It was one of those oppressive August evenings on the East Coast by the shore, the kind where the heat doesn’t just surround you—it presses down with the density of an invisible tide. The humidity had turned the air into a damp shroud, making every movement feel labored and every breath a deliberate, practiced effort.
After returning home from a full day at the office, fighting rush-hour traffic on the way home and going for my usual evening run, that evening in the ninety-degree heat, I pushed through the stagnant, salty atmosphere, determined to press on through to my weekly Friday evening landscaping tasks and start the weekend free of chores.
After a brief cool down and a bottle of cold Poland Spring, I marshaled my weary body to the garage, rolled out the mower and began trimming the front lawn, then the back. The smell of freshly cut grass mingled with the briny dampness of the evening. Then, with what little reserve I had left, I turned toward a twenty-foot stretch of overgrown shrubbery along the side of the garage.
These were nasty bushes, covered in thorny, needle-like barbs that scratched at me whenever I brushed past them. That evening, deciding they had to go, I spent hours dredging them up by the roots, dragging the thorny limbs and leaves into several garbage cans until I was well past the point of physical exertion.
The Inexplicable Energy Source
Looking back now, more than thirty years later, there seems to have been something frenetic, nearly frantic about my physical stamina in the hot, humid air that evening. It was as if I were exerting every ounce of my own life force at the exact moment his was wrested away from him.
I should have been far beyond the point of sheer exhaustion by 9:00 pm that evening, yet some strange energy source was surging through me, pushing me to keep pulling those thorny bushes from the ground long after my body should have given out. It almost felt as though there was a kind of energetic transference that had worked its way into me.
At the time, I had no way of knowing where all that frenetic energy was coming from. But in retrospect, I sometimes wonder if something inside me sensed that the world had already tilted on its axis, and that I needed to exhaust myself to dampen a feeling I was unaware of at the time, a foreshadowing of something that had already befallen three thousand miles away.
By the time I collapsed onto the sofa to the dull drone and flickering light of the television, I was completely spent, and fell into a deep, heavy sleep, blissfully unaware that the world I would awaken to had already irrevocably changed.
The Call in the Night
Having slept through the first three times the phone bellowed in the early morning hours, I eventually awakened to its ring. Fumbling for the receiver, my mind was thick with sleep. Half dazed, I wondered who could be calling at this dark hour. Then the words struck, “I didn’t want to leave a message like this. I’ve been trying to reach you with some solemn news from our sister-in-law.”
In the span of a heartbeat, my mind raced through two distinct possibilities. I though of my eighteen-month-old nephew, and then of his father, my older brother, during a brief vacuum of silence, knowing the outcome would be devastating. Then, when the silence was broken and the words finally struck, the air vanished from the room, my lungs, and every cell in my body.
The shock was not just emotional. It was physiological. My diaphragm seized. The oxygen in my lungs felt as though it had been replaced with lead. I dropped to the floor in my bedroom, clutching the phone in one hand and my chest with the other, my body folding inward as if trying to protect a heart that had just been shattered.
It was the first loss of a two-legged family member I had ever experienced, and it came completely unexpected. My older brother, just forty-five, had simply stepped away from his desk for a coffee break and never returned. Sitting in the dark, gasping for air, I tried to recover from the mighty gut punch.
The Time Capsule in November
In the days that followed, I flew to the West Coast with the rest of my family. The funeral passed in a blur of activities and rituals that accompany sudden loss and grief. But the full weight of my brother’s absence didn’t settle on me until months later, during a trip I took with my mother to initiate a medical malpractice case on behalf of my brother’s wife and my nephew. (My brother had visited his doctor six times in a three-month span complaining of chest pains with no cardiac testing having been performed.)
Over the Thanksgiving holiday later that year, my mother and I returned to brother’s apartment to visit my sister-in-law and initiate a medical malpractice suit on behalf of her and my brother’s eighteen-month-old son. (My brother’s health had fallen through the cracks despite a series of repeated visits to his doctor with a complaint of chest pains he had been experiencing for months.) Walking into the apartment for the first time since his memorial service felt like stepping into a time capsule. Everything seemed frozen in time since that early August day.
I moved slowly through my brother’s home office, a space that was suspended somewhere between the memory of his presence and the presence of his absence. His desk was as he had left it: his computer, business cards pinned across the cork bulletin board, the Rolodex resting on the corner of the desk, his appointment book still open and filled with notes. As I looked around the room I remained composed, measured, dignified, studying the objects around me with a kind of emotional distance, keeping my shield and armor firmly in place.
The Architecture of Absence
And then I saw them.
In the corner of the room sat a pair of brown leather shoes, as if they had simply been kicked off at the end of an ordinary day. They were still laced, waiting, it seemed, to be stepped into for another day that would never come: size eight and a half, worn, textured, creased. The edges of the soles had softened with use, and the leather carried the familiar wrinkles formed by the way he stood, the way he walked, the way he carried his weight through the world. And just in that instant, at the sight of them, my shield disintegrated.
Those empty shoes held the ghost of my brother’s presence: his quiet, protective presence. I could still see him standing there in that pair of shoes, his head cocked slightly to one side, a wry smile forming as he delivered one of his understated quips that carried more humor to it than he let on. I could feel his natural kindness, the kind that revealed itself in small, unannounced gestures. I could sense his wit, sharp, quick but never cruel, and his quiet reluctance to conform simply because the world expected it. All of his essence was so deeply ingrained in that empty pair of shoes.
Seeing the imprint of his two feet in that leather felt more intimate and more painful than any photograph or eulogy could be. The hollow leather shells that carried the memory of his footsteps, while proclaiming the presence of his absence in that quiet room etched into me a physical ache than ran through my entire body.
The Eternal Emptiness Etched In a Pair of Shoes
More than thirty years have passed, yet I can still see the empty pair of shoes in the corner of that room exactly as they were that day. They remained there motionless, and as I looked down at them I was overcome with a flood of tears and quivers. It wasn’t the shoes themselves that broke me, but their emptiness because my brother was no longer here to step into them and stride forward alongside me.
In that quiet moment I understood something grave about loss. When someone leaves this world, they leave behind a void that lingers—a hollow space in our lives where they once walked beside us. Sometimes loss is experienced most clearly in the tangible things that are left behind, a pair of shoes waiting starkly for the one person who will never step into them again.
