principal drove Steve home and waited in the car as he retrieved his shoes. Steve returned, looking as respectable as a long-haired hippie in bell bottom jeans could at the threshold between the 60s and 70s, with feet dressed what appeared to be appropriately. The vice principal might have felt satisfaction at righting a wrong, enforcing the rules, achieving a level of compliance from a willful and free-spirited teenager. What the vice principal didn’t know was that previously Steve had cut the soles out of his shoes so he could always feel his feet touching the earth.
The brown socks were difficult to slide onto his cool and stiffening feet especially because of his high arches. Dancer’s feet. And yet he was always too self-conscious to dance in public. He’d reserve his dancing to quick frenzied bouts that would erupt in the kitchen or living room, which is really the same room, like a jester whose sole purpose is to entertain. He’d jerk his arms and legs at odd angles, bouncing and hopping from one foot to the other, striking ridiculous poses, a goofy expression on his face, and I’d laugh and I’d laugh and I’d laugh, my laughter fueling his rhythms. And then, almost as suddenly as he began, he would stop, his intention complete in bringing joy.
After he was dressed in black sweatpants for comfort and the t-shirt I got him for our 30th anniversary—a maroon batik with a silkscreened hummingbird seeking nectar from a sunflower—I studied the feet that had carried him through sixty-five years.
Let me remember the curve of these feet.
Let me never forget those glorious high arches.
Sacred
You asked me what I wanted to do with your body. It was a discussion we had to have, and you brought it up like a business transaction, fit in between your naps and other people coming and going for visits. Time was moving so fast yet it also stood still. But there was no time, not enough time, give us more time, you were nearly out of time. And then with your parting, time transformed. It became altogether something else. A mutant creature with wings and a sharp beak, something elusive yet biting, clipping me on the shoulder or neck, the top of my head, the back of my calf. Time is sacred but people don’t realize it because it is abstract. You can’t pin it down. You can’t capture it. You can’t hold it cupped in your closed hands the way you would a frog.
You said, “What do you want to do with my body?” I said, “Have you cremated.” You said, “Okay, that’s fine, once I drop my body, it won’t matter to me.” As though dying is as simple as setting the groceries down on the kitchen counter. You expressed a total lack of attachment. Even though for years you always said, “I want to be buried in the ground, no box, I want to become earthworm food.” I mentioned this, but you realized such a request would only make the afterword harder on me. It would require permits and more time. I needed more time with you, not to spend more time making arrangements for how I would dispose of your body, the thing you would vacate and leave behind like a cicada shell.
Now you sit in a box on the shelf. I have no urn for your cremains. Just a simple black box, and inside the box a heavy duty plastic bag and inside the bag ash and bone fragments, heavy.
You sat on the shelf for the last two years untouched. But on the third anniversary of your death, I picked you up, astounded once again at the heft, the looks of which are deceiving. That was what impressed me so when I first accepted your cremains into my arms, how heavy you felt. Certainly not as heavy as when you were in a body, but there was something about the size of the box and the weight of it that didn’t match in my mind’s expectation. For I had never held a box of cremains before. I had nothing in which to compare, no point of reference.
I carried you around that first year, taking you to the coast on our wedding anniversary and again on the anniversary of your death, strapping you into the passenger seat with a seatbelt and then setting you upon an altar with candles and photos. When I picked you off the shelf this time, the box was dusty, so I wiped it down with a damp cloth and carried you into the sunshine and sat in a folding chair in the yard, looking up at the garden and the evergreen trees, the ridge and pearlescent sky. I held you in my lap, all the while knowing how it might look to an outsider, a crazy woman, crazy with grief, talking to no one, a black box steady in her hands.
I opened the box, then opened the bag. I took the bag out of the box so I could really see into it, your shards, your powdery ash that could so easily float away in a gust of wind. I said, “Doesn’t the sunshine feel good? You always loved the sunshine.” I think that’s what must have been hardest for you in leaving this earthly realm—besides leaving our girls and grandson—leaving the natural world, this cathedral of beauty, the most sacred of sacredness. We sat there awhile, you and I, and eventually I squeezed the bag with my two hands so as to mold you back into the box, for out of the constraints of its four walls, your cremains spread like castles made of sand that collapse. I packed you in and set the box back on the shelf, and there you remain. I suppose you will gather dust once again. But isn’t that appropriate? Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. One day I will release you, send you into water, watch your bone shards disappear to the bottom of the riverbed, becoming one with the rocks and fish that nibble my toes, your ash carried downstream, tiny particles of DNA heading to the sea, diluted into nothingness, into the vast everything.
Laura, this is just lovely
Thank you, Linda. Much appreciated.