Some days are so quiet that it is hard to find anything to write about that would feel worth a reader’s time. Yes, I write here very aware that people will be reading these words. If my words are just babbling, you and other readers would abandon this site as to banal. Part of the reason for my few days of silence has to be shared so that this site is more authentic.

On Saturday, we attended a Celebration of Life for our niece. She died a year ago of a self-inflicted overdose, an intentional suicide. She was in her mid-fifties and had two children. I won’t go into her story other than to say, that she was truly loved by all who knew her.

We left our home on Friday to spend the night with our eldest daughter and her husband as she lived halfway to our Saturday destination. I got sick Friday evening and didn’t join in around the campfire in the backyard. This is unusual for me. Saturday took a lot out of me while I was still not quite well. The constant socialising with extended family wore me down even more. I am an introvert and get my energy from timeouts away from “people.” The socialising went on well past midnight. The socialising continued at breakfast in the hotel the next morning. I finally got quiet time on the way home with a stop at our daughter’s to drop her off.

Naturally, there was no opportunity for slipping out of my clothing, not that I expected it. I am a naturist, but I am also a realist who sees and understands the real world. This world is never going to be nude-friendly to the point that I or you will be able to be nude whenever we want or need to be nude. I am not going to self-isolate and hide in a cave on some inaccessible mountain slope.

I am 77 years old. She was 55. My father died when he was 58. With today’s grey skies, I felt very mortal. Every day I wake up is a gift. Yet, there is always the day when one doesn’t wake up lurking in the future for all of us. What then? What we leave behind us tells others so much we have been keeping as secrets. I have them, you have them. Imagine them all spilling out in all of their messiness. Of course, we’ll be dead and it won’t matter to us. It will fall to those who survive us to have to cope with and wrestle to try and understand the mess. In a way, they will see strangers, the version of who we really are that we have disguised in order to be liked/loved. They will be left wondering why we hid from them.

I saw all of this on Saturday in the faces of others who had yet to come to grips with my niece’s suicide a year ago.