What do you do with someone’s climbing shoes when they die? I hadn’t thought about it. After all, my husband, Cam, was 34 and still should have had many years of climbing ahead of him. It was December 2019, the season of gift-giving, as I sat in our apartment shedding his belongings. Some things felt fitting to donate (a ski jacket) or use (a laptop), but his climbing shoes were a problem. We’d purchased them together in 2017 at The Arch climbing gym in London—a pair of his and hers Scarpas. We downsized to increase precision on footholds, and our feet would come out of them sore and imprinted, the tiny shoes warm and sweaty. They were molded to our feet by some of the best times of our lives and carried these memories like ghosts. In the summer of 2018, we wore our shoes in Spain’s Catalonian mountains. On the shoe rack, they sat as a reminder of the future I had imagined we’d have. Too intimate to give away and too painful to keep, I wrapped them in newspaper and put them in the garbage outside. Then I came back to our apartment and hid my pair in the hallway cupboard.
Cam and I met in our early…
