My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking. When Michael and I finished, I thought, Good. I don’t need to do that again. It was on his bucket list, not mine. Still, I long to be back there, walking past those fields of green, listening to my son cycle through his thoughts.
As we were leaving the States, he said to me, “One day, after you die, maybe long after, I’m going to hike into the wilderness, take a lot of shrooms, and die.” Michael is afraid his arthritis will get so bad that he will not be able to walk. That was one reason we were taking this trip now, while we could both walk easily.
“Your children will never not need you,” I reminded him, sounding stern, like my mother.
At the passport check in Madrid, the border guard was almost handsome. He asked Michael if he was Mexican, perhaps because the name on his passport is Miguel. Or maybe it was because of the way he spoke Spanish? Michael is tall like his father, with black hair and more gray in his beard than on his head. “Half Mexican,” he responded, then pointed to me. “The other half is standing right there.” The guard laughed.
While my husband was still alive, in 2000, he and I traveled to Madrid. Before we left the US, my father-in-law said to us, “If you see the King of Spain, tell him we want our gold back.” We saw the palace but not the king. We saw the place where, in 1906, when the king and queen had just married, an anarchist threw a bomb at their carriage. A horse and many bystanders and soldiers were killed, but the monarchs survived. We saw flamenco dancers in Plaza Mayor. We saw Guernica and all the Goyas. Fernando was sure there was a ghost in our room, following us.
“This is where they used to kill people,” I told Michael in Plaza Mayor, while we were looking for tapas. “They burned heretics alive if they would not confess. If they did confess, they hanged them by their necks and called it mercy.” Michael was standing under an arch. Beyond it: crowded streets, blue sky. The back of his T-shirt said, “Don’t be a dick.”
If my doctor were interested in listening, he might ask what else worries me. Cognitive decline, I would tell him. That and constipation. By “cognitive decline” I don’t mean being unable to tell time on a clock with hands. I mean being unable to focus on writing, to pay attention to nuance, to maintain my interest in what will happen next.
Last year it was cataracts. What will it be next year? I don’t think Medicare covers existential worry. Take a breath, I told myself the other day. It was raining, and I was walking up a long hill here in Oregon, worrying about something. School shootings? The wars in Ukraine and Gaza? My twin grandchildren playing army? “This is when you should take deep breaths,” Michael would say on the Camino when we walked up a steep hill. It was true. Why do I take such shallow breaths? I did the same thing when I was in labor: forgot to breathe. Fernando kept hitting me on the back. I even hold my breath during sex. Waiting for the orgasm.
Recently, when I went for a walk with one of the twins—my daughter Kathryn’s children—he picked up various sticks and long-stemmed weeds along the way. When we got to a patch of dirt, he laid the sticks in a circle. He planted a weed in the center. Then he gathered some red berries to place on this earthen altar. (We are not a religious family.) When he was finished, he said, “There. Maybe Tata will come back to us now.”
Fernando died eleven years ago. When we knew he was dying, I tried to make it easier for him by asking him to wait for me on the other side. I said we would be together again. I said it wouldn’t seem so long to him. But then I was surprised when he stayed dead. Every year my body remembers the anniversary before I do. It’s been forever since I’ve dreamed him alive. Can he still hear us? Ferdy. We need your help.
“What if I have to pee?” That was my question for the Scottish woman who was arranging our baggage drops along the route—a big no-no for Camino purists.
“There are cafés every five kilometers,” she said.
“What if I reach a point where I simply can’t walk anymore?”
“Pop into a wee bar, and they’ll call you a taxi.”
Take doggy-poop bags, one website advised, in case of emergency. Never. Even now, on long walks, I have a mantra: Next café, next café.
After we shared our first hotel room on the trip, Michael said, “Mom, I think you stop breathing at night.” For months I’d wondered: What was this brain fog? Cognitive decline? Long COVID? Now I knew: lack of oxygen during sleep.
I have since started using a CPAP machine in bed. I have to wear a mask, like Darth Vader. I want to ask my little sister, who has had to use a CPAP much longer than I have, Do you masturbate first and then put on your mask? Or do you put your mask on first, settle into the warm bed, and then decide to masturbate? We have our father to thank for this, I tell her. By which I mean the sleep apnea, not the desire for an orgasm.
The first mask I tried covered only my nose, the hose like an elephant’s trunk. “Choose it if you move a lot in your sleep,” the respiratory therapist said, “and if you’re not a mouth breather. Try wearing it around the house.” I imagined wearing my trunk while enjoying a glass of wine or running the vacuum. Would I do as she advised and take showers with it to clean it? “Put it in your carry-on if you travel.” The machine is an albatross. But the alternative? Brain fog. A heart that stops beating.
I guess I am a mouth breather, because I had to switch to a full-face model that goes from the bridge of my nose to my chin. It makes a sound—pfft, pfft, pfft—like Fernando snoring. Air leaks upward into my eyes. Do I need an eye mask too?
One of the twins, apropos of nothing, recently asked when I’m going to get a boyfriend. I didn’t tell him the chances are slim: If someone loves you, they accept your frailties. But if you aren’t already loved and you become sick, good luck.
I thought I might meet someone on the Camino. I considered the candidates. There were the Three Amigos: two men supporting a third between them, helping him walk, half dragging him all the way. Sons and a father? Three brothers? Friends, Michael said. Then there were the two Michaels from Ireland, who drank more than we did and walked faster. One of them kept praising Ronald Reagan, until I said he was the Antichrist. “I told you I never liked him!” the other said and broke into song.
We followed paths through tunnels of trees. Others passed us as my Michael lessened his long stride to match mine. He said I was “strolling” the Camino. We always walked together in the morning, but in the afternoon he sometimes went ahead, then waited for me. “Buen Camino,” people would say in greeting. Each time I saw a shrine marking where a pilgrim had dropped dead, I took a picture.
Low stone walls. Slate slick with rain. Huddled homes made of stone. Big blue murals of faces. Steep hills, green fields with a bright house in the middle. Sheep moving from pasture to pasture. Horses. Almost always a stream. (Keep the river on your left, I imagined pilgrims of old saying.) Sometimes a pool. Birdsong. Each town so different. (Ten miles was how many steps?) Ruins of houses with trees growing inside, tendrils of green. Doors painted green, or a weathered blue. Time in the shape of hills. The sounds of footsteps and breathing.
A pilgrim from Germany showed us a video of her favorite albergue—a hostel for pilgrims—where the guests all cooked and ate together, washing dishes and singing at night. It made me nostalgic for a low-residency program where I’d once taught: that intensity.
A professor from LA wore a red hat and red lipstick. Her cell phone, like an extension of her arm, appeared magically to capture every vista. I admired her flair. Like my Michael, she drew everyone to her. Her husband, who’d been a ballet dancer, was quieter. His feet badly blistered, he was the only one slower than I was.
Now, when there’s something in my shoe, I think of the professor’s husband. When it rains, I remember the days of walking in the rain. I remember the woman from Holland and her mother, who collapsed in the middle of the trail whenever she was tired. Aaron from Israel, who worried about the woman’s mother, and Aaron’s son, who was walking off his military grief. Another family from Israel, walking with a two-year-old and an infant. “Maybe we were too ambitious,” the mother said on the third rainy day.
Everyone walking the Camino with us came to recognize Michael, because he had the second-biggest moustache. Bigote más grande belonged to a guy from Uruguay. The men selling trinkets laughed when Michael joked with them. When we passed abandoned buildings, he said he would love to turn them into albergues where people could rest, recover, write. His daughter would bake the bread. He talked of walking the Camino with his son in four years. They would start in France, carry all their belongings in packs. It was as if he had come back into himself, could see possibilities for future happiness. As if his diagnosis had quit hobbling his spirit.
“Walking with your mother,” a man from another country said to Michael: “What’s that like?”
“We grew up together,” Michael replied.
True. I was a mere child when I had him. By the time I was thirty-two, he was taller than me. I’m more nostalgic for the popular music of his teenage years than for that of my own. At one point on our trip, when we were seated on a train or a bus, he took my hand in his, and I teared up. His hand, so big now. All the ways I’d failed him. Why think of that? Why touch the most tender part?
On the plane he’d said, “People told me we should set our intentions. Do we need to repair anything in our relationship?”
“No,” I’d said, “I don’t think so?”
We played cribbage in the afternoons after walking all day. He had a beer, and I drank a glass of wine. His hand moved the pegs so quickly. I’ve never known how to keep score. I tend to forgive and expect to be forgiven.
I’ve read that attention is a form of devotion. That’s what I wanted to give him. His health troubles had made him distant. When he was so sick from COVID, he didn’t tell me. And then, during the first arthritis flare, he didn’t want to worry me. But I was worried: about possible depression. My mind lingered on what he’d said at the start of our trip, about his plan to die in the woods. I wanted him to trust me, to tell me what he needed.
I once lamented to Kathryn, “I’ve been a better mother to you than I have to Michael.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said, “you’ve scarred me too.”
Did I think about all this when Michael strode ahead and I walked alone? No. I thought about breathing. The sound of my footsteps. About making it up the next hill, around the next corner. No more wine, I told myself. But, as a graffitied wall said, “No Vino, No Camino.” Michael had asked if the walk was too easy, if we needed to suffer more. He hadn’t taken his arthritis meds before we left the US. Was he punishing himself? Suffering does not make you a good person, I wanted to tell him. We all suffer. It’s how we bear it that matters.
A house with flowers blooming in shoes left behind by pilgrims. Paths worn deep through centuries: two, three feet lower than the surrounding land. Ferns growing through stone walls. Slick cobbles. Slipping from boulder to boulder to ford a stream. How did the Three Amigos navigate? The Israeli family with their little ones in a wagon? We heard schoolchildren singing as they came up from behind and passed us.
I wondered: Who built the stone walls, the bridges? Who laid the cobbles? During the trip, I’d been reading the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus, which puts names to some of those builders and offers advice to pilgrims. We are told of rivers from which pilgrims must not drink. The water runs unhealthy, there, for horses and men. Thieves wait with knives. If you happen to eat eels, you will die for sure. In a wooded area called Lavacolla, the French people wash the dirt from their private parts.
People asked Michael why he spoke Spanish so well. “I speak kitchen Spanish,” he would say, from working as a cook in LA. He ordered for us at restaurants along the route, but sometimes the menus were in Galician. Conger is eel. He’d already ordered it when he asked if there was anything I didn’t want. I shrugged. The eel was good, like oily halibut. We didn’t die.
I sometimes felt like I was dying while we walked, though. So tired. Couldn’t write, couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. Was I dying? I hadn’t shit for days. Where had all that food gone? Were my organs shutting down? The other pilgrims all looked so happy. The leading cause of death on the Camino is cardiac arrest. If I dropped dead, I thought, it would ruin Michael’s trip. Way to go, Mom.
The second-leading cause of death for pilgrims, the German told me, is drowning. I wasn’t worried about this. I had saved Michael three times from drowning: once in my parents’ swimming pool, once from a riptide while he and Kathryn were floating on a rubber raft, and once when he and I were running in the surf holding hands. He was maybe five at the time. Suddenly we were plunged into deep water, the waves crashing over us. There must have been a hole in the sand at our feet. The water dashed us down. I remember disorientation, not knowing which way was up at first. Then I held on to Michael’s arm and pushed him toward the sky. I knew if I drowned, he would too. So I got my footing, held my breath, and saved us.
Fernando saw us get swallowed by the wave. He was sitting on the beach with Kathryn, who was very little but walking by then. Fernando started running to help us, but Kathryn ran after him, would have followed him into the surf if he hadn’t stopped.
Weeks before Fernando died, we went back to that beach, and he called the ocean “Mother.” Years later, same beach, the twins were maybe three. One of them stood on the water’s edge, arms wide open, and yelled, “Come and get me!”
I tell the respiratory therapist I am either oxygen deprived or sleep deprived. Is the pressure on the CPAP set too high? But she is not concerned. “This is my last call,” she says. I am a box to be checked off. Oh, well.
The headgear flattens my hair. My face is marked till noon each day from the straps. How will I ever find that boyfriend my grandchild wants for me? Here, in the snowy hinterlands of Oregon, the men on Match.com are all fit and love pickleball and paddleboarding and are looking for “that special lady.”
The twins want to have a sleepover at my house, but I’m afraid I will die in my sleep.
“Do you know Jesus?” one of the twins asks.
“Do you mean the teacher whose birthday we celebrate on Christmas?” I ask.
He thinks so. “Jesus is one of the good gods,” he says. “He used to be alive, but now he is in heaven.”
“Where is heaven?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, “I don’t know if we go down or up when we die. But I think we go up. To heaven. They all wear white there, like uniforms. Jesus looks like me! He has curly hair, but long.”
“The bad gods are behind a wall,” the more practical twin informs me. “But,” he pauses, “don’t we get buried first? What happens to our bodies?”
The angst in his voice. Kathryn has been afraid of dying since she was little. Three little girls were murdered in Tucson, Arizona, where we lived when she was a child: one taken through her bedroom window; one left in an alley; one, in our very neighborhood, knocked off her bicycle and abducted. I think we should have turned off the TV. Or maybe she remembered sitting on the beach, seeing Michael and me disappear. Her father running toward the waves. Those few seconds she was all alone, abandoned.
The end of the Camino for most pilgrims is a shrine to the apostle James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Sometimes, in the still, cool air of a church, I feel the faith of others. At the Cathedral of Santiago, though, I saw only gold. A golden statue—a saint? a conquistador?—rode a golden horse above us and brandished a sword of gold. All I could think about was Mexico, where the gold had come from, and who had labored to mine it. Jesus could have overturned a few tables in that house of worship. I wished I could have been more reverent. Three men swung the Botafumeiro—a golden censer—over the pilgrims, higher and higher, until the vessel filled with live coals and incense went horizontal above our heads. I expected a shower of fire.
Standing next to Michael in the cathedral, I felt Fernando in the air between us. He would have been reverent, I thought, but the gold would also have made him angry. His father had been orphaned in Mexico. Had the Church ever helped him? He’d fled the country at fourteen. Never went back. “Don’t ever go to that part of Mexico,” Fernando’s father said to him. “Don’t have nothing to do with those people.”
The next day, leaving the old city, Michael and I paused in a tunnel to listen to a man playing the bagpipes—an instrument Fernando had loved—and we saw the Three Amigos, who had just arrived. The tall one began speaking and gesticulating wildly. Michael hugged them, and then they hugged me, all crying.
“I didn’t think they would make it,” Michael said later. We were seated at a table outside with the LA professor and her husband, having raxo—pork cut in cubes and fried just right, crisp but tender. The professor told the waiter he had an unusual face as he placed our wine on the table. “Feo?” the waiter asked, but he seemed pleased.
“Michael is so open with his emotions,” the professor told me when my son wasn’t listening.
“Yes. Like you, he has a generosity of spirit.”
I need to tell him so, I thought. Maybe he’d floated the suicide idea to me at the airport the same way, as a teenager, he’d said, “I’m thinking about dropping acid.” The key, I knew, was not to overreact. Just take the information in. Let it sink like a stone. But instead I’d said, “Your children will never not need you.” I hadn’t said, You should know this, because don’t you still need your father? I hadn’t said, Think of Kathryn and the twins. Of course, the responsibility to stay alive for your children can feel suffocating. But it can also get you through when nothing else will.
The Costa da Morte is a dangerous, rocky coastline near Santiago de Compostela. Its remotest point is called Cape Finisterre. “Do you want to go,” I asked Michael, “along the Coast of Death to the End of the Earth?” Of course he did. We took a bus to get there, although if not for me he would have walked. He missed walking, he said. Santiago had come too soon. The hike to Cape Finisterre would have been beautiful, I agreed, but then we would have missed Muxia, an added destination for many pilgrims.
Was this the bus trip where he took my hand, where I felt that irrepressible child?
On the coast at Muxia wind and rain were coming in horizontally. Through bars in a door, we looked into a small chapel of stone and wood. The hills were green: green grass, green ferns. Stone paths and walls. Michael climbed a hill of huge boulders. I stayed on a cobbled path above the town crypt. Crosses between me and the water. A crucifix in a cairn of stone with moss growing on it. An orange house. A bright-blue one.
At Finisterre the path to the end was all uphill: a narrow road climbing up, up, up above cliffs, and slopes of green leading down to the choppy sea. It was sunny. Michael, walking at a clip, couldn’t rein himself in. Triangular warning signs showed a picture of a body plunging over the edge. Someone had written, “Volar,” on one. To fly. I stopped to breathe. At the top was a concession stand, a man playing bagpipes and another playing guitar, then a rocky promontory so high you could not see the sea below. On the highest rock was a sculpture of a lone shoe.
People had left their well-used backpacks there, like offerings, but I didn’t see Michael’s. The wind was terrific. I could imagine someone believing this was the end of the earth. This blue sky, this gray sea. To fly above it all and plunge into cold, cold water. There were boulders I would have to climb up and then down again if I was to go to the very end with Michael. But I couldn’t. All the time we were walking, I’d sensed a lifting of a weight in him, a lightening of his spirit. How to preserve it after we returned home? When he reappeared, we found a picnic table in a grassy place, and he wrote in his notebook for a long time.
It is not so easy to abandon this world.
