Roger Ebert on not eating

by Debra Bendis

“I mentioned that I can no longer eat or drink.”

With this opening line, film critic Roger Ebert begins a recent post called “Nil by mouth,” going on to explain how he’s lost the ability to eat, drink and even speak during his eight-year struggle with thyroid cancer.

Ebert writes openly about his losses (all of his nourishment comes to him through a G-tube) and gracefully expresses his gratitude for having enjoyed gustatory experiences of all kinds throughout his life. Lately he’s experienced heightened and surprising bursts of memory—of an A&W root beer in a frosted mug, or of a meal at the Old-Timer's Restaurant in Chicago, where there was

no fuss, no muss, friendly, the owner stands behind the cash register and chats with everybody going in and out. I've ordered breakfast at lunch time there. “You're still serving breakfast?” I asked. “Hey, an egg's an egg.”

Yet even though he can describe a Steak ‘n Shake meal “bite by bite in proper sequence,” what he misses more than food or drink is the fellowship around a table:

It doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, “Remember that time?” I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore.

Ebert is not a Christian, but his words of struggle and gratitude make me grateful for the quintessential Christian table gathering: communion. The communion table is larger than any family reunion I’ve known; it grows and stretches to the horizon and beyond. At this table are those who cannot chew the bread or swallow the wine, those who do not speak or do not speak a familiar language, those who cannot kneel at an altar rail and those who cannot afford a meal in a Chicago restaurant.

I especially appreciate World Communion Sunday and All Saints’ Sunday, for on those days I’m reminded that the table includes those who are communing at the other side of the globe, as well as those who were once physically at the table but are now gone.

The physical presence of others in this life is vitally important to us, as Ebert testifies. But for Christians the fellowship doesn’t end there: the joy of being at table with friends and family includes our hope of that table still being set for us through the worst of our struggles and even after death.