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On my 21^st birthday, my father bought me a pair of hiking boots and I held a man’s hand while he died.

We’d been driving on back roads from New Hampshire home to Maine when we pulled over at the scene of an accident. An elderly man in a red truck had gone into cardiac arrest and driven off the road; there was no ambulance in sight. A group of people were standing by and someone helped my dad and me, both EMTs, lift the man from the driver’s seat and lay him down in the grass. He was gasping like a swimmer in the last yards of a race. His tongue was turning gray. His hand was big and warm and stiff, and I held it as if I were about to run across the road in the safety of his shadow, like I used to do with my father’s. The fingers of my other hand gripped his wrist. I could feel the pulse press up and out of the skin. I was losing it, it was beating him. His heart stopped as the ambulance pulled onto the shoulder.

“Back away, miss,” they said. A policeman offered me hand sanitizer. We watched for a while as the men from the ambulance used an AED to help the man on the ground, but not long enough to see them give up. Then we got in the car and drove the rest of the way to Maine.

When I got back and carefully pulled the boots out of their box, my first thought was that they were cursed. They were the kind of boots I’d always wanted: black leather with hooks for the laces and thick rubber soles. , from the famous company in Intervale, New Hampshire, made and sold to us by a man wearing a greasy leather apron. My dad said it was a mark of experience if somebody was wearing these on the trail.

For a long time, I refused to put them on. I wished they weren’t mine. I told myself this was because they were too big, and not because we’d seen that man die. Not because, witness to his death, I’d been unable to help.

All summer the boots sat in the back of my car, in their little cardboard coffin, and I wore old boots to work, with the soles chewed out, and pretended. I was working two jobs—one on a flower farm in midcoast Maine and the other at a nearby —and I didn’t have time to take them back and exchange them. I didn’t have time to hike, either. The boots were bulky and stiff and I didn’t need them.

It was one of my bosses, Susan, who finally convinced me to put them on, lace them up, and throw out the box. She was running a and did arrangements for weddings, but not so many years ago she’d been the first mate on a schooner. I jokingly called her the Air Traffic Controller—she had three kids and as many acres of unruly blooms—and she always knew what to do in a crisis, whether that meant setting up a last-minute carpool or consoling a tearful bride. I’d admitted to her that an unfamiliar feeling of superstition (or was it guilt?) had made me reluctant to try on the boots. We were in the barn, stripping leaves off sticky peonies and listening to NPR.

“The way I see it, they’re probably lucky,” she said. “You tried to save a man’s life, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but he died anyway.”

It’s hard to look stern with an armload of pink flowers, but she did her best.

“You were there. You didn’t just drive by. You tried.”

I mumbled something about being legally mandated to act because I’m an EMT, but she wasn’t listening.

“Tomorrow, wear the boots.”