He planned to make a famed pilgrimage alone. He died, while doing it, among friends.
Friends often joked that Aaron Hewitt was “The Mayor of Charlotte,” a guy who seemed to know everyone wherever he went … or, if he found himself around people he didn’t know, he had a reputation for being able to turn a stranger into a pal in a matter of minutes.
So even though Hewitt boarded a plane to Europe 11 days ago with every intention of walking the Camino de Santiago on his own, it should come as a surprise to precisely none of his friends that others making the pilgrimage had attached themselves to him less than two days into his journey.
And in the face of her tremendous grief, it comforts his wife, Amanda Hewitt, to know that when her husband collapsed and died just outside of Logroño in northern Spain on Saturday morning, he was not alone.
As was his custom, he was surrounded by friends.
Aaron Hewitt was 46.
A four-time marathoner, an avid CrossFit athlete, and a hiking enthusiast, Hewitt spent more than 15 years as a popular and respected physician assistant specializing in sports medicine at OrthoCarolina in Charlotte before he and his wife moved to Naples, Florida, in 2018.
But just two weeks ago, the Hewitts closed the books on their 4-1/2 years in Florida, with Aaron accepting a new position that would bring them back to Charlotte. He’d also arranged to take five weeks off between jobs to do something he had dreamed of for more than a decade: the Camino de Santiago (or, “the Way of Saint James”), a legendary pilgrimage for Catholics that spans from the base of the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.
There are several different hiking routes, ranging from 75 to 500 miles.
Amanda Hewitt says it had been on his bucket list since not long after they started dating in 2010, when they saw a movie titled “The Way.” As she explains it, “it is shockingly very familiar now — a son actually dies doing the Camino, and the dad goes and does the journey to complete it for his —” she pauses for a second, her voice shaking, before continuing “— in honor of his son.”
“So we saw that movie and it was just really moving to him,” she says. “And, truly, since 2010 he has incessantly watched YouTube videos, has planned for this, has wanted to do this for so freaking long, but just never had the time to devote to it.”
With the transition between his two jobs and their return to Charlotte, Aaron had finally found his opening
