Feet

Anyone who knows me well knows this about me: I do not do feet.

I never have. I do not like to touch them, and I do not like to be touched by them. It is less a preference than a quiet piece of logistics I have arranged my life around, for as long as I can remember, simply so I never have to deal with feet at all. The people closest to me know it well. My family, my kids, anyone I have ever been close to. My own mother gave the best foot massages in the world to my brother and my sister. Never to me. And my own kids, I am afraid, are deprived of them to this day. It is simply one of the fixed facts of being me.

I am telling you this first, because without it, you will not understand what yesterday actually meant.

Though here is the contradiction that makes no sense even to me. At home, I am barefoot almost all of the time. My own bare feet get a pass, apparently. It is everyone else's I cannot abide. I know how strange that sounds.

The Call Came Straight to Me

It was a Sunday afternoon. I was on call for the weekend, so when the phone rang, it came directly to me. And I will be honest with you, because there is no point in being anything else: I was about to lie down for a short nap.

The call was from a client I will call Penny. She had surgery on her toes last week. Over the past few days the bandaging had grown so uncomfortable, the swelling and the ache so much to bear, that she had finally unwrapped the foot herself just to get some relief. And the relief came. But then the moment arrived when the foot needed to be cleaned and wrapped again, and Penny realized she had no way to do it. At her age, bending to reach her own foot is simply not possible. And I will tell you honestly, I am not sure I could have managed it myself.

So I Went to Her

I got up, and I drove to her home.

I sat down at Penny's feet. I cleansed her toes, gently, one at a time. I wrapped the foot again, carefully, the way it needed to be done. And the whole time my hands were working, we talked. We talked about why I love this work so much. About the strange and holy privilege of doing for another person the things they can no longer do for themselves.

I told Penny something I do not often say out loud. That the last time I had done anything like this, truly done feet, was in my early twenties, caring for my own mother after her foot surgery. That was the only other time in my life the aversion had simply had to step aside. I had not thought about that morning in years. And there I was, decades later, kneeling at Penny's feet the same way I once knelt at my mother's, love asking the same thing of me twice in one lifetime.

Here is the part I keep turning over in my mind. I never once thought about the fact that they were feet. The single thing I have avoided my entire life, and love walked me right past it, so quietly that I did not even notice until hours later. It never crossed my mind to flinch. There was only Penny, and her pain, and the wrapping that needed doing, and the wanting to make her comfortable again.

It Is a Ministry to Me

I am a spiritual person, though it is a quiet part of me. I do not broadcast my faith. It is personal, and it lives less in anything I say out loud than in how I try to move through the world. There is a story I have always loved, of a humble act of care being treated as something worth doing with total devotion. It has quietly shaped how I think about service, long before I ever thought to apply it to myself.

Sitting there at Penny's feet, I was overtaken by gratitude. Not duty. Not obligation. Pure gratitude, that I get to do this. That this is the work I have been given. To me it is not only a job, and it is not even only a company. It is a ministry. It means more to me than I have the words to explain.

A Passage I Have Carried

There is a passage I have carried in my heart for about five years now. It comes from A White Preacher's Message, the memoir of Robert Graetz, the Lutheran pastor and civil rights figure. I know it the way I do because, years ago, I read that memoir aloud to his sister, Suzanne, a woman I have the privilege of caring for. That is how I first came to know the story of Robert's son Ray, and it has never left me since.

The passage tells of one of Ray's brothers going to visit him, just a week before Ray died. While he was there, a friend of Ray's came by, bringing food, and encouragement, and one more thing none of them expected.

The friend led Ray to a daybed by a large window that looked out over the ocean. He fetched a bowl of warm water and a soft cloth. And then he knelt down, and gently began to wash him. Ray's brother, watching, understood at once the enormity of what he was seeing in so simple an act. Love, bending all the way down to the body of a dying man, and tending to him with warm water and bare hands.

What moves me about that story is what it shows about love, real love: that it will do the humblest thing, without a flicker of hesitation, no matter how small or overlooked. The friend did not have to be asked twice. He simply knelt, and did what needed doing, for someone who could no longer do it for himself.

The Highest Thing I Know

The people we care for spent their whole lives doing for others. Raising children. Showing up. Carrying more than anyone saw. To be allowed now to kneel and do the small, humble things they can no longer do for themselves is not beneath me. It is the highest thing I know how to do with my days.

I do not do feet. Everyone who knows me knows it. And yet yesterday, at Penny's feet on a Sunday afternoon, I would not have traded that hour for anything in the world. Because it turns out the thing I thought I could not do was exactly where love was waiting for me all along.

It turns out the thing I thought I could not do was exactly where love was waiting for me all along.

That is the best last season. Not one spent alone with an unwrapped foot and no way forward, but one where someone will always come, and kneel, and stay until it is done.

Sarah is the founder of SarahCares, a boutique concierge home care team serving families in Nashville, Brentwood, Belle Meade, Green Hills, and surrounding communities.