“Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.”
-John Donne
There are some times and experiences that seem so poignant that, although you are an active participant in the moment, it feels almost as though you are intruding upon some kind of sacred ground. Today was one of those experiences for me, and this is why.
Today was Thanksgiving, for many a poignant day in and of itself. A time of family gatherings, fellowship, food and football for some; for others perhaps a day of loneliness and sadness; for many though, it’s more like a mixture of the two, like something that is both sweet and bitter at the same time, like a fall day in which the beauty of autumn leaves hanging on trees and blowing through the air with their red and orange and yellow hues is at once stunningly beautiful and peaceful and yet is a reminder that the cold deadness of winter is near and that the day is somehow suspended between a world that is both living and dying at the same time.
And on this day we gathered at my mother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner: My family with our four rambunctious children, my sister and her husband with their 2 week old child, my other sister, who brought my dad, and some friends with their children whom we had invited over. Anyone looking through the windows at our gathering around the table, bursting at the seams with children running around and filled with talking and laughing would probably think we were like some Norman Rockwell painting in some magazine somewhere. And maybe at that specific moment we were really like that. But like Thanksgiving, it can be really like that and really different from that at exactly the same time.
Now dad, you should know, has Parkinson’s disease and hasn’t been doing so well this year. In fact, a couple of days ago, he took a pretty nasty spill that landed him in the hospital. Parkinson’s is a merciless disease, one that slowly sucks the life out of it’s once strong, independent and vigorous victims, and does so in such a way that those who care and love must behold it’s awful, certain, steady progress, to the point where simple things like unbuttoning a pair of pants to go to the bathroom become insurmountable tasks.
But the thing that most struck me, this Thanksgiving Day, was fingernails. And why would I expect anyway, if dad couldn’t pull up his slacks or button his trousers, that somehow he’d be able to clip his own fingernails? His were in terrible shape, long and jagged, and I wondered how long it had been. So after the laborious trip to the bathroom but before we got back to the table, we sat quietly in the foyer by ourselves, and I clipped the aged, yellowish fingernails of someone who could no longer manage but had at one time held me in his own once strong hands. How could I help but think who might be there to clip mine if the tables were turned. It was one of those perspective changing thoughts about what kinds of things are important in life.
Later that evening, we brought home our own crew of four now extremely tired, rambunctious children and began the process of getting ready for bed. And that was when I noticed another pair of fingernails on my son. So there, in my own bathroom this time, we sat and I clipped the dirty, overgrown fingernails of a tired child who couldn’t manage that well on his own, and even if he could, probably wouldn’t think to do so.
It was then, after clipping the dirty, overgrown fingernails of both my father and my son that it really struck me that whether it’s a disease or injury or simply the natural course of life, there is no way of avoiding the reality of age and sickness and death and that at that moment, I myself was suspended in that same world, blown along like those same leaves by the wind, a world which is both living and dying at the same time.