Unpeeled

We don’t tell everyone everything. Even ourselves.I’ve been thinking about layers, how we are, each of us, thickly layered humans, each layer formed from the passage of time—like rings in a tree—the result of events and people, the sediment of experiences, relationships that nurture, relationships that wound, births, deaths, you know.I am not wise enough to say anything meaningful about how one remembers or rediscovers or relearns what is at the core, underneath all those layers, how one unpeels oneself. Tom did this, I think, as he prepared to die. It is solitary work. I observed it from the outside: How he sat in the sun on the front porch, face tilted upward. How he sat on the back deck listening to the birds. How he fell asleep mid-afternoon with a worn copy of Lao Tzu opened across his lap.What was happening inside I do not know. But I know that when he sat on the edge of the bed we had set up in the living room when going up stairs became too much, when he sat there in his jeans and the gray plaid wool shirt I bought him that was always one of my favorites, when he sat there and took the medication, he was a different man. He had come to a place of knowing. He was unpeeled.Before that, in our lives together, in the layers he unpeeled for me and I for him over the years, there were, I now know—of course I knew then--oh-so-many unpeeled layers. I shielded him, and myself, from intermittent doubts about who we were, and I am sure he did the same. We hid parts of ourselves for all kinds of reasons, for no reasons, maybe when we didn’t even know we were doing it, maybe when we didn’t even know what those parts were. I don’t say this with regret. It is who we were.And when it worked, it was glorious. And when it didn’t, we played it close to the chest. And kept on playing.