The Shoe
I know how she died.
Her family relayed the details. Witnesses gave me statements.
I’ve been to the scene, read the official report, browsed the news accounts.
And now, I’m reading the coroner’s report. The days these papers skid across my desk are the ones I’d rather not show up for work. I’d like to tuck the report between the manila folds without a glance and just say it contained no helpful information.
I know already it will say the cause of death was blunt force trauma. But this case is a puzzle, and hidden in the cold clinical detail of the autopsy is a tiny missing piece I cannot find without reading every sterile page. I shield my eyes as I read how the body was opened in the usual manner, note that various body parts were without abnormality. I stare at the wall, pretending not to look as I invade a private place, add indignity to injustice with the clumsy pencil pushing of my trade.
I find what I’m looking for. It’s what’s not there, really, that I needed to find. But I stumble on the way out, as though knocking stainless steel instruments to the floor in a clanging din that threatens to stop my own heart.
It’s the inventory that paralyzes me. A punch card of descriptors, itemizing the color of her hair and eyes, documenting her length and weight.
I know what she had in her purse. How many bills. How much change. The lipstick, the credit cards, the family photos.
I know how she was dressed. The sweatshirt, the t-shirt, the long sleeved shirt underneath. The socks. The undergarments. And the one brown slip-on shoe.
The brown shoe. Just one.
This woman I never knew, whose post mortem details are spread in black and white in front of me, who dressed in comfortable cotton layers as I am known to do, is missing a shoe.
Though it has nothing to do with the question I need to answer before I can stamp a bright red CLOSED on the outside of a file, the missing shoe haunts me. How did it come off? Where does it rest? Should I have seen it somewhere along the way? But what difference does it make?
Really. What difference does it make?
Mortality has shown her face too near my windows lately. Too close and too often, leaving me to hold a solitary brown shoe in want of a bigger story. The end of life does not come down to this — it is not reduced to the sanitized accounting of pockets and the color of socks.
I know it isn’t. But all the same. For God’s sake, somebody, find that other brown shoe.
::
wow. what a story and such sensitivity to a difficult job and task. Now I will be thinking of a brown shoe today and wonder what happened in the process before death.
2012/01/24 at 10:39 AM
Sharon, thank you for your thoughts here. For your sake, I hope you can shake the picture of the shoe sooner than I. It’s been haunting me for quite a while now. But it seems it’s in these seemingly small details that we really stop and see.
2012/01/24 at 11:32 AM
Heavens! What a touching and perceptive blog piece – a million miles from the CSI scriptwriter’s fantasies. This a real story, a real death. I will ponder the shoe all day.
2012/01/24 at 10:45 AM
Oh, Lyla. I have no words here. Not. One. This has stilled, stunned me.
2012/01/24 at 10:48 AM
Love, Sandy.
2012/01/24 at 11:32 AM
Lyla,
Wow.. .. you paint quite the picture here. Over 15 years ago I used to help run a 1-Hour photo lab. Most days I loved the job…others not so much. We were the lab that helped the police department develop pictures taken at a crime scene and sometimes autopsies. Looking at the pictures and wondering what happened to some of these lost innocent people really stayed with me for a long long time.
Your words: The end of life does not come down to this — it is not reduced to the sanitized accounting of pockets and the color of socks.
I need to remind myself of this almost daily.
Thank you.
2012/01/24 at 10:49 AM
It’s a lot like that, Julie. Not every day, you know? Most days it’s smaller, hard to remember it’s not inconsequential by contrast. But the days it blows up big like this, you wonder about the lives. We keep on living, and others around us are grieving. Or we’re grieving, and everyone else goes on living like nothing happened. It’s good, I think, to stop and look at it once in a while, even if it’s not in my back yard. I’m rambling. I hope that made sense.
2012/01/24 at 11:35 AM
It makes perfect sense. I thought it was just me…and that I was weird. I am glad to see I am not the only one….
2012/01/25 at 9:40 AM
Oh, what a difficult reality. Life is full of tragedy we’d rather ignore, but sometimes we can’t. We can only stay focused on Jesus who offers life in the face of death.
2012/01/24 at 10:52 AM
How true that is, Solveig. Sometimes we just can’t. It’s good to see you.
2012/01/24 at 11:35 AM
Popping in here to thank you for your willingness to share such a delicate moment, Lyla. This is an important story to share, and I think each of us can find ourselves in the middle of the story, as we consider our own mortality. We feel it every time we stand at the edge of a casket. I do anyway …
I’m also grateful that God has put this calling on your life. You do more than push the pencil around. You have a deep sensitivity for the lives behind the cold facts.
Thank you, Lyla.
2012/01/24 at 11:09 AM
Thank you, my friend, for your encouraging words. Like gold, to me.
Pushing a pencil can feel pretty ineffective some days, even meaningless. It’s good to be reminded sometimes that there’s a lot in the balance.
2012/01/24 at 11:36 AM
I thought I was reading a crime novel — but you didnt make the story up. When you deal with tragedy — as you do and nurses and EMTS and others — the stories can numb you, or make you more sensitive to mortality.
You will always wonder about the missing shoes.
2012/01/24 at 11:24 AM
I will, David! I will always wonder. Some things just stay with you. And I think you’ve hit something there — we can go numb or we can let it touch us. It’s a hard but better choice, I think.
2012/01/24 at 11:38 AM
Infinitely better. As C.S. Lewis said, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
A Facebook friend suggested your blog…and I’m so glad she did. Thank you so much for your writing. Truly beautiful.
2012/01/24 at 9:46 PM
I can’t tell you how much I love and identify with this piece, Lyla.
Weeks of sifting through a lifetime of photos and memorablia and jewelry and clothes and old Christmas cards and boxes long since forgotten leads me back, once again, to knowing the strange truth that while life seems infinitely futile, it is at the same time infinitely purposeful.
Strange. From cradle to grave, life is strange.
2012/01/24 at 11:36 AM
Strange. Oh, yeah. Do you think, if we didn’t have the stuff in those boxes to absorb and bear our memories, we would forget most of it? Sometimes I wonder.
2012/01/24 at 11:41 AM
Somehow I pictured you, in your line of work, dealing with cold, hard things like property loss and insurance checks. This just floored me. I think you’ve born witness well to this woman’s human-ness, to the reality of her image bearing.
I’m kind of odd, I guess, because I grieve over things like missing shoes. When I see a shoe, an item of clothing, or even a child’s toy discarded along the road somewhere I often think about it having a back story. At some point, the item was brand new, perhaps given as a gift to parents of a newborn. I like to imagine there was joy connected in some way with the things I now see discarded and lying, dirty, alongside the road. And that breaks my heart.
But I’m weird that way.
2012/01/24 at 11:49 AM
Nancy, your perception is correct — I do that too. I deal in stuff, which is easier to talk about (in fact, you can see the opposite kind of writing about my work with a frozen hot tub on L.L.’s facebook page). But I also deal in injury and occasionally death. I was talking with a friend just this morning about how the daily contrast between those realms — and giving them each their due respect and attention — can be a bit crazy-making for me.
I get you on the discarded pieces. They didn’t grow there from seeds. They belong to someone, somewhere. And some of them are really missing those things.
2012/01/24 at 11:54 AM
Crying now. That shoe is everything.
2012/01/24 at 12:19 PM
Megan, love you.
2012/01/25 at 12:14 AM
She may not have a face, for me, but you have given her humanity, with one missing shoe. Thank you.
2012/01/24 at 1:57 PM
Thank you, Melissa. I’ve not seen her face either. But I imagine I know what she looks like. A lot like the rest of us, I think.
2012/01/25 at 12:14 AM
Lyla, after reading my story today both Jennifer and Nancy suggested I come to your place and read yours. This piece was like reading a novel. Wow, how you drew me in. And the shoe, its what links us today. Just wonderful writing. I want to be like you when I grow up!
2012/01/24 at 4:51 PM
Oh, Shelly… I read it. The shoe. Oh, my.
Folks, check this out: http://redemptionsbeauty.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/tell-your-story-it-just-might-change-someone/
2012/01/25 at 12:13 AM
Two words come to mind while reading this, Lyla: Closure and Redemption.
The way you offered ‘humanness’ to the papers in the file – which then brought to life the person whose last moments you were sifting through – demands of me closure.
But that missing shoe will – until its found – keep the door open to the very notion of closure.
How many times do I seek closure, seek redemption? Unnecessary intensity (read: Too loud of voice) when dealing with my kids or wife. Wrestling with things on my calendar that bring life to others but drain me. Seeing arms folded across a person’s chest as I preach and I judge them. Convicted but still choosing to sin
I’ve been through each of these scenarios too many times. I want closure from the guilt, the human nature that is so unlike my Savior’s, the need to once more own up to my puffed-up chest as I look at the cross.
I will always have this need to experience redemption. Until my last-breath day, I will need to be redeemed.
And the redemption I need is the closure Christ brings.
My sin always keeps the door open to my guilt. You – and that shoe – reminded me today that my Redeemer offers the closure of forgiveness.
2012/01/24 at 5:44 PM
Dave, tying the two together here, redemption and closure, I’m not sure I’ve looked at it that way but I so appreciate what you’ve drawn out. My problem with closure is that it only feels like I have it when I get the last word on a matter. But redemption? That calls for Someone else’s final, best word.
2012/01/25 at 12:12 AM
Lyla – the detail, the foreshadowing, the tension building. Isn’t this what it means to be mortal? I love this so much, have felt a similar sting of mortality recently, and just can’t believe how much I love your writing!
2012/01/24 at 8:50 PM
I wonder sometimes what it would take for us to be really, really comfortable with being mortal, not trying to crush the head of our humanity. Even at my age I still somehow think I’m beyond it. And then I live in these stories and I know I’m not so different and not at all immortal.
2012/01/25 at 12:11 AM
This is so “you” Lyla. We, each of us, want to know that we are valued – every little bit of us. How we long to know that the details of our lives are important – even the simple things that seem to have no great significance.
You have such a heart – longing to do exactly that for this dear woman. I can’t help but think it is exactly what the Father gives us – this absolute attention to everything about us. It is a gift.
2012/01/24 at 9:38 PM
Oh, LInda, isn’t that it? It’s a lot about being known. The details do that, when someone notices them.
2012/01/25 at 12:09 AM
I will defer to LInda’s comment. And the others.
It’s a soul piercing write Lyla.
Peace be with you in all your daily.
2012/01/24 at 11:20 PM
Thank you, Deb.
(Present comment or not, I find it wise to defer to Linda often — she speaks good truth well.)
2012/01/25 at 12:08 AM
Oh Lyla,
I am so deeply moved by your description of this experience. Like Nancy, I have only ever thought of water damage, natural disasters and deductibles… but this, I had no idea. It is the simplest thing that grabs hold of our attention, isn’t it? For me, in my work place, death happens every day and it’s the hair brush that always gets me… knowing he knows every hair. I have come to expect death and often wonder at the thought of my own papers passing across someone’s desk. You give such blessed dignity to this woman in your thoughts and pausing long enough to know you were holding intimate details of her life…. you give her respect…. something she may not have known. As I read this, I could not help but think of Cinderella. Please don’t think me trite… I pray the Prince of Peace meets her with that shoe.
2012/01/25 at 12:35 AM
Whoosh. The air is gone out of me. Reads like fine, fine detective fiction…but it so is NOT. So.Much.Here. Thanks you for this texture, this contextualization of our common humanity, our mortality. Wonderfully thoughtful, respectful, yes…contemplative. Thank you.
2012/01/25 at 1:30 AM
Oh, my. The heaviness of this telling grips. It’s always the little things…these are the things that remind us of our humanity. Wherever the shoe is, however it was lost, you give this space–this reverence–to a life once breathing with God’s image and your tenderness just honors.
2012/01/25 at 8:12 PM
We are the sum of those small details–shoes, purse contents, and all. This is gripping.
2012/01/26 at 12:43 AM
I’ve read this … many times … on different days. And still I’m stunned with the reality of your words.
2012/01/26 at 2:35 PM
one shoe lost, but not both.
only one shoe missing.
i see baby’s shoes fall off very easily.
so many times i came home with one of my small girls, and there would be only one sock on her tiny foot and the other sock was nowhere to be found.
the socks were worse than the shoes.
they are very bad at getting lost.
my youngest one would come home from school without her jacket quite often one year, and it was the same jacket (actually a zip-up sweatshirt) that was lost every time. her favorite. and i would tell her that her jacket was misbehaving by running away like that and that we would have to go and look in the lost and found. we always found it, and then she grew out of it. it was the most naughty jacket she has ever had.
2012/01/27 at 12:19 AM
Haunting…
2012/01/27 at 10:25 AM
It shows your compassion and humanity.
2012/02/06 at 7:11 PM