Without You On Earth

We will carry your memory here, until we join you. In just a little while, in one blink of a star time.

“But I’ve walked so many places in those shoes,” five-year-old Jay said.

“Do I have to get rid of them?”

“Aren’t they too small for you?” I asked.

Jay shrugged, and then he hobbled towards me. “I can still fit into them, only I can’t stretch out my toes.”

Jay was a little boy who never wanted to part with his outgrown shoes.

“What about the pair you outgrew last summer, can we toss those out?”

“Mom!” Jay blinked up; his eyes were watery pools. He sat motionless for several moments, staring into his lap. I lifted him onto my knee, studied the gold flecks glittering in his tense dark eyes.

“OK, you can keep them.” I agreed, and I scraped off some strawberry jam that had dried like a brilliant cut ruby on the toe of his shoe.

In time, Jay began collecting rare coins. His hobby interest in old vintage cars developed, and he stopped saving his outgrown shoes. Yet the shoes of my son’s life are a scrapbook in my mind: the light blue rubber baby shoes he arrived from Korea wearing, a first-grader with brand new school shoes, kicking them off to cuddle with me as I read to him. The boy with suntanned legs who fished mountain streams wearing knee-high rubber boots, the sleepy child who wrapped his arms around my neck, feet dangling.

And the new pair of tennis shoes Jay wore to South Korea and then six months later walked out of the hospital wearing on March 10, 1999, to face a Hospice death at home, at age fifteen, days before his body wore out from cancer.

The night before he died, Jay loosened the laces and kicked his shoes off at the foot of his bed for the last time. Now those shoes stay in the closet and comfort me in long nights of remembering. I pick them up and press my hand into the place where my son’s feet once stood. I stand quietly and remember waking him up in the morning and starting the day, sitting at the kitchen table together, cups of cocoa in hand, Jay’s foot kicking the table leg while he told me about his latest favorite book. There were difficult moments too. Those shoes witnessed arguments and angry outbursts, but mostly they were surrounded by love and caring.

Years pass and still I keep Jay’s shoes. Older grief is softer. It’s about piercing pain channeled, reshaped and rounded into tender grace. I hold Jay’s shoe and feel him smiling at me, running barefoot in my heart.

Jay 1983—1999

In just a little while, in one blink of a star time by Joy Harjo

This is the first morning we are without you on earth.
The sun greeted us after a week of rain
In your eastern green and mountain homelands.
Plants are fed, the river restored, and you
have been woven
Into a path of embracing stars of all colors
Now free of the suffering that shapes us
here
We all learn to let go, like learning how to
walk
When we first arrive here.
All those you thought you lost now circle
you
And you are free of pain and heartbreak.
Don’t look back, keep going.
We will carry your memory here, until we
join you.
In just a little while, in one blink of a star time.

—Joy Harjo
An American Sunrise: Poems

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Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press), and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother’s Story (KAAN). Her essays appear widely in anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), and Mixed Roots: Writers on Multiracial Identity & Both/And Belonging (Beacon Press). Terra is the granddaughter of Oklahoma sharecroppers. She was raised in Southeast Los Angeles with roots in Compton, California. Of mixed descent including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape.