Some of us hold on to the belongings of those we have lost as if letting go of the object means letting go of the person. This Sabbath story is about a widower, a pair of rubber boots, and the surprising discovery that love is sometimes best honored not by keeping things, but by giving them away.
“He had kept the boots to remember her. It had never occurred to him that she would have wanted them on someone’s feet.”
By Raffy Castillo
For three years, the boots stood beside the front door. Green rubber, knee-high, slightly faded at the toes. Size seven. They belonged to Elena.
She had bought them the year the floods reached their street for the first time. Ernesto had teased her about it. “We’re not farmers,” he had said. She had laughed and worn them anyway, out into the water to check on the old woman two houses down, then on the family across the street with the new baby.
Every time it flooded after that, the boots went out. And every time, Elena came home with news of who needed rice, who needed a ride to the clinic, whose roof was leaking.
When she died, Ernesto gave away most of her clothes. Her sisters took her jewelry. Her books went to the parish library. But he could not bring himself to move the boots.
The Shrine No One Called a Shrine
He never thought of it as a shrine. He simply left them where they were.
Visitors noticed, of course. His daughter once offered to put them in the storeroom. He said no, more sharply than he meant to.
Sometimes, coming home in the evening, he would see them first before anything else in the house. For a moment, it would feel as if she were just in the other room. Then the moment would pass, and the house would be quiet again.
He told himself the boots were a comfort. Most days, he believed it.
The Boy at the Gate
This August, the floods came again, worse than in years.
On the third day, Ernesto noticed a delivery rider at the gate of the house next door. The boy couldn’t have been older than twenty. He was wading through water up to his shins, wearing rubber slippers, a parcel held high over his head.
Ernesto watched him for a long moment. He saw the boy wince as he stepped on something under the water. He saw him check his foot, shake it, and keep going.
He had read the news. He knew about the leptospirosis cases, the hospitals filling up.
He looked at the boots by the door.
The Argument He Had With Himself
He did not move right away.
They’re hers, he thought. They’re the last thing that’s still hers.
And then, unbidden, he heard her voice, as clearly as if she were standing beside him. Not words, exactly. Just the laugh she used when he was being stubborn about something that didn’t matter.
What did Elena ever do with those boots? She walked into floods for other people. That was the whole point of them.
He had kept the boots to remember her. It had never occurred to him that she would have wanted them on someone’s feet.
The Gift
He opened the door and called out to the boy. “Anak, wait.”
The rider turned, puzzled. Ernesto held out the boots.
“These might be a little small,” he said. “But they’re better than slippers.”
The boy hesitated. “Sir, kanino po ‘yan?”
Ernesto paused. “They belonged to my wife. She’d want you to have them.”
The boy pulled them on right there at the gate. They were tight, but they fit. He thanked Ernesto twice, then a third time, and waded off with his parcel.
Ernesto stood at the door and watched him go. The spot where the boots had been looked strangely bare.
He waited for the grief to come. It didn’t come the way he expected. What came instead was something quieter, almost like relief.
The Sabbath Morning
That Saturday, the water had receded. Ernesto went to church early and sat near the back, the way he and Elena used to.
The reading that morning was from Matthew: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
He had heard it a hundred times. He had always thought of it as a warning about money.
That morning, it sounded different. He had been treating a pair of boots as a treasure, as if Elena’s love lived inside them. But her love had never been in things. It had been in what she did with them — the rice she carried, the neighbors she checked on, the floods she walked into for other people.
The boots had not been her treasure. People had.
What He Wrote Before Sunset
That evening, Ernesto opened the notebook Elena had given him years ago, the one he rarely wrote in.
“I kept her boots by the door for three years so I wouldn’t forget her,” he wrote. “Today a stranger wore them away, and I have never felt closer to her.”
Below it, he added: “Maybe the best way to keep someone’s love is to let it keep working.”
He closed the notebook. Outside, the street was drying in the late light. Somewhere in the city, a boy was making deliveries in a dead woman’s boots, and for once that thought did not make Ernesto sad.
SABBATH REFLECTION
Grief has a way of freezing things in place. A room left untouched. A coffee mug no one uses. A voicemail saved for years. These are not foolish. They are how the heart holds on while it learns to carry loss.
But sometimes, what we keep in memory of a person ends up keeping us from the very things that person stood for.
The Sabbath invites us to pause and look at what we hold. Some of it should be kept. Some of it, perhaps, is waiting to be given — not because we love less, but because the love was always meant to move.
Is there something you have been holding on to, in memory of someone, that they would have wanted put to use? A skill they taught you, a kindness they practiced, a habit of generosity that has gone quiet since they left?
This Sabbath, may you find the courage to let a little of their love keep working through your hands.
CLOSING PRAYER
Lord of all comfort,
You know the people I miss and the things I keep to remember them.
Thank You for the love they gave me, and for the ways it shaped who I am.
Where my grief has become a locked door, give me the courage to open it.
Teach me that love does not live in objects, but in what we do for one another.
Let the goodness of those I have lost continue through my hands, my words and my choices.
And in all my remembering, remind me that they are held in Your keeping, not mine.
This Sabbath, let me treasure what You treasure.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
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