Life is not like an onion
Letters from the edge #4
My best friend had just given birth to her second baby. Naturally, I rushed over to visit, happy to sit beside her on that pink cloud for a bit. The birth had been everything she’d hoped for — smooth, joyful, a dream. The baby was content. Her older child was thrilled. Everything felt exactly as it should. “Isn’t it hard for you,” she all of a sudden asked me, gently, “to see me now and think back to that time with your baby R.? I mean... things were very different then.”
She’s right. Ten days after giving birth, I was torn away from my baby R., and hospitalized. For the first six months of her life, I was as dependent and fragile as she was. But to summarize that period as just the trauma — the stroke, the brain injury, the loss — does a deep disservice to the layered complexity of life.
I often think about the birth. It was glorious. I honestly don’t have another word for it. There was no pain. It happened naturally. At just 36 weeks, while I was still giving a public lecture about my work, the contractions started in full force. Still I finished the presentation, then called the hospital and informed them: I’m coming over now to give birth. Too early but there is no holding back now! The result: a healthy baby and what looked like a strong, glowing mother. That’s one layer.
Another layer: the first days at home with the four of us, happy. Another layer: pink thermos beside my bed every night, filled with tea, heaps of snacks, placed there by my partner. Another one: proud grandparents beaming with joy.
But there’s also a layer that hurts: this was the last birth I will ever give. My body is no longer allowed to carry children. There are other painful layers. There are warm layers; cruel ones, joyful ones.
Life is not like an onion.
When you peel back the layers of an onion, you eventually reach the core. But our lives don’t work like that. There’s no central truth, no one clean conclusion waiting for us at the center. You hope someday you’ll understand why things happen the way they do, or find a word to capture what you're feeling. But what you’re really describing are the layers, and how they shift and collide and hold each other.
The value of a human life doesn’t lie in one core truth.
It’s in the endless, entangled layers.
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Beautiful. I am reminded of this little piece of a longer poem by Stanley Kunitz
From THE LAYERS
…In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
STANLEY KUNITZ
I love the analogy with the onion. Life is life. Life is tough. Life is beautiful.
And like an onion, make us cry. But also like an onion, if you know how to cook, it's tasteful and delicious. That's life.
Thanks for sharing!