Red-rimmed trainers

I wrote this piece not long after my husband died.
Hard to believe, tomorrow it will be 10 years.

I walk in your shoes
The red-rimmed trainers we bought for rehab.
Your physio noticed and smiled.
Your doctor too.
Not the shoes you’d expect an 80-year-old to choose.
And maybe you didn’t.
But comfort comes before style
When a body’s been through hell.

Four years on they’re still like new
You were always easy on clothes, shoes
And people. You wore them all lightly,
Your presence never heavy.
I loved his feet, your ex once said,
The most beautiful feet of any man I knew.
The toes curled up in conversations
Of which there once were so many.

The children came and helped clean out
The cupboards just days afterwards.
Perhaps too soon, but later it would
Have been too hard to discard
All the folds of a long and lazy ending.
A grandson adopted your wardrobe
And when I hug his six-foot frame
I have your shirt in my arms again.

It takes my breath away to see you
Standing there in him
As if you don’t want to leave us
Any more than we wanted you to go.

But you did want to go.
Die, die, the only words
You could sometimes find
And then, soon after, sorry, sorry.
Still trying with what little you had left
Not to give pain, or make a fuss.
So we let you go and a whiff of smoke
Rose up into the blue Noosa sky

And now I wear your shoes
Our feet, like our minds, the same size.
A joke,when different coloured slip-ons
Were how we knew whose feet wore what.
Now only my feet are left
To slip on the red-rimmed trainers.
And I’m walking again with you
My body in step with yours forever.