Dear Joan,
Please accept my deepest sympathy upon the passing of your brother. I recognize him as my fellow pilgrim, Agnelo the doctor. During the first 3 weeks of September 2013 we met up several times on the Camino, always by chance as I rarely knew where he was walking or overnighting at any given time. As is typical among pilgrims we chatted about our lives at home, me in Western Canada, and Agnelo in England. We were the same age - 60. I remember meeting him in the courtyard of the monastery in Roncesvalles and at various other places along the way. I was a slower walker so we never spent great lengths of time walking together. We had conversations during stops in Pamplona, Boadilla, Fromista and in Carrion de los Condes where I saw him for the last time. When I saw him examining a woman's blistered feet at a downtown bench on a street in Pamplona on September 5th there was something about his manner during the examination that made me believe he might be a doctor, a fact which he confirmed when I asked him later the same evening. Over time, other details surfaced having to do with his profession as a GP and cardiologist in Cambridge, England, and that he'd been married at one time but was alone now. I think it was in a conversation with Agnelo about family left behind while we were walking this pilgrimage that I learned of a sister at home caring for their elderly mother. I remember him walking for some time with a man from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and both they and others got enjoyment out of the shared city name on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Someone called them "The Cambridge Pilgrims." Agnelo seemed to be physically healthy and to be doing well on his walk across Spain. Other people I came to know as friends on the Camino met him too; in fact, he is with a group of people at dinner in a photo one of my friends from Australia has in her Camino album on facebook. (The same photo is included in an earlier post on this forum about the missing pilgrim.) We all agree that he was inclined to be very positive and good-humoured; and thus pleasant to be around.
All seemed to be well with Agnelo and his pilgrimage until September 18th when I caught up to him and joined him at his table at a café during a coffee stop in Boadilla. At that moment he was feeling very troubled about an incident of racism that had been directed toward him. He felt angry, and he stated how disillusioned he felt about life on the Camino because of another pilgrim who had brought their unchristian racist views from their own country to the Camino to inflict upon people of different races than their own. His hurt was very fresh and raw, and I saw and felt his pain as the event had occurred less than a day earlier. During this conversation he told me his "rags to riches" personal history of being born into poverty in Africa to his family of Indo ethnicity (a minority group in Africa) and of his arrival in England as a refugee when he was a child, I think he said he was 9 then. He told of his opportunity to be educated, and that with hard work (and obvious brilliant intelligence) he pursued medicine and went on to achieve further success with cardiology as his specialty. He remarked that had the racist abuser collapsed from a heart attack, he would have been the one making a valiant attempt to revive and treat this individual. I reminded him that the majority of pilgrims were kind and accepting of other people, and were gracious toward others. Deep inside of himself he agreed that my words were probably true; however, at that moment he'd just been on the receiving end of the opposite sort of treatment. Later the same day I met him twice on the street in Fromista, and after having done some sightseeing he said he was feeling better. I was staying at an albergue near the big church and he told me he was settled into a small hotel. He admitted that he was staying in hotels to avoid the hoi polloi and the chance any of risking future negative encounters that he feared might arise in the atmosphere of communal living at pilgrim albergues. The last time I saw him two days later he was sitting at a table outside "Bar Carmen" in Carrion de los Condes sipping on a refreshing beverage in the late afternoon heat of September 20, so I joined him for some conversation. During that encounter with him I came to understand that he was also a mathematical genius when he told me about his social world of friends at home with whom he enjoyed playing the numbers game "Go" with its complexity of numerical permutations and surreal numbers. Afterward, I didn't see Agnelo again on my pilgrimage as I stayed an extra day in this city while he moved ahead, and by the date of his passing I had moved ahead by train and was already walking from Sarria to Santiago. I remember asking a few friends if they’d seen him lately but nobody had, and none of us ever heard of a pilgrim’s death in Triacastela until your post written months after our return home. I must admit that I thought long and hard, and I hesitated before sharing about Agnelo’s painful experience that I believe is extremely rare on the Camino, as I found my fellow pilgrims to be exceptionally kind, considerate, tolerant, unprejudiced and congenial. I was pleased to read that he met up and walked with some lovely people on a different portion of the Camino.
I am totally shocked and grieved that Agnelo did not live to walk into the city of Santiago de Compostela and that he did not arrive home alive and well to tell his family members about his pilgrimage across Spain. I hope you find comfort in the memories being written by the pilgrims with whom your brother walked and sojourned. During my journey I stopped and paid my respects at several shrines dedicated to fallen pilgrims who have died along the way in years gone by. I hope to walk the portion of the Camino between Sahagun and Sarria next year. When I do, I will stop in Triacastela to remember Agnelo and to say prayers for his surviving family. I am so sorry for your loss.
Blessings and “Buen Camino,”
Carmen Fairley