It was when I visited my parents for my mother’s birthday after a long time. On the way to the market to buy my mother a birthday gift, I met my father who was returning home. Then I noticed his shoes were worn-out tennis shoes, tied so tightly that no air could go through.
“Father! Why do you wear tennis shoes on this hot day? Don’t you have sandals?”
He just smiled and entered the house without saying anything.
I bought a pair of shoes for my mother in the market. However, on the way out of the store, my father’s worn-out shoes came across my mind. I went inside the store again and picked a pair of sandals for him.
I came back home and handed the sandals in the shopping bag to him who was fanning himself. When he took the sandals out, his face lit up. As if he had never tried new shoes, he kept putting them on, taking them off, and walking around with them on.
“They’re expensive. So you have to wear them for the rest of your life.”
Actually, I just picked any sandals, thinking that all the sandals were the same, but I told my father that they were expensive, being embarrassed to see how happy he was with those sandals.
Ever since I got married, I spent the summer vacation with my parents, but I didn’t that year on the pretext of having already visited them for my mother’s birthday. At the end of the summer, I received a phone call early in the morning. My mom was sobbing over the phone.
“Your father collapsed . . . we’re in the emergency room . . . they say he won’t make it . . . come to the funeral hall.”
My father, who had collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage, welcomed me with a smile in the picture just as he did when I visited him two months before. I never imagined that I would never see him again. I should’ve visited them again during the summer vacation. Regrets and bitter grief pierced through my heart.
I couldn’t believe that he had died. It still felt like he would be sitting on the porch at the house as usual. Probably, that was why I didn’t even cry at the funeral. The last image of him I saw kept haunting me.
After the funeral, I dealt with my father’s items. Among his clothes and all kinds of things, something that looked familiar caught my attention. They were the sandals I had bought him.
When I picked them up, I froze right there. Tears didn’t come out even at the funeral, but when I saw the sandals, I cried profusely. The sandals had my name written in white paint.
“He showed them to everybody in our town and boasted about them, telling people you had bought them for him,” said one of the villagers.
Then my mother said, chocked with tears, “As soon as you left, your father wrote your name, saying that he didn’t want to lose them. He said he would not let anybody take them.”
I told him to wear the sandals for the rest of his life, and he indeed wore them until he passed away with this undutiful daughter’s name written on them.