The Only Thing that Grows After Death

They say nails keep growing after death. 

But really, it’s just the skin that draws back. The nails do not actually grow. They just stay as is. 

I don’t remember where I learned this but it stayed with me. Not because it cleared up a misconception, but because it sounded familiar—uncomfortably familiar.

It reminds me of whenever I help nurse my grandmother at home. She moves with a deliberate tenderness manifested from a lifetime’s worth of patience. That same lifetime also weighs her down as she struggles to even stand up unassisted. The food she eats has also become uninspired; she eats purely for the nutrients, at the cost of everything that makes eating food enjoyable. Sometimes, if we don’t keep up, her jagged nails grow tediously long, curling into soft-like claws.

That is when I get the chance to cut them. 

Her hands and fingers are delicate, and ever-so-sacred. Fragile with callouses and age. Her fingernails however, hint at an unmistakable blue hue that implies something; a subtle yet secret whisper our body alludes to when it is aware of time thinning out. It is the kind of color that dissolves your resolve with the impending warning of a life slowly waning. So softly, it glows blue; what once was a rich and healthy flow of red, succumbs to an inevitable blue prelude to some form of ending. 

Maybe grief arrives like that. Quietly, without any grand entrance or ceremony, instead creeping in like the static ceasing of blood circulation in our fingernails. Leaving us in a blue stagnant version of ourselves, drowning in an unsatisfying farewell to someone who left. 

But I’ve also begun seeing something else too. 

I’ve always known before that death would come, and that the seemingly soul-draining experience of grief looms ever so close to it. But grief isn’t something we suffer, but rather a tender token we carry with care; it is an undeniable love for the departed. Grief, as it turns out, is simply a byproduct of love, because it is impossible to weep for someone you do not love. 

And so when we love someone, we shouldn’t just mourn their absence; we should tend to their presence, even as it fades woefully. We should stay with them despite their certain leaving. We should offer our hands, our time, our quiet devotion, while facing the ultimate conclusion.  

That’s how we make the endings gentle. Not by bargaining for more time. Not by pretending to escape the inescapable. Certainly not by removing ourselves from their final moments. We ought to make the endings gentle, not by changing the outcome, but by choosing how we arrive there.  

When they say nails keep growing after death, that has never been true. The skin just pulls back. Grief doesn’t grow too. It simply pulls us back; the pain of grief being the revealing proof of how deeply we love one another. 

So even if the body pulls back, even as time itself recedes, love does not shrink. 

It grows, even after death.