Semper ubi sub ubi... and other morbid throughts

I'm sure most of you reading this were told at some point in your life that you should always make sure to wear clean underwear when leaving the house... especially when embarking on a trip. 

From what I gather, the reasoning behind this bit of parental advice is that in case you are ever in an accident (G-d forbid) and have to be brought to a hospital, the medical staff will not have cause to ridicule you for the sorry state of your skivvies (presumably somewhere between cutting off your outer garments and beginning life saving measures).

The logic here is obviously flawed, since one can safely assume that any accident serious enough to require medical staff to cut off your outer clothing is almost certainly going to result in your undies being in, ahem, less than pristine condition (if you catch my drift).  Also, I want to believe that professional medical staff are above leering and jeering at critical patients (feel free to jump in and correct me if your experience is otherwise).

Being both a bit of a rebel as well as a male of the species, I've never really gone in for the whole meticulous underwear thing.  In fact, IMHO, a clear indication that underwear is just coming into its prime (comfort-wise) is when wives or mothers start trying to throw them out.

But I promise you that I didn't set out to write about undies today.  Honest, I didn't!  What got me going down this line of thought was an even more morbid memory.

For several years I volunteered as a member of our community's Chevre Kadish (burial society).  In Jewish tradition, once a person dies, their body must be watched over (guarded), ritually washed and dried (a ritual called a 'tahara', or purification), dressed in pure white burial shrouds, and conveyed to the cemetery for a proper burial.

The responsibilities I've listed above were split amongst several people, but I was usually involved in the washing and preparation of the body.  In most cases I hadn't known the people personally for whom we were performing this 'favor', but occasionally it was someone I'd known... and that made things a bit hard (although I was never squeamish). 

To help deal with such potential emotional upheavals, I used to go through a small mental preparation ritual on the drive over to the place where we prepared the bodies for burial.  I used to tell myself that even if I walked into the room and saw a face I recognized... it was no longer them.  The person I had known was long gone, and all that I was doing was taking care of something that they'd left behind... like a forgotten jacket or a hat. 

Once I was actually in the room and working with a few other members of the society to wash, dry and dress the body, I would maintain that narrow focus by looking at only the part of the body I was dealing with at any given moment.  This wasn't a dead human being, I would tell myself... it was a hand, a head, a foot.  Somehow that helped depersonalize the process for me and allowed me to maintain the necessary 'distance'.

But on one particular evening when we were preparing a body and I was narrowly focused on the task, my mind made note of the fact that the toenails of the deceased were particularly long.  It was just a passing thought, but for some reason my mind wouldn't let it go.  Perhaps the man had died after a long hospitalization and nobody had thought to trim them.  But whatever the reason, that observation stuck with me for the rest of the evening... and well into the next day.

It was such an odd thing to have stuck in my mind.  After all, I had performed many taharot for accident victims, amputees and others whose imperfections (for lack of a better word) should certainly have stuck more solidly in my mind.  But they didn't.   At least not nearly to the extent that this one corpse's long toenails had.

I'm not sure how long it was between that day and my next business trip... but I distinctly recall showering the morning of the first airline flight I was to take after that particular tahara, and thinking absently to myself, "Oh yeah, when you get out of the shower, make sure to find the nail clippers.  After all, if (G-d forbid) the plane crashes, you don't want to have someone on the Chevre kadish staring at your overgrown toenails tomorrow".

Ever since then... even if I'm not so careful about clipping my nails at other times (c'mon girls, what husband is?), I've never gotten on a flight since that day without having trimmed my toenails within the previous 24 hours.

Nuts, right?

This is the kind of information that is unlikely to be helpful to anyone... and I'm not even sure why I shared it today... other than the fact that I have a blog, and I can. 

But I'm sure of one thing:  When I get back from England next week, the first thing my wife is going to do is hit me in the head with a frying pan for timing this post to appear after she's seen me off at the airport and I'm still in the air.  :-)