My mom baked me a blueberry pie every year for my birthday for as long as I can remember, except for my early childhood years where I was surrounded by family and neatly decorated cakes would find their way to my home from a neighbor’s kitchen up the street.

I can still hear the somehow gentle and rough scrap of the bowl she used to prep the blueberries, sugar coating the plump, ripe fruit as she lightly folded and folded and folded, adding a dash of lemon juice to cut the sweetness.

Somewhere in my heart, she’s standing at the counter rolling crust and naming every person who could bake better. “Pat Nauman made the best crust,” she’d say on cue, never understanding that I wouldn’t have traded her crust, one of the truest labors of her love for me, for anyone’s.

The thicker edges she always shamed—pinched by her own fingers—were delightful to me, always touched with the taste of the sweetened blueberries that bubbled up during baking, occasionally spilling over and leaving behind a deep purple trail of deliciousness. Careful knife cuts vented the lightly browned top of the finished pie, pulled from the oven and placed on a cooling rack.

The first cut would always bring a quick groan about how the blueberries ran, crowded too long and too uncomfortably, like hot, excited concertgoers dumping out of a venue into the relief of an empty street.

I was always happy for the extra saucy goodness, a perfect topping to the scoop of ice cream I’d plop next to my perfect piece of pie.

I’ll be forever grateful I was born in a month where blueberries are in season.

My mom once told me she started bleeding while she was pregnant with me. At the time, her doctor simply told her to go home, rest, and let whatever was going to happen, happen.

Being pregnant in the 70s was not for the faint of heart.

Clearly, I hung on, and maybe the bleeding was never about me?

I still find my own sometimes neutrality toward living surprising in the face of my uncertain start, a sharp, quick strike of … something something resilience, … fated to be here.

But then I sink deeper, and the truth that all of life is both restrained and freed by choice becomes clearer and I realize there is nothing really extraordinary about my existence.

We are all here by chance.

I wasn’t about to attempt the crust. I was too raw at the thought of my first birthday without my mother’s careful care. She’s the constant. The one who speaks my wonders to the world, diligently finding photos spanning my ages to accompany her over-the-top inventory of all my best qualities.

She was gifted at seeing the best in people, and even more skilled at making the people she loved feel special.

I chose thoughtfully. A blueberry coffee cake from her recipe book, simpler yet within a familiar range, and cheeseburger pie for dinner, the first recipe we’d cooked together when I was young. The cookie bars she used to send me when I was away at college would be dessert, along with homemade chocolate sauce.

She loved to tell the story of how I pestered her to tell me if I’d gained weight the first time she and my dad visited me at school in upstate New York. “She kept asking me, ‘Mom, do you think I’ve gained weight?’” she told my son, explaining how she waffled until finally admitting that, yes, maybe I’d put on a few pounds. “She wouldn’t talk to me the rest of the trip!”

My roommate was an aerobics instructor and after my parents left I went to her class religiously until my shin splints made walking nearly unbearable.

I don’t remember the last time I’d had her cookie bars. I’m not sure she ever made them for me again.

Everything went wrong from the start. The butter for the coffee cake hadn’t been warm or soft enough to properly cream and so the cold milk Ben added to the sugar, butter and egg quickly curdled.

The second time was better. The batter came together but was so thick I couldn’t manage to get half spread into the pan before adding the blueberries, as the recipe noted. So, frustrated, I scooped the mixture back into the bowl and folded the fruit in before dropping back into the pan.

I imagined my mom in the ether. Was she as upset about missing my birthday as I was to have to miss her?

The cookie bar dough was thick, too, and we ended up patting it into the pan with our hands, trying our best for even. Into the oven for the 20 minutes the recipe card recommended, though I pulled them out at 18 or so when the edges looked appropriately light brown.

Instant disappointment hit my belly when I cut a test square. “Nanny’s were twice this thick,” I told my son. The first bite confirmed they were slightly overbaked.

My mom would sometimes finesse recipes because she was more of a baker than she would ever openly admit. I wondered if when she’d made the cookie bar dough she’d doubled the recipe or perhaps adjusted the pan size. Mine were thin and dry where hers had always been thicker and more cakey.

Zero for two.

Aunt Mary’s chocolate sauce, the same I’d pulled from the fridge at my parents’ house countless times when my mom would just get a hankering to make it because it was easy and delicious, was down for the count from the start because I’d misread the recipe and thought the cocoa and sugar should melt together instead of simply heat through before adding the can of condensed milk.

We ended up with something closer to fudge. Delicious, but …

Zero for three.

I started to wonder if my mom was silently sabotaging.

When Kurt and I visited my parents not long before he died, my mom insisted we sleep in separate bedrooms until we were married. In my room to say goodnight before he shuffled off into the bed next door, I could tell he was feeling a little blue, maybe a little lonely.

He was in a house he wasn’t accustomed to with people he didn’t know well and now he had to fall asleep alone instead of next to the person, the body, who had, at least for many nights of the week, been a regular source of warmth and comfort. His family was close. He was used to boundaries being more fluid.

After he died, my mom chucked that rule straight out the window on the very rare, count-with-one-hand occasions I brought somebody home with me. Even years after Kurt was gone she would remember her insistence with regret.

During therapy after Kurt died, I once grumbled how I never felt him with me and what was being dead good for if not for being able to constantly be around the people you loved?

I was young and selfish and grieving and desperate.

Jane looked at me with compassion. “Imagine being around the people you love and not being able to talk to them or touch them," she offered.

We’d talked once of what came after death. Jane imagined that perhaps there was an in-between. Not purgatory but rather a staging area, of sorts, where people got used to the idea of being gone.

Was my mom there now, a little bereft at having to leave a life she honestly loved, tinkering with the outcomes of my own attempts at including her in my birthday, as if to say, “Not this year. This year needs to hurt a little.”

I don’t believe death is anything other than a biological reality. A collection of vital systems finally and completely failing.

Still, I also believe we are, at last, energy, where death might only be the disorganized dispersement of what was once exquisitely coordinated. Present, just not recognizable.

I bought a hot cake mix instead of the Bisquick the cheeseburger pie recipe called for because the package was smaller and I didn’t want a box of leftover batter mix cluttering my already full cabinets. I probably hadn’t made the recipe since my mom and I had back when I was maybe 10, so assumed any difference between the two would be small enough not to matter.

There were other recipes I could have picked, like her meatloaf that was my dinner request on my birthday for most if not all of my childhood, or the pasta bake we used to make during visits because my dad didn’t enjoy it and was too much for one person.

But something about making what we’d first cooked together all those years ago felt right. I’d picked it out of her Betty Crocker cookbook, and it’s a recipe that I now know she would have absolutely hated, but she did not say one word then, though I can’t remember if she ate any or not.

The hot cake mix added the slightest bit of sweetness that we cut with a sauce Ben made that we usually use for burgers. “I bet Bisquick would have added a little sweetness, too,” he said.

Zero for four.

Losing my mom has been a strange experience. In some ways, her absence has served to show Kurt’s loss in much deeper relief. I feel his absence more acutely these days, and there is an honest yearning for him that hasn’t been present for years but was an unimaginably large part of my grief in those early days.

If there is a more calamitous feeling than wanting, needing, wanting someone you know you will never have again, I have no earthly idea what it would be and don’t want to know.

And still, I feed the tenderness, press on it like an old bruise.

I’ve taken to reading gentle, delicate romances. I can’t get enough of them. Stories where two people know one another so intimately they can anticipate need, careful but lusty. Not overwhelming or obsessive but inevitable, undeniable.

Too many cliches exist to describe a sensibility that, in my experience, confounds language.

I’ve absently wondered if I’m doing more harm than good. Should I put the stories down, let the longing wither so I have a fighting chance of tucking the agony back behind my ribs, present but more isolated? I recognize an urgency in the process, though, a pull to listen to my most elementary need.

Sometimes, what is the most basic is also the cleanest and most straightforward.

Share

I often wade in the deep end with my therapist. I tread over the same ground, wearing a path through the same emotions, the same questions.

“How do I live without the two people who knew me best, allowed themselves to meet my vulnerability in equal measure, love me wholly with patience and warmth?”

The most brutal realization came when I worked out that I wasn’t an aberration, as I’d always suspected. “I was born in the wrong time,” I often thought to myself throughout my life, feelings too deep and accessible, crushed by what others accepted, if not easily than at least with a discomfort they could push out of the way.

When you lose the love of your life at 26 you can’t possibly fathom, once the dust settles, that you’re done. And even if you do believe that’s it, nobody will let you voice that type of despair without immediately using your youth as a rebuttal, as though the only thing deciding your chances of finding love again is the time you may or may not have left on Earth.

“What I understand better now that I’ve lost my mom is that the love I had with both her and Kurt is rare,” I tell my therapist. How we loved one another was different, for very obvious reasons, but the overarching understanding that honest and unsullied love is what allowed these two people to really see me can’t be denied.

And so much of everything, but perhaps most importantly our willingness to love, is soiled by our impulse to discount our capacity to be vulnerable. We don’t grapple with our experiences with any vigor, instead readily covering over our humanity with shame and greed and misunderstanding and fear and pettiness and … until what makes us, us is blurry and distorted.

We are, I think, one of the only mammals who spend most of our lives running from our own instincts.

“The saddest part is that we are all capable of loving one another like this and we don’t,” I tell Jamie as we near the end of a session.

“Because it’s work. It’s really hard work to be open and vulnerable,” I admit.

But what a world we might have, I imagine. What a world we might have if we dared.

My mom would have been 83 today.

The first thing I did when I woke up, after stretching, was whisper “Happy Birthday, Mom” into the quiet of my bedroom.

Then, without warning, the absurdity hit me. The words themselves make plain what we all casually accept by singing the same song, saying the same words, year after year with too often forced enthusiasm and a kind of casual indifference : We are marking a birth.

An entrance, followed by sustained momentum; a life built, brick by brick, the person still laying mortar down.

Nothing in the ritual speaks to exit.

The irony of empathy is that you need closeness, you desire intimacy, the recognition from another person that says “Hey, I know you.”

But that kind of familiarity is rare, ethereal, really.

Instantaneous, sometimes, and at other times grounded in uncanny moments where everything aligns and you’re vulnerable enough, know yourself well enough, feel safe enough to risk your heart for the opportunity of sincerely connecting with another person on this planet.

For someone like me, the moments of feeling truly seen are anchors, reminders that in a world where almost nobody knows what they’re doing and it’s messy and complicated, a place we’ve ravaged and brutalized, bent to our will at the cost of almost everything truly good, there is still love with heft and depth, an earnestness that feels molecular.

Kurt was one such person for me. My mom, another.

When they first met, they both caught me tracing the front of my thumb across the top of my ear. Kurt was the first to notice and ask: “Are you tired or stressed?” My mom nodded along.

I’m not even aware of the habit, really. “I’m tried,” I admit. The drive from Ohio, even shared, wore me out for some reason. Both we’re relieved the answer was simple.

That’s true intimacy. The small details, the quiet observations that give you insight into another person and allow you to seamlessly care for them and anticipate need, find and expand joy, bolster honesty, help shoulder burdens and shelter against pain.

People will unfold themselves to you in a million different ways if you are brave enough to pay attention.

In a culture that winds itself up so tightly around bodies and sex and morality, where any closeness, unless religiously sanctioned, is seen as questionable and deviant, we leave little room for what makes being human tolerable—connection.

We scoff at close observation and yoke intimacy to sexual desire instead of giving her air to live in the adjacent space she’s also meant for, where seeing someone completely, wholly, fully isn’t wracked with shame and obsession. There should be nothing extraordinary about noticing things about your fellow humans, even those things that are deeply personal but obvious to an empathetic eye.

But we make it so. We pound our default settings from public to private almost from our beginning—our birth—until our operating system hums with shame and guilt, and curiosity and exploration are shoved into the darkness to fester until, as with so many things humans ruin with worry and austerity, we no longer recognize them as beautiful and fundamental.

There is nothing that compares to being known. No words in the English language can hold the feeling of having someone devoted enough and aware enough to map you for themselves so they can draw you back to your center when you stray too far or need reassurance. Small, inconsequential gestures that are implicitly understood, habits attended to, feelings unmasked and deciphered with tenderness.

Nothing asked and nothing owed.

Share

My mind moves back to the world birthday, and I think of all the ways my mom might have been rebirthed into the universe. I have no religious beliefs. I do not believe in the afterlife or heaven. But as one scientist encouraged in a column devoted to why physicists should be invited to funerals, I do believe in energy.

When I’m feeling particularly raw and exhausted, wrung out by loss, I imagine my mom zipping around the ether, pure, frantic energy, loose from her mortal coil. She’s happy, has dispensed with everything weighty and wearisome. Exists in nothing and as nothing more than … what?

The most essential part of herself? The lightness that allowed her to trust herself when she heard her heart say: “Hey, go ahead. Lean in.”

These are usually the times I’m also begging my mom for some reprieve, to show up and let me know I’m not alone. Kurt, too.

I’m angry or perhaps jealous when I picture them, maybe even together sometimes, free.

I’ve talked before about how surprised I am by how fresh Kurt’s death feels alongside my mom’s. That nagging ache in my center creeps back sometimes, like I’ve been hollowed out with a melon baller. The pain is dull but somehow urgent. I’m aware something is missing. Even worse, I know what’s missing and I desperately, desperately want it back.

My body alone doesn’t know how to fill the gap. I’ve been devouring sappy romances where the characters are hopelessly in love and attuned to one another, but also peppered with moments of intimacy that can and do exist outside romantic love. In some ways, I find I’m just reinforcing the loss, widening the gap. In other ways, I’m renewing my hope in a world I want to believe can exist, where we all pay attention and find moments of real connection, build real community.

Perhaps what I’m really feeling is what, when I’m still, is the seed of grief for me. All the losses I’ve endured, especially of people who, like my mom and Kurt, gently gave me space, made space for me, in their heads and hearts, pushing me back toward the invisible rhythm of the world I want to live in.

To see and be seen.

Here, there, everywhere.

You and me. Me and You.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

(I love you, Kurt.)

I often think about that time now, especially since my mom’s death. I’m grateful I have that year of everydayness to look back on, days and days of just being in one another’s lives, less as mother and child and more as adult friends worming their way through this world together, ordinary and extraordinary at once.

My parents’ house is on an acre of land, set back in a cul-de-sac just on the outskirts of a mid-sized Midwestern city. The front yard reaches out and out and out, building in some separation between them and the three other homes in the neighborhood.

One summer, I dug out the rock landscape the builders had lazily dumped around a wild cherry tree in the middle of the yard, shovelful by shovelful hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of river rock to the woods.

I worked for days, and by the end I thought my back would never be straight again.

My mom planted roses and native grasses, a few bushes, and every season peppered the space with birdhouses on shepherd’s hooks and baths, and spinners that would catch the wind.

Year after year, spring after spring, summer after summer, she would coax life from the soil, play host to birds and bees and butterflies, spiders and beetles.

That year, I also picked up my camera again. I’d purchased a mid-range digital camera years before and played at nature photography. I took a class. Followed photographers. Read about different settings, and, more than anything, took a lot of photos.

I got average, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hobby.

With my parents, my hobby was thrown into overdrive. I’d get up early and spend an hour or two out on their deck, walk their property during lunch or sit quietly at the border of my mom’s garden and watch nature carry on her rituals of living.

The time became a meditation, a communion, an honest collaboration and reaffirmation that I am united in ways both big and small with all living things.

I know. I know. That sentiment is sometimes so overused, and in some ways so commercialized, that describing anything in terms of connection with the natural world feels cheap and fabricated.

But in those moments, giving myself over, fully, to the present, blurred the boundaries.

We all, every sentient being, cycle through our lives in overlapping, returning seasons.

We are brand new, beginners more than once in our lives.

New experiences, new hardships and joys crack us open when we let them and soften what’s tightly bound, providing space for growth and renewal. We can reach for the light. We can settle in and let hardship do its work of nudging us toward something deeper, more fundamentally us. We can strip ourselves to what’s essential and then rebuild truer.

I have a very clear memory of watching a bumble bee get stuck in a spider’s web as I sat on a gardening stool in my mom’s flower bed out front, camera on my lap. I sat for a minute, thinking the bee would shake itself loose and fly off, clearly misunderstanding the genius of the web.

There would be no freedom without intervention.

My choice was going to have consequences for one of the players in this drama. Let the bee nourish the spider or save the bee but risk damaging the industrious architecture spun for just such a necessary and life-affirming occasion?

After a moment’s hesitation, I choose the option that didn’t require any immediate loss of life. A thin stick helped me carefully free the bee, whom I then placed in the lawn a short distance from my seat where it sat and sorted itself for a moment, eventually buzzing away into the woods.

Nature, interrupted.

But, I thought, how many times had my own life been interrupted. How many joys, how many disappointments, how many trials (and errors)? How many nights have I laid awake wondering if this was it, was I finally going to be pushed over, dumped fully into the darkness? Alone and messy and lost.

Then again, how often have I been plucked from misery? Picked up, pitted and bruised, maybe barely hanging on, but safe again, or safe enough, to mend myself.

Restart.

Share

My neighbor’s cat is a wanderer. I don’t like indoor/outdoor cats. They are incredibly hard on bird populations. In Chicago, if you suggest outdoor cats are a nuisance, you’re met with instant and hostile feedback. “They keep rat populations in check!” (They don’t). “More birds are killed by window strikes!” (Wrong again).

Tiny cat is the worst kind of hunter. He kills and leaves his prey bloodied and dismembered for others to find. Nothing is taken for nourishment or to cull populations that are unsustainable in greater numbers.

Tiny cat, as many cats do, kills because he can.

I came around the corner toward my back stairs one morning to see a baby bunny frantically scratching at my building’s brick exterior like they were going to dig their way in. A reverse escape.

Tiny was crouched low a few feet away. “NOOO! NO, TINY CAT. NO!” I shooed him away and took my sweater off to scoop the bunny up.

After crossing the street and depositing the bunny in a patch of grass I was only about halfway up my back alley when I decided the spot was just as unsafe. I walked around my block, finally nestling it in some bushes by the schoolyard.

I’m reminded of how dependent we are on one another, how much I need the steadfastness of who and what supports me, the places I find solace, the ways in which I am integral, both in what I give and what I need.

I always shrunk, a lesson I subconsciously inherited and nurtured throughout childhood, like I was continually apologizing for existing, trying to just fill instead of take up space.

Age and lived experience opened me up, allowed me to recalibrate my understanding of myself and reconfigure my internal landscape.

What’s that they say? It’s all about perspective.

Small is not the same as powerless just as big cannot assume righteousness.

Death and loss more than anything has encouraged a nuance that forces me to reconcile that in this world very little we consider in opposition is truly antagonistic.

I can hold grief and joy, happiness and sadness, life and death, and in every one of those moments I can find multitudes, overlapping emotions that hint at the complexity of life, the ways in which living deeply engaged, wholly committed to both humanity and my own humanness, is rich with subtlety and mystery.

When I’m honest, I don’t always want to be here. I don’t always want to exist.

Put simply: I sometimes passively wish for death.

The sentence isn’t active: I want to die.

More like: I don’t want to live.

There is a difference, subtle but significant.

Often, though, I remember how elemental every mortal’s existence is in this world

Where everyone and everything anchors me, and I anchor everyone and everything.

Reciprocal, collective.

Shortly after I’d hung up the phone after telling my mom I was pregnant she called me back. I was still standing in my kitchen, leaning against the counter, my stomach finally settled from what I remember was a mix of nervousness and excitement.

“I just had to call and tell you that I haven’t stopped smiling,” she confessed.

My relationship with my mother has always been close and complicated.

Not any more complex than any other meaningful relationship, I should be clear. Is fully loving and knowing another human being even possible without some tension existing?

We, all of us, bump up and against one another, refining our sense of ourselves in both the sharpness and softness of others. Coming into being is not and never has been a solitary act.

We are born in need of community.

As I get older, some of what I’ve come to despise most about modern culture is our insistence that deeply caring for one another, whether connected in family or friendship or complete strangers, is somehow a shortcoming instead of a strength.

For my mom, though, I was always (subconsciously) more interested in being who I thought she needed me to be versus developing my own idea of myself. Psychologists would probably have a field day studying all the ways in which my adolescence was marked more by a deepening imprint than honest individuation.

Interestingly, and maybe only to me, looking back I see my mom, too, was giving herself over, constantly creating space for everyone but herself. When my dad remembers her now, he consistently places how much he misses her in context of her use to him. Sounds crude and vulgar—because it is, honestly—but I’m not sure how else to interpret the sentiment in this sentence, which I’ve heard more than once from him during mourning: “I never realized how much she did for me.”

He doesn’t talk about how she could coax life from almost anything, like the gardenia plants she would buy every spring that would have at least one near-death experience per season before blooming for her. Or the way she talked about getting her hands in the dirt every year, itching to get her roses pruned and her garden cleaned up.

Even before being diagnosed with the chronic illness that limits his mobility today, my dad didn’t spend any time with her at the local greenhouses. We’d go every year, me pointing to beautiful flowers and asking “What about this one?” and her usually answering me “That’s a perennial.” (Because we were looking for annuals).

Does he know how peaceful she found the arboretum, her face serene as we’d walk the rows in silence. Does he remember how amazed she was one February when she’d gotten a tip that there were gobs of bald eagles at the lock and dam so we hopped in the car and drove down? (We were not disappointed). We visited almost every morning the entire month until the weather started to warm and they headed further North.

He doesn’t talk about the ways she’d grow cilantro every year for me, even though I lived three hours away, or how we’d usually buy two basil plants and talk about making pesto, “It freezes so nice!,” only to have the plants go to seed with only a single batch made.

A few days after she’d died, he noted how he hadn’t given her enough credit for all she did for him, like she was an employee who’d been passed over for a promotion instead of an autonomous human being with a life of her own, separate from him and wonderful if underdeveloped and unrealized because of life circumstances.

Share

There are circumstances that shape my life, too. I don’t think that’s something any of us can avoid. As with my own mother, the experiences that make me who I am as a person also shape who I am as a mother.

As I sit with my own grief, I also grapple with how my son will think of me after I’m gone, as well as how he thinks of me now. I am marked by both great fortune and great tragedy, the love of my life buried young, the subsequent years lost, at least in part, to a return to simple usefulness instead self-possession.

I worked hard at the time to rebuild my ability to tap into my tenderness. I wanted to broaden my capacity for love. I didn’t want to stop weaving myself into the world.

But I couldn’t quite shake the trauma. I couldn’t quite inch past the part of myself that too often imagines the worst whenever my son is a few minutes late or doesn’t pick up his phone. He grew up basking in both the heart I grew instead of stunted and the shadow of my too-easily-agitated unease.

An impossible place, really. Like me, he instinctually plays the role of caregiver, though we approach the work differently.

Once, while visiting my parents in Florida during a holiday break my senior year of college, I raced out of the car after my parents continued to ask me how my applications to graduate school were going. My dad was fascinated with having a child with a doctorate degree. “So, people will call you Dr.?” he used to ask me during every discussion of post-graduate work.

Instead of telling them I wasn’t really interested in going to graduate school, that I was probably at the beginning of what would become a clinical depression, I lied until lying wasn’t workable. Miserably collecting applications I’d only half-heartedly fill out, and rarely to the end. Asking professors for letters of recommendation. Visiting the registrar to collect transcripts.

My son doesn’t want to worry me, so when I ask after his grades, his scholarship dependent on a B average I know is becoming increasingly unlikely, he rattles off generic percentages like “mid-80s” and “low-90s” in an attempt to suggest my apprehension is unnecessary.

Until the phone call that mirrors my own bolting from my parents’ car where he confesses losing his nanny (my mother and one of his best friends) tanked his mental health and the second semester will end about as poorly as the first.

We go round and round, as we have for most of his life, stuck in what feels like an intractable pattern that is, ironically, grounded in a deep love and an abiding desire to save me from myself.

How do we free ourselves? How do we find our way back or to a place where we understand we can tell one another and love each other through hard truths?

Before my mom died, we were having frank conversations about our own buried truths. She told me one night how surprised she was that I’d married my ex-husband. “I knew you weren’t excited when he proposed,” she told me. “I should have said something.”

She went on to ask me why I stayed with someone who treated me so poorly, having been witness to verbal abuse and other bad behavior.

“Where do you think I learned that?”

She didn’t know, and when I told her from watching her, she moved on fast.

What might sound like bitterness was actually me reaching for her in a more honest and authentic way. I wanted the hard truths between us out in the open. No more raking darkness over the most complicated and vulnerable parts of ourselves that both connected us and caged us.

“You allow dad to get away with everything,” I tell her. “You do everything for him and he gets to treat you however he feels.” I’m angry and scared at once because I know she hasn’t been feeling well and something about our conversations feels both urgent and unnecessary.

She hints at being too old to change. But my son came out as trans when he was 10 and my mother, then 73 and having zero idea of what being trans actually meant, was his staunchest ally from the start. “There is no such thing as too late,” I remind her.

Share

My grief for my mom is tangled with a realization that the dynamic we had for most of my life is being repeated with my son. The hard truths that need telling are different, but the outcomes are similar if not indistinguishable.

Just as I unknowingly became like an extension of my mom, absorbing the overflow, working to make the lives of the people closest to her easier so they, in turn, would make her life easier, my son looks for ways to ease the pressure he knows is too often lurking just beneath.

In the effort to sustain equilibrium, we’re both missing out on the opportunity to deepen our relationship. There is real beauty in rocking the boot, even when your stomach churns and your knuckles and face go white.

Losing my mother in the midst of what were some pretty transformative conversations has reinforced what has been scratching at the back of my brain for a few years: I don’t want the same for me and my son.

I loved my mom completely, but I didn’t know her completely, in part because she never took the time to know herself completely.

I think that’s actually pretty common for mothers. We stretch and stretch and stretch, losing some of ourselves, too tired, maybe, or too busy to take the time to really ask ourselves who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be.

Self-actualization, at least in part, is a selfish endeavor.

But in the ways mothers and their children do, my mom and I were muddling through, guiding one another to fuller versions of both ourselves and our relationship, mother/daughter, friend, confidante.

It’s work we should have started earlier. It’s also work I’ll continue doing with my own child, not only for him, but for me, too.

About halfway through my most recent session with my therapist, where talking about my mom became almost tangential to mining the grief that continues to resurface around losing Kurt, I stumbled on a feeling I hadn’t previously connected to the loss.

Shame.

When he first died, guilt was my bully, like a drill sergeant screaming in my face: “HE’D BE ALIVE IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU.” “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST PICK HIM UP YOU LAZY PIECE OF SHIT.”

I picture myself wheezing out a defense in the smallest whisper I can muster, chin tucked tightly to my chest: “he wasn’t supposed to walk home, sir. he promised me he wouldn’t walk home.”

"WHAT’S THAT? YOU’RE SAYING THIS IS HIS FAULT?” “OH, I SEE. YOU FELT ‘SICK’ AND WANTED TO SLEEP SO THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE DESERVES TO DIE. GOT IT.”

“no, no, no, no, no,” I whisper, shaking my head, tears building then silently dropping down my face. “that’s not what i’m saying. i didn’t know. i didn’t know what was going to happen. he was beautiful. it should have been me. if it was going to be anyone, it should have been me."

“YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU!”

Kurt was the first person who helped me see myself clearly. Being with him felt like a long overdue exhale. I had no part to play, no role to fill, there were no expectations, all things that felt true for nearly every other relationship in my life.

Being with him was … easy. Loving him was easier. The surprise was that letting him love me was the easiest.

I’ve talked before about being too much. My emotional landscape always felt endless and … I can’t get the word here and I want to be precise … raw, unprocessed, tender, green?

Untamed, maybe?

Untamable might be what I’m looking for, but interpreted less like savage and barbaric and more like unrestrained and unreserved.

I couldn’t create a bottom to the depths of my connection to world, the ways in which I felt accountable to everything and everyone. In youth, that, among other personal dynamics, often made me a shapeshifter. I was who people needed me to be.

I say “in youth,” but really that habit followed me into adulthood. How could it not?

So you might imagine how powerful being loved by someone who saw me and then reached in and pulled something genuine and true to the forefront felt. Or, maybe didn’t pull but invited, encouraged, coaxed.

I don’t think I really understood until he was gone, and even then not right away.

After Kurt, there was nobody for awhile and then a string of self-centered, sometimes abusive people I knew I maybe didn’t deserve but allowed anyway because I was … too tired to push back against the guilt that hovered close and constantly reminded me that somebody’s got to pay.

I didn’t have the will to remind myself that Kurt would never ask or need or want me to be with anyone who didn’t lift me up. No penance was required.

From run-of-the-mill assholes to master manipulators that weaponized Kurt’s death against me—”There’s always been three people in this relationship, me, you and Kurt!”—the constant was always some version of having to be over Kurt in order to love another human.

That wasn’t my grief. I didn’t want an end. I wanted integration. I wanted to not have to disavow my love for a person no longer on Earth in order for my love for another living human being to be acknowledged as real.

Instead, my guilt was doubled; I was twice condemned.

I talked for awhile before what had been silent and dormant for all these years finally shook herself awake and peeked out from under the mountain of guilt I’d always assumed was the main byproduct of sorrow.

Shame.

I think both my therapist and I were a little surprised by the discovery, especially because we were exploring grief that was, by comparison to the loss of my mom, aged.

Guilt in grief feels expected, especially when, like it or not, something about your own life or actions directly intersects the point where everything shifted. “It’s not a lie to say that if I hadn’t gotten sick Kurt would still be alive today,” I tell my therapist. “Or, at the least,” I correct myself, “he would have survived that night.”

Even with my mom I wondered and still wonder sometimes if I could have saved her life if I’d been there. “I’m a nurse and I couldn’t even save my husband’s life if I needed to perform CPR for 20 minutes,” one of her health care providers told me. “Doing CPR correctly for 20 minutes is harder than people think.”

But, I mean, what is she going to say? Yes, you could have saved her if you were there but you weren’t so now she’s dead.

Those are the gray areas I hate, those places where you both know and don’t know, that I’m continually struggling to let quietly exist without question or judgment.

Some things in this world just are.

Share

Now, to the shame.

Shame.

The unexpected visitor who sat me down and asked, “Hey, why did it take you so long to realize that I’m the underside of the guilt you’ve courted for so long?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed. “Maybe guilt feels less personal.”

“Right,” she answered, “because unlike guilt, where you’re encouraged to just beat yourself senseless, I ask for something more nuanced and exacting. I want you to take a look at yourself.”

“Yeah, that bit … I don’t like …”

But she cut me off.

“I want you to ask yourself if you honestly believe that all you’ve ever deserved these last 25+ years is to spend your time doubting and diminishing who and what once gave you the most confidence you’ve ever had in your whole life? I want you to wonder why it’s so easy for you to think he had you so wrong? What do you need in order to believe you still deserve to be loved the way he loved you?”

“Oooof, c’mon now,” I beg.

That last question? That one’s a killer.

Both the heart and soul of the shame I feel.

I meander to my point with my therapist, as I often do. “I’m ashamed I’ve spent so much time with people who didn’t deserve me.” Even that I say cautiously. Who am I to believe I’m special?

Yuck. NO.

“I look at the years I’ve wasted,” I try again, “the ways in which, after Kurt died, I almost instantly reverted back to a person who would just squeeze herself into whatever space was made available to her, believed she was only worth whatever someone was willing to give her. I feel real shame about that lost time.”

The subtext of that admission is almost always: “Because that’s not what Kurt would want for me.”

But something about this moment changes my perspective and I move from thinking about “how would Kurt want me to live?” to something akin to “what would Kurt say to me about the shame I’m feeling?”

“He’d have compassion for me,” I tell my therapist. “He would know I’m doing the very best I can, have always done the very best I can. He wouldn’t be disappointed. He wouldn’t judge me. He wouldn’t feel like I’d betrayed what we had together because I couldn’t sustain the clarity he fostered. He would remind me that what we had was whole and unconditional, and still is, even now.”

“There you go. I think you’ve got it,” I hear shame whisper.

Maybe shame is the sometimes more tender side of guilt, what you’re left with after drilling through the heap of mostly inconsistent and false assumptions served up by a brain marinating in sorrow. Perhaps shame, in the right dose, helps you slide some of the pieces of yourself back in place where you can begin to see a crisper, clearer picture of who you are now.

I don’t know. I’m still learning, obviously. Aren’t we all?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is an invisible weight to grief that is bound up in our inability to honestly grapple with the emotions experienced and expressed by grieving humans.

I mean that more as an observation and not a statement of fact or in judgment.

We are, or at least can be, as a species, extraordinarily miserable at piloting ourselves and others through heavy emotion, grief being the most profound I’ve yet to experience.

I think of other mammals who mourn.

The orca who carried her dead calf for more than 1,000 miles, followed by another who did the same, diving, diving, diving to retrieve her lifeless baby each time it slipped away from her own body.

The elephants who stop and form a defensive circle before tenderly exploring the remains of their matriarch, trunks interrogating skull, hind feet delicately pressed against skeleton, bleached bones picked up and worried over inch by inch.

The weight of that body or those bones, what do they mean against the heft of the deep, unrelenting grief that fills nearly every internal space?

Nothing, and maybe everything.

I see the ritual of carrying at least part of our grief on the outside as a means of maintaining what little control we have over the newly scrambled signals of our internal life.

There’s something beautiful and righteous about Tahlequah nosing her decomposing daughter around Puget Sound as if to say: “Something in me, too, is rotting.”

When Jason came to the house to gather information he needed to cremate my mother, I asked him if he had her. “Yes,” he answered. “ We pick the body up within a couple of hours.”

Shortly before he left, I asked how long it would take. A brief flash of confusion crossed his face before he answered: “Sending in all the information and getting the death certificate and social security taken care of, three to four weeks usually. Social security has been backed up since COVID.”

I suspected he knew what I was really asking: How long will it take for my mother to turn to ash?

I wanted to know my mother’s very last moments, didn’t want her alone, even in thought, until she was returned to us to eventually return her to the wind and the rain and the sun and the Earth.

I wanted to know the chamber used during the cremation process is called a retort and that temperatures reach 1400F to 1800F, the body’s large water content evaporating first before the soft tissue, fat, muscle and organs break down. From start to finish, the average human takes between 2.5 and 3.5 hours to cremate.

What’s left is mostly bone, first passed over with a strong magnet to pull any metal before being pulverized in a cremulator.

I first thought her pacemaker would have been left to be picked from the remains, but learned it would have been removed prior to her being placed in the retort because the lithium-based battery is at risk of exploding when subjected to such high heat for so long.

When we unplugged her pacemaker monitor at home when it started blinking, I wrongly assumed those slow flashes of orange meant she was in the cremation process when all they really indicated was that she was gone, which I already knew.

I imagine some folks can’t understand my need to fill in these blanks. Why would I ever want to know what happened to my mom during the cremation process?

I don’t really know how to answer that beyond saying this point is just where my brain and my heart meet. Over the years, I’ve developed a very real reverence for life–in no small part because of the losses I’ve endured–which includes a very deep respect for death.

Honoring my mom’s life, honoring our relationship and the abiding love we had for one another obliged me to see her through to dust. I didn’t want unknowns clouding the clarity, how wholly I saw her and me.

Share

After Kurt died, a friend caught me coming out of the English department office and told me, exasperated: “I wish I could turn you upside down and shake the grief out of you!”

Unlike orcas, human tolerance for outward-facing grief is low. We want equilibrium restored quickly, or at least the appearance of composure. We don’t want to have to bob and weave around someone’s emotions. We expect, as the old and wholly untrue myth of America demands, self-reliance.

Throughout her vigil, Tahlequah’s pod sustained her. They would carry her calf so she could rest or eat. Sometimes, they fed her. They stayed close. Her grief was truly communal.

I think about that now. What if I had 10 or 15 people constantly close. Would that be a comfort or annoyance? Probably a little of both, though I’ve always loved closeness.

When I was young, my maternal grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins would come and stay for a couple of days during Christmas. We’d get the rollaway cot out, kids in sleeping bags, a fire would burn down to embers late into the night.

There was a feeling of fullness in those days and nights.

Maybe that’s what I’m missing in grief. The knowing connection that can only exist when people engage in this world and with one another honestly and with a vulnerability that can be very hard to muster.

The one relief I have is knowing that I loved my mom with as little reservation and defense as I could, even when I knew this day would come, miles and years stretched out before me without her. She left this world knowing exactly what she meant to me and how much I loved her.

I think that’s the kind of love I need to get through grief.

I think that’s the kind of love we all deserve.

My mom was my barometer.

She could tell me if I was overreacting. She could give me examples from her own parenting so I could better gauge if what I was spiraling over was something I truly needed to be concerned about or could let go.

She knew when I wasn’t feeling well or when I was upset. She understood my ticks, like when I rub my thumb on the outside of my ear, indicating I’m tired or stressed. Sometimes, when my ears are cold, I just like the way it feels.

She empathized with my penchant for worry and had a way of easing my mind.

She was, after all, a mother who raised a son with an anaphylactic allergy to peanuts in a time before epipens were common. How many races to the hospital, my brother’s face exploded like a pufferfish and his throat closing, did she make?

She was cool, and what made her composure even more stunning is that its origin wasn’t a lack of care or compassion. She just always understood the assignment.

Kurt only came to me in dreams twice. The first time was shortly after he died. My parents were in Ohio with me, sleeping on a futon in my front room.

In the dream, Kurt was talking to me on the telephone, though he was somehow still present, too. He was telling me he had to go.

I must have been crying in my sleep because I woke up to my mom sitting on the edge of my bed, her hand gently resting on my head. She didn’t say anything, at least not right away, tears just silently slipping down my face.

I think about the immensity of the pain she carried then with my brother, too, in the mist of his own heartache. She must have felt how far she needed to stretch her love to protect us both. She must have wondered if either of us would be too broken to survive.

When I first got the call, I didn’t believe she had died because I hadn’t felt her leave.

Now, knowing what we know about her brain injury, she was gone before she even got to the hospital.

I don’t lament the hope we had for those few days.

I don’t regret saying out loud: “I think I would know if she was gone. I still feel her here.”

I can think rationally about how those feelings were simply my mind helping me cope with what felt like an impossibility. Part of the genius of our brain is its ability to understand the information we need to be spoon fed and what can come in a rush.

Love, the floodgates open, euphoria reigns. Grief, start sandbagging.

The truth is: I still feel her here.

Still.

Still.

Still.

Still, I’m lost without her physical presence.

I’m unmoored, unanchored, topsy-turvy. I try to think of other, less ordinary ways to say what I’m feeling. Why can’t I find a description as extraordinary as the loss?

I understand the language of grief. Why is my tongue so twisted by this specific absence then?

The whole world is peculiar and foreign. Is this really the street I’ve driven hundreds of times, mindlessly going to pick up a prescription? Are these the same sidewalks my dog and I have rambled for years? Why does the city I’ve know for 25+ years feel dusky and unfamiliar?

I feel artificial. I wonder sometimes if I’m losing my mind. I’m scared I’m never going to feel good again.

That’s when I want to call my mom most. I want her to talk me back to my center.

Share

In a brief video of Anderson Cooper talking to psychoanalyst Francis Weller about his book “The Wild Edges of Grief,” Weller talks about the need to honor grief.

Living to deliberately avoid what grief is telling us about ourselves inevitably backfires.

“But at some point, the strategies fail, and then something more genuine is asked to be encountered,” Weller says.

I think of David Attenborough’s documentary “Ocean,” the scenes of the bottom trawlers scraping the sea floor clean, not in renewal but like a botched abortion, sediment and rock rising in both protest and resignation, marine life shoveled into nets indiscriminately.

Interestingly, just when you think Attenborough can’t drag you any deeper into hopelessness, he unveils the ocean’s greatest strength: her resilience.

With a little bit of our help, she has an amazing capacity for regeneration.

I remember that’s my strength, too. Resilience that’s not tied to indifferent endurance or defiance but is instead dependent on my willingness to meet an ask for authenticity with vulnerability.

All of the things that make me feel unsteady and unhinged are necessary. In many ways, just like grief, I am the same, same, but different.

I am me … and not me.

The work, I remind myself, isn’t getting over or even through.

The work is running my head and heart over a landscape I don’t recognize anymore and learning who I am anew.

I always hated the way the pastel flowers on my comforter looked against the brown and rust shag carpeting covering most of my apartment. The phone on the floor is ringing. It’s early morning. I reach down, lift the receiver and croak: “Hello.”

Time links together seconds that turn to minutes and hours that become days and weeks and months and years. You would drive yourself crazy thinking about all the possibilities contained in a single second, but you’d also be a fool to deny its potential.

The words come fast, like he needs to get them out before he inhales them back in, swallowing what he knows without doubt will be marked as a defining moment in my life. I don’t remember the exact order, only highlights: “Very bad news,” “hit and killed.”

One second. Half marked by a sleepy hello; the other half a fissure, a small crack threatening a wide expanse.

“Very bad news” and “hit and killed” flood into mind where they are quickly stamped with denial. “No, no, no, no, no” I send back into his ear, south to his heart that wisely recommends silence, the absence of everything — time included.

The brown I’ve always hated closes in on me. My apartment feels too small. Outside, I pace, imagining that by simply putting one foot in front of the other I can stay ahead of that last half second, stop myself from dropping into the vast unknown of grief, stay where denial can reign without upsetting reality.

But alas, you know that’s not possible.

Half seconds merge, becoming one whole second, undivided, sleepy complacency muddled with a terror and sadness I didn’t think possible.

August 9, 2016

I slide the back off one of the pictures and look for the obituary I know is tucked inside. All those words that can’t possibly be expected to convey the value of one lifetime, no matter how impossibly short. Born, died. Surviving, survived.

Surviving, survived.

I’d never thought how apt a description that is, taking the task of grieving down to its barest essential: continuing to allow my heart to beat, breath to fill my lungs, one second to one minute to one hour to one day to one week to one month to one year over and over and over again.

But of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

As with most of us, grief proves more complicated in character than her imagined obituary might suggest. All of her darkest imperfections are matched by a lighter tenderness that becomes more apparent as seconds become minutes become hours become days become weeks become months become years over and over and over.

I carried unbearable until I came to acceptance. I guarded despair while waiting for promise. I didn’t blink against the darkness until I saw a pinhole of light. I submitted to I have to until I want to took hold.

And that’s all grief’s domain, the territory she shares with you, sometimes against your will, until she can deliver you to something better than just surviving. All of her, in that one second, contradictory, both relentless and merciful until the landscape shifts and surviving becomes living.

Living.

I flip the picture back over and whisper, “I love you.”

I love you into this life that includes your death; one second allowing me to pull you from the past into the present without tying myself to misery, for all the minutes to hours to days to weeks to months to years and on and on and on.

For weeks after Kurt died my routine was the same. Get up and smoke a cigarette and then perform the very basics of living. In and out; in and out; in and out — breathing was compulsory. The only thing keeping me tethered to Earth, really, was my body functioning as it was born to function. If I’d had the option to flip a switch and be gone … I’d be gone.

Of course, that’s the immediate story—the story that was my inner life in it’s truest and most unedited form. The story of me after sudden and deep loss.

The truer of the true stories I tell myself about losing Kurt is there was plenty that kept me tethered. My parents, my cousin who flew out and got lost with me on some random Ohio road, steady to my insecure. My brother, whose letter to the court I couldn’t even read or submit it was so full of rage. Kurt’s dad, who stood up that day and acknowledged me as family. His mother and brother and sister who did the same, every day, before and after. My friends.

Music.

I vividly remember meeting Kurt, sitting next to him that night as he sang this song, one of his mom’s favorites. I don’t think he chose it from the jukebox, but he sang it like it was a part of him.

Then, he looked at me and said: “Nevermind.”

My marriage was never good. The signs were always there, but I ignored them and in some ways, perhaps, I needed to punish myself—not just with my marriage, but with everything. I wore living like a hair shirt. If I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t paying mind to his memory.

He never asked for this penance, of course. He never demanded that my husband come home one day and simply say: “I’m moving to Colorado. I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

Similar to Kurt dying, my physical body took over. I walked down the stairwell of our condo building, through the first door, through the second, the phone ringing in my ear. I don’t remember being panicked. I don’t remember silently hoping that my mom would pick up, though I am sure I did wish just that. The air was cool and I gulped its crispness into my lungs, similar to how when you wake up hot and hungover you gulp water.

When she answered, I’m not sure what came out of my mouth first, but soon enough the cards were on the table and everyone knew what was happening, everyone waited in shock. By the end of our conversation though, I knew I’d be OK. My parents were in Colorado visiting my brother and niece, and though they offered, though my brother nearly insisted, I didn’t want them to fly back. I was fine. I was going to be fine.

“You don’t come from a dysfunctional family,” my dad reminded me a couple of days later, and by this he only meant that I had people who fully supported me—and I did. I did. I knew I had resources, both financial and emotional.

I played this song endlessly during my divorce, which was frantic and stressful. My mom was the only other person in the courtroom who knew me the day my marriage was dissolved. The only thing the judge asked me about directly was religion. “What if your spouse wants to raise X in X way?”

The answer was short and agreed upon. My child’s dad didn’t want them caught up in endless battles, so whatever was fine.

My lawyer, who, as I remember her, was good and thorough and kind, told me as we walked to file the necessary papers after appearing before the judge: “Being a divorce attorney is surprisingly family friendly.”

My kid was crying when I opened their door. A friend of theirs had suggested they might harm themselves. “Nobody can get ahold of them,” they told me.

OK, I thought.

The protocol around suicide is … slippery. Post, everyone hurries to talk about what they could have and should have done. You think you’d move mountains, and in all likelihood, you would.

If the lead in, the preparation, didn’t get in your way.

Because the lead in, … she’s complicated. You don’t want to intrude; you don’t want to overstep, even when every instruction you’ve ever been given has made overstepping necessary; you don’t want to assume you know the person better than they know themselves.

Outside of outright confessions of suicidal ideation, when you’re here, soaked in the interior, your moves become calculated because there is risk on all sides. Push too hard and, like a turtle seeking refuge, you witness who you’re trying to help slowly recede. Push too little and you get a phone call that immediately signals failure on your part.

It’s an impossible position for anyone who loves someone.

“Hi …” they finally text.

Now, the tears suggest relief, not fear. A giving over to the notion that the outcome could have been entirely different—but isn’t—even when the fear and the endless texts asking for assurance would never have prepared them for the alternate reality, the timeline where their friend suddenly stops existing.

I don’t know how close my kid’s friend came to completing suicide. I don’t know how seriously they were truly considering death, what was the angst of age and what was indescribable despair.

I know that to speak that word out loud, to fill it with the very breath that keeps you here, is an act of self-preservation, a call for back up.

A few months later, we’re driving home from a birthday dinner for my kid. We’d all stuffed ourselves with salad and pasta, everyone ordering a dessert to share. When we’re done, we lean back in our chairs and sigh, smiles all around.

I drive and my kid and their friend pick the music. At first, they can’t decide. But when they do, we spend the rest of the car ride singing loudly, joyfully. Alive.

Dying is a bitch.

And that’s simplifying everything we know about dying.

There is a mythology that surrounds dying that promises release and freedom without ever mentioning the agony and pain that bookends the experience. We’re conditioned to want death to be peaceful. “They died peacefully,” we tell ourselves. “They’re at peace now,” we assure the mourning.

For me, there is a real fear attached to knowing that I will one day be every person I’ve ever buried. Every time I notch a symptom that might speak to larger problems, I have a moment of calm followed by a laundry list of reasons why I’m not ready to shed my mortal coil.

My kid. My family. My friends. My dogs. The perfect day. When we first hit 65 degrees after consecutive cold months. Sunshine. That feeling of accomplishment when I finish a hard workout. Teaching my kid something new. Smiling at strangers. Talking to people with similar interests. Trying new beers. A big sigh before I finally relax enough to sleep. Watching baseball.

I’m not thinking of death today. But perhaps my experience with death, in all of its immediacy, has prepared me for loss in all of its iterations. Loss is everywhere, especially in times of uncertainty, especially now.

Loss of income. Possible recession. Decrease in intimacy, closeness, warmth. Death, certainly. There is loss everywhere in this time, this right now, and it’s hard to reconcile the world that we’ll emerge into, reborn, not in a religious sense, but fundamentally. Everyone who walks through the door to freedom, to any sense of a renewed normalcy, will be a survirvor.

Survivor.

Strangely, my constant—music—has left me. Here, now, today and these past weeks, I’ve depended on my kid, who, like their mom, has found the sheltering quality of music. I haven’t listened to any of my own, save the one or two we have in common.

I’ve largely relied on them, and have found a beautiful mix of rebellion and community in their play list.

Rebellion not in the sense of misunderstanding what’s at stake. Rebellion in the sense that we’re all underdogs right now. There is a sense of fight, as unintentional as it might be with my kid, that is rooted in knowing that these are unusual times that require both individual and collective strength.

My memories will be both individual and communal. I’ll have made personal decisions that could haunt me, or not. I’ll have worried too much or not enough. I’ll have either contributed to a greater good or I will have …

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I heeded a call. A call that, when I listened, spoke to the best in me. The need to be fiercely me coupled with a focused determination to take care of my larger community, my kid, the next generation, the previous generation—myself—so we all might learn, I might learn, that we’re always interconnected, always dependent, even in solitude.

Always our best when we hold both me and you together.

She died more than a week ago, but titling this “My mom died one week and one day ago” seemed too precise, and in ways that feel unexplainable and murky, my mom does die everyday, over and over.

When I was 26, I lost the love of my life on a dark road. He was walking home—home to his own mother—after working the door at a local bar, a job he did some nights after he finished as a mechanic at one of the dealerships.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve stayed with my mom,” he told me as I got into my car to go home after we’d had dinner together. I made him promise he wouldn’t walk, he agreed, and then I kissed him goodnight and left him, standing there, hurrying to get home because I wasn’t feeling well.

I get a lot of calls from 800 numbers that are spam so when I looked at my phone that night I let it go. A couple of minutes later I noticed a voicemail. The transcription was something about my parents medical alert system and how my dad had called because he couldn’t get my mother awake.

I started to pace. Always a bad sign.

My dad’s hearing is bad, and truth be told I wasn’t ready to hear what I knew he was going to tell me, so I dialed her number instead even when I knew the chances of anyone picking up were slim.

I messaged her friend and let her know my mom was having a medical emergency. Can you go over there and see what’s going on? “On my way,” she wrote back to me in an instant.

Next, my brother, who was driving his daughter to college. When he answered he thought I was his wife who he’d been spoofing, trying to make her believe he’d seen Snoop Dogg in a restaurant. “Mom’s had a medical emergency,” I told him. “I can’t get in touch with Dad but Cindy’s on her way.” He would try dad, he said, and call me back.

The details came from a Sheriff and an EMT who’d responded to the call: She’d been down for 20 minutes without a pulse. They shocked her twice and administered four shots of epinephrine.

“I’m sorry, Shellie,” my brother said when he called back. “She’s gone.”

Kurt’s dad woke me from a dead sleep. When I picked up the phone, my voice was still froggy and thick. “I’ve got some really bad news,” he blurted out, probably unsure he would be able to finish if he waited. “Kurt was killed.”

The part of my brain that processes incoming information slammed shut, unwilling to let those words have meaning, letting them sit outside, useless and undefined. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I screamed back at him.

“I have to call my mom,” I said, hanging up.

“She’s still with us,” Cindy exhaled, and everything I’d been holding back and pacing away across my floor came rushing to the front of my mouth. “Really?” I sobbed.

She was, in that moment, the sickest person in the hospital, the ER doctors said, but they’d intubated and sedated her and were going to transfer her to ICU.

When I summed up for the doctor what I thought I’d heard him tell me, he agreed I’d understood: “There were some positive signs that suggested she might make a recovery, in some way. There were a lot of critical signs that suggested she would not survive. The next 24 hours were going to be critical.”

“She’s alive!” I shouted to my son in Vermont, who’d been at the library when I first called to tell him his Nanny was in trouble. He’d muted himself so he could be sick in the bathroom.

My mom was in the room when I gave birth to my son. Watched as they delivered him to this world, poked him under the lamps and cuffed him with a bracelet that said he was mine.

“He’s beautiful,” she said with true wonder, as though seeing something otherworldly for the very first time. Their hearts instantly knitted together.

“She’s alive?”

I immediately tempered the expectation infused in that word: “She’s very, very sick,” I added. “She’s was down for 20 minutes without a pulse. She is still critically, critically ill and may still die.”

The guy who hit Kurt left him in the road, turning back toward home to get his son. He’d been drinking, or that was the assumption.

A nurse who saw Kurt stopped and called an ambulance.

“When they put us in the small consultation room, I knew it was bad,” his sister told me later.

Doctors said he died instantly. His neck had been broken.

When I first saw my mom laying there, intubated, a ventilator doing some of the work of breathing, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

My dad was in a wheelchair at her side, stroking her arm. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, “Dad,” I said, bending down to give him a hug.

“Oh,” he exhaled over and over.

Out in the waiting room, my mom’s friend grabbed me, my aunt and uncle enclosing me in a hug, everyone shocked into near complete silence. A short while later with my dad falling asleep in his wheelchair, I went back to be with my mother.

Finally, alone, I laid my hand on her forehead. “Hey pretty lady,” I whispered. “Looks like you just got your hair done. You went a little shorter and spicier with the color. I love it.”

I bent over and kissed her cheek and told her that I loved her over and over and over.

Two days of peaks and troughs—hope and heartache—were followed by three doctors visiting with the same definitive and devastating news: She had sustained a massive and irreversible brain injury.

The pulmonologist was the last to leave, telling my brother and I that he would write orders such that nurses could access as much morphine as needed. They wanted to slow her respiration so when they removed the ventilator her breathing wouldn’t quicken too much, and they wanted to help with any anxiety.

As the ICU nurse explained what would happen, I asked, as I asked every nurse who’d provided care to my mother, if she’d always wanted to be an ICU nurse. She was the only one over the two days my mom was there who’d answered “Yes.”

“Have you ever seen ‘Dying for Sex?’” I asked her. When she said “No,” I told her she might enjoy it, that one scene in the series stuck with me and came to mind as she was walking us through my mother’s death.

“There’s a hospice nurse who tells those caring for the young main character who is terminally ill that ‘the body knows how to die,’” I described. “I thought that was such a beautiful way of talking about the process.”

She agreed on both counts.

My mom needed loads of morphine to get her respiration down far enough to remove the ventilator. Everyone in the room had a chuckle about how this woman who didn’t drink was now high as a kite. “She is flying,” the nurse confirmed.

When the ventilator was removed, my dad and brother and I stayed next to her bed, my son on the phone. She shepherded him into life and he would usher her into death.

I rubbed her forehead, tears traveling down my face and dripping onto her neck, a continuous stream of love and gratitude and sorrow and promises poured into her as her breath rattled and rattled and rattled and, finally, stopped.

Years ago, I had a friend who was traveling abroad. We kept in touch via email. During one of our exchanges, he answered one of my questions with “same, same but different.”

That’s how loss feels to me: Same, same but different.

The loss of my mom feels familiar in ways. The deep pit in my chest as I tried to work out for myself that my mother no longer exists. The catching myself thinking of something I have to tell her. The wondering if in some other plane of existence she is alive, well, either saved or never sick.

All of those and more I’ve felt before. Same, same but different.

What never changes is that loss follows what I’ve found to be life’s larger pattern: A study in opposites, an ask for all who make her acquaintance to test their ability to hold what feels contradictory together.

They came and interrogated my mom’s pacemaker while she was in the ICU. They could pinpoint when her heart went into ventricular tachycardia, somewhere around 6:10 or so.

“She had a small run at 3:48,” the tech said. “Then one at 6:10 or so that was more than a minute long.”

Back in February, I was visiting when she fell over like a tree. I heard her as I came back in from walking my dog, though at the time assumed it was my dad. When I got up to my parents’ bedroom, she was conscious, but her voice was a forced whisper.

I called 911 and went back and forth between her and the window, checking in every minute or so, asking if she was still with me. “Yes,” was always her answer in a low moan.

She spent two nights in the ICU and another two in the cardiac unit.

At discharge, I was talking with a nurse who told me a heart can’t sustain a v-tach rhythm for more than 20 seconds or so. “Then, you go into cardiac arrest.”

After she died, my son told me he’d gotten a Facebook message from her that simply said “I didn’t send this!” She was talking about a previous message that was probably from my dad poking on his phone and sending things by accident.

Her message was sent at 6:05 p.m.

I sometimes wonder, suddenly and without any deep meaning attached, how close I am to dying.

Do you ever think about that?

Like, you’re sitting or driving or working or chatting with friends and, unbeknownst to you, you’re living the last 30 minutes of your entire life.

Share

When my mom wrote that message to Ben, her heart might already have been in v-tach. During the earlier episodes, nurses in the ICU would come running in, alarms from my mom’s heart monitor blaring, only to find her sitting up relatively unfazed.

“You don’t feel that?” they’d ask her incredulously, looking at the wild rhythm on the screen. “You’re not lightheaded or dizzy?”

“No,” she’d answer.

I think about that now. The bottom chambers of her heart — bumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbum — on a rapid race to oblivion, sprinting to its own demise.

She was talking to the same friend I’d only minutes later ask for help when she arrested, not in a panic or pained gasp, but quietly.

“I heard your dad shout “Flowers, Flowers,” she told me when she called from the ER, “but I thought he just needed her help and our call had dropped.”

I wonder if she’d been standing instead of sitting the v-tach rhythm might have been interrupted by a fall. I wonder if a pacemaker with a defibrillator would have saved her. I still type in the symptoms she was experiencing prior to the cardiac event, imagining the questions I’d encourage she ask her doctor.

I wonder about those minutes and seconds that were ordinary and mundane until they were anything but in an instant.

Death, swift and greedy.

Grief is unknotting the wonder and knowing what you can let go and what you need to resolve. My problem has always and forever been my resolve for resolve.

I know nothing will bring her back.

And yet, searching feels like clawing something back from death.

Maybe what I’m really hoping for is a way to make those last moments count for something more.

Almost every evening after dinner, I restart the series “Heated Rivalry” from the beginning.

The story centers two closeted hockey players — Shane and Ilya — who fall in love. One gay, one bisexual; one Canadian, one Russian.

I first heard about the program as its fandom started growing in the U.S. after HBO Max picked it up for distribution.

My reaction was immediate, weighty and visceral.

I think I’ve watched the entire series no fewer than a dozen times, likely more.

It’s become like therapy for me.

I sometimes think about all the people who exist that I’ll never meet, or those I’ve met but no longer know.

Similar to how if you plot your individual presence within the reality of the universe you start to realize you are but an almost imperceptible blink of energy.

Here … *poof.*

While here, I am a collector.

My mind squirrels away tiny moments I have no logical reason to document and rarely understand their meaning beyond small, seemingly mundane remembrances.

But noticing, quiet observation, is my way of knitting myself into this world.

Shannon, the photographer, my head in her lap, her fingers in my hair as she drove me back to my dorm the weekend we graduated from college.

Andy, muscles and tank top that if you were judging books by covers might make you think he was a frat guy instead of a person who would let a mosquito drink her fill from his forearm. “I mean, she already bit me,” he explained when he saw me staring.

Leah, who one night leaned over and asked if she could kiss me while we were sitting at the bar. One, short but slow. Years later she’d text when one of our favorite bartenders died. “Hey you. Pretty sure Ed was our bartender a few times. Loved these nights looking out onto Dearborn.”

Tim, a true punk rocker with spiked platinum blond hair, leather and Docs, who spoke so eloquently in my freshman seminar class about how the first step to being able to kill someone is dehumanizing your target.

Suzy, tiny and fit, thick English accent, in love with a much older man and independent films.

The longer I live, the more I open myself up to letting my feelings saturate my internal landscape, deep and nourishing if occasionally intimidating, steered by raising my trans son and losing two of the greatest loves of my life.

I want to be in this world fully.

I did not learn intimacy growing up. My parents didn’t model closeness.

There was no hand holding or hugs. There were very few “I love yous” spoken either casually or seriously. Kisses were scarce and awkward, saved for occasions like an anniversary or birthday. Affection was for behind closed doors, which when you’re a child feels like secrecy and shame.

Their relationship looked more like a division of labor than a love story. My mom the emotional bedrock, my dad the provider.

In a conversation not long before she died, my mom shared she’d spontaneously kissed my dad on their wedding day, after the ceremony but before the cake. “Why’d you do that?” he’d asked her in response.

“I knew I was in trouble,” she told me.

The trouble here being a person who felt deeply, needed her roots generously watered with emotion and compassion, had herself grown up in a house punctuated by cruelty and coldness and somehow still managed to want more.

The way, as a kid then teenager then adult, I always wanted more, too.

I just didn’t know what I was wanting or the depth of the deficit I was carrying.

Share

Kurt caught me off guard, both in life and death.

My experience before him was shallow and insignificant, not just in romance but everything.

I was always, always too much.

My feelings like a chasm, deep and endless, with no proper channel, just me, their imperfect and stunted vessel.

I had no way of taming my need, my desire to give meaning to the entire world and make sense of my own place. Imagine carrying all your senses on the surface, heavy and burdened with input, but not having the understanding or skill to process the overload.

That was, that is, that can be me, then, there and now.

Circuits screaming for relief and me — dumbfounded and raw — unable to find the shut off valve or rewire.

I didn’t want avoidance or absence.

I wanted conversations that would help me unravel the disorientation created by having such big feelings with no real place to put them. I wanted people to recognize themselves in me. I wanted fellowship. I wanted deep connection in ways both big and small.

Kurt taught me how to slow down, stand still long enough to let someone take in the emotional view, get acquainted and acclimated.

“Are you …” he began, before trailing off, having just sung the entirety of Me and Bobby McGee in honor of his mother as we sat together nursing beers at the bar.

I knew the question and answered, a little bewildered he’d even wondered. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

In therapy, I finally come round to my point.

“When my mom died, she took my entire history with her.”

Trying to put a bun in my hair when I begged her, even though she knew it was too thin to hold.

Grabbing a stuffed animal like one Ben had gotten for his birthday that I liked, the shopkeeper asking, looking at Ben, “Is this for this little cutie?” My mom responding, looking at me, “No, it’s for this big cutie.”

The blueberry pie she’d make from scratch for my birthday every year. The poppy seed thumbprint cookies every holiday. Godiva truffles in the mail and bags of Cool Ranch Doritos on the counter whenever I visited.

Silently sitting on the edge of my bed after hearing me cry in my sleep, waiting for me to wake up, a hand gently resting on my side.

Watching my son take his first breath. Yelling at the doctor to do something about the pain. Waiting for his dad to leave the hospital room before giving me a necklace with Ben’s sapphire birthstone. “I wanted you to have this.”

I think of her brain cascading away, sweeping everything she ever knew into the abyss, collapsing under the weight of oxygen deprivation.

“This is where everything that makes you, you is stored,” her doctors told us, explaining the brain top to bottom, finally arriving at the brain stem, the only thing really left of my mom, giving her the involuntary but essential ability to take a few breaths on her own.

The person who knew me best and loved me most was already gone before I was at her side in the ICU.

And, in ways, me with her.

Grief loops back. “You’re talking more about Kurt,” my therapist notices.

It’s true. Even knowing you can’t compartmentalize grief hadn’t prepared me for how much losing my mom would revive the loss of Kurt. Then, the ache was physical, like someone had scooped out my center and left a furious, gnawing void.

“I feel a lot of the same feelings I did when he died,” I admit. Close to three decades of absence suddenly feel stifling and near. “We didn’t have the decades my mom and I had together, but he was the first person to really get me, show me care, be vulnerable so I could be vulnerable, too.”

When I told him how often I woke up at night just to slip my hand under his shirt, craving skin to skin contact, and he responded by just not wearing a T-shirt to bed anymore.

Stepping outside when the door at the bar was slow, him leaning against the building, me leaning into him, kissing, unbothered by the outside world.

My feet resting in his lap, his thumb slowly smoothing over my skin as he talked to his twin brother about a soccer game.

Driving home from a long road trip to a friend’s wedding. “How does it feel to know you won’t ever have to do this drive alone again?” he asked out of the blue.

Sitting on the curb of a gas station in the early morning hours one of the first nights we met, talking about how he came home sick one day to find his then fiancee fucking someone else on their couch.

Driving to bingo when I started to worry I’d left a candle burning and him quietly turning around to go check with my asking.

Sitting on the couch, visiting with his family when he gets up to go do something. He leans over and gives me a slow, unreserved kiss before leaving the room.

Playing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” on the jukebox every time we shot pool together.

In ways both similar and different, my mom and Kurt both gave me cover and a way to continually renew my promise to myself.

They both held up a mirror and introduced me to my tenderness, not as a weakness but a strength. Taught me how to protect her while at the same time coaxing her out into the open so she could seek herself in the wild, unafraid and gutsy.

“I think that’s why ‘Heated Rivalry’ is such a balm to me,” I tell my therapist. “I’m replaying what two of the best people I’ve known in my life taught me about intimacy. Ilya and Shane are like both sides of myself.”

One cautious, one a little more audacious. Both with their own reasons for not believing they can either have or deserve what they want and need but still, somehow, finding ways to reach and reach and reach, compelled to nurture their feelings, attend to their softness, over and over and over — after joy, after disappointment, after heartbreak, after contentment.

Against every impulse that suggests self-preservation requires distance and solitude.

Intimacy, in all its forms, demands daring and patience. A resolve to dampen self-doubt and cultivate resilience while knee deep in unease and insecurity, because beginnings, and endings, are always plump with both potential and peril. Being that open, that alive, is a definitive and unambiguous kind of exposure.

You … laid bare.

In the show, I come to realize, I find the heart of both my mom and Kurt reminding me that living is, at least in part, a conscious choice to remain entangled.

I want to remain entangled.

Woven in and around, in spite of death, in celebration of being, vital and essential, knitted to the cosmic human experience, moment by moment, again and again, from ever to end.

I’ve always been interested in social justice. I am a person who has felt deeply for most of their life.

But, moving myself from caring to action proved challenging for me.

As a white woman, my learning curve—not so much around what needed to change and who needed my commitment but around how best to show up and where and when I could engage, disrupt, uplift—was steep. Busting open the “go along to get along” culture so many of us are raised in was difficult for me. I felt paralyzed, telling myself I didn’t know enough to feel confident enough to act.

That’s a cop out. Let’s be real here.

And, if you’re in a similar place, I’m here to tell you that the narrative around “What can I really do?” that I leaned on requires you answer with something other than fear. You need to continually and forcefully push aside your reluctance to plunge yourself into what will necessarily be some deep, deep discomfort and just do the god damn work.

Looking back, was a perfect storm in my own personal history that led me to where I am now, to a more rigid demand of myself to honestly reconcile both this nation’s past and present, and do the real work of actively engaging in fights for justice.

First, I was the mother of a gender expansive kid who needed and deserved a parent who could hold themselves accountable and do the deep work of untangling the internal mess of unquestioned obedience to a social order that really made no sense.

Then came Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in June 2014, a piece of writing that flattened me and truly was the origin of deeper work around racial justice.

The very next month, Eric Garner was murdered by state violence. Then, Michael Brown in August. Just three months later in November, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by an officer who fired three seconds after arriving on scene.

As people waited for decisions around whether charges would be filed, almost every BIPOC person I followed, read and listened to prepared and talked about the reality they knew, from experience, was coming: Nothing would be done.

Back then, I was naive enough to believe the platitudes people so often repeat around justice.

Of course, none of the officers involved in any of these murders were charged.

Protests started in earnest.

Ten years on, I am still stung with the shame of my own certainty.

During this time, Twitter was a real place of community and organizing. I quietly followed people, from trans people to BIPOC creators, to really lean into my own growth.

I set up some guidelines for myself around engagement, none of which involved actively sharing my own worldview:

1. Trust the person’s experience, even when that experience is different or directly contradicts others in the same community.

2. Ask myself, over and over, how my own experience, from gender to whiteness to where I grew up and where I am now, informs my understanding of the world. What don’t I know about myself? What assumptions, both conscious and subconscious, am I making? Where did I need to dismantle internal default settings that served a dominant narrative that harmed vulnerable communities?

Coates had a Twitter account I followed and loved. His profile picture was General Grant. Honestly, my understanding of the Civil War then was basic and uninspired and could probably be boiled down to the barest minimum: North = good, South = bad, Lincoln freed the slaves.

(I’ve sat here for more than a few minutes staring out my window thinking how I might make myself look less stupid here before finally deciding that brutal honesty is the only thing that cements lasting personal growth, and if at best I’m trying to help other people engage and at worst just sharing, then I need to let my ignorance stand).

The mythology around Lincoln freeing slaves overshadows the very real personal work he had to do to get to solid action around not only emancipation but equality.

Lincoln’s primary concern was saving the Union, and for a long stretch at the start of the war, the North’s strategy reflected that interest.

General George McClellan was cautious and largely if not wholly uninterested in confronting slavery, something that increasingly frustrated Lincoln as the war dragged on and eventually led to McClellan challenging Lincoln for the presidency in 1864.

But Lincoln, too, waffled.

When you dig into the history of this time, you begin to understand Lincoln tried almost everything to avoid reckoning with the brutality and inhumanity of slavery along the way to his deeper commitment to emancipation, including colonization, a plan he pursued with purpose beginning as early as the mid-1850s, and one that called for slaves to be freed over time and deported to land outside the United States.

Never mind it was enslaved Black Americans who were almost solely responsible for the work resulting in this nation’s enormous wealth. Never mind that by the 1850s, every slave had been born on U.S. soil.

As I poke at my own ignorance, what continually strikes me is that if not for an openness to listening and a curiosity pointed inward, Lincoln’s legacy may have been vastly different.

Many times, Lincoln was saved from his own ignorance and worst impulses by his respect for and relationship with Frederick Douglass. In community with Douglass, Lincoln was able to interrogate his own worldview and do work that today we might very well name “personal growth.”

Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural speech hints at how far he’d come: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'“

In other words: Justice would be the war continuing until all that had been plundered by white men was repaid in lost wealth and spilled blood.

Imagine for a minute having leaders today who were as keen to grapple with the world with just a touch of the same intellectual honesty?

That won’t happen.

And honestly, that’s not the point.

The point is that as we set off, today, on what is bound to be some of the darkest days, we can do this work.

We can commit to never stop poking our own ignorance, digging out our own blind spots so we can more clearly see where we are and where we want to be. We can have difficult conversations with ourselves and others.

We can be in community with other humans and consciously choose to believe their experience and join them in their struggle for equality and liberation.

We can use our privilege where we have it to offer protection.

This nation, this world, is not its leaders, nor is it wealth or fame or any number of things we are told to value and uplift on any given day.

This world is you and me and every other human who has the capacity to dream and build and grow.

You’ll likely be asked to give up your power to believe that we the people is, in the simplest terms, the very essence of what we’re all doing here. Some days, you might even believe you have no power.

But that is and never has been true.

We’ve been near here before.

We can withstand together.

I need people to know my son.

Because I need people to care about my son.

Not in the casual way they care about their favorite sports figure being out for the season with an injury or the celebrity crush going through their latest divorce or conscious uncoupling.

No, I need people to care about my son in the same ways they care about their own children, or their niblings, or their aging parents, or even themselves.

And I need elected officials to love my son not only for a season, like when they need his vote or my vote or the vote of anyone who truly cares about trans people and the LGBTQ+ community, but for lifetimes.

Because lifetimes are what’s at stake.

My trans son is who helped me truly understand the full complexity of being human.

Being his parent and navigating his experience with gender alongside him blew open my understanding of everything in this world, requiring I cultivate the courage to take a critical look at all I’d subconsciously absorbed, untangle the mess, and rebuild with an unflinching honesty.

What that meant for me is doing some of the most deep, personal, and vulnerable work I’ve ever done.

I questioned everything, my son, most often—at least at first. My need to know if my child was trans bordered on compulsive. I felt definitively knowing was the only way I would be able to parent him, to advocate for his needs.

Back then, some 15 years ago, the most common answer you got if you Googled whether your child was transgender or not was, somewhat ironically, fairly binary: If your kid was “consistent, insistent and persistent” in their desire to not be their assigned sex at birth, chances are your child was trans. If not, then your kid was … probably not trans, but … maybe?

That answer did not bring me any closer to understanding what my child needed from me.

Turns out, as with so many things in life, I was just asking the wrong question.

Instead, appropriately, necessarily, I turned my gaze inward, where my focus should have been all along.

Then, the questions I started asking weren’t about whether or not my kid was trans but, rather, why I was so afraid the answer might be “Yes.”

After the 2024 election, pundits, analysts and legislators were eager to dissect Harris’ loss and, to the surprise of no-one, they found an answer quick: trans people.

From Tom Suozzi to Seth Moulton to Chris Murphy, Dems almost immediately pointed fingers at the demographic that not only needs and deserves the most protection but is also one of the most reliably Democratic voting blocs.

Instead, they told us, in a chorus as loud as it was redundant, we need to once again focus our embrace on the working class, slough off our insistence that trans people deserve humanity, and quit quibbling over inclusive language and equity because, as they noted in quieter and more veiled language, all of those things make the average person uncomfortable.

“We need a bigger tent,” Murphy said over and over and over again.

No, I thought to myself, over and over and over again.

What we need, what all legislators who can’t fathom why protection of LGBTQ+ people is not something you negotiate away after an election loss need, is bigger imaginations and a bigger commitment to community.

I recognize the language of discomfort. I recognize the posture of not understanding and then, instead of committing to understanding, letting defenses rise. I recognize the defensive stance meant to protect my peace and stabilize my worldview.

Because I came to my trans child via questions. I came to my trans child in discomfort, in knowing that I was going to have to take my understanding of reality down to the studs and remodel my relationship with and in this world in very fundamental ways.

Yes, that work is hard. Yes, that work can be uncomfortable and intimidating. Yes, that work is delicate and vulnerable.

But, it’s work every person who is elected to represent people—whether locally or nationally—should be willing, even eager, to do.

I carved out new understanding by putting everything I knew under the microscope so I could think honestly about how I knew what I knew and the ways in which the world worked to uphold consensus around normal and good and worthwhile.

Doing this work made one thing clear: There is a certain confidence in the patriarchy and social norms around gender that tricks us into believing they’re immutable.

But, once stripped of their illusion—eyes, heart and mind wiped clear—you begin to really see that nothing and no one is ever easily categorized.

The more I dug, the deeper I sunk, the clearer I was able to see I didn’t really know anything at all, and I could choose to let people—everybody, not just my kid—tell me who they are for themselves. I could meet people where they are and, from there, let them unfold at their own pace.

I learned that agreeing, uncritically, to the social contracts I’d been eased into since childhood was only serving a majority experience that too many people I love don’t share. People in power (and, yes, if you’re having the majority cis, hetero experience, you have power) are careful about what and who might disrupt or topple their own understanding of the world and, more importantly, their place in this world.

They can’t or don’t often engage with this truth because it’s not charming or kind to admit that you want to keep your stake in this world stable and that, most often without thinking, you’ll sacrifice people in really vulnerable positions to so.

But when you start to understand that posture is everyone’s default—we all, no matter who we are or how evolved or inclusive, unconsciously protect our own high ground—you also start to realize that one of the tent poles of being engaged in the world, of building community that really matters and sustains, is to be forever vigilant and conscious about leveling that same high ground.

We need our elected officials to get back to doing the work that matters: Committing to making sure the legislative power voters trust them with is used to protect the most vulnerable among us.

I need the people I vote for to do the work themselves—and help those around them do the work—of adjusting their own worldview to enfold within their majority the humanity of people, like my trans son, who have a different but no less valuable lived experience.

For every legislator who thinks that closing ranks and acting as if the LGBTQ+ community is dispensable is good strategy, please understand there will be a cost: My vote, and the vote of everyone who loves me and my child and every trans child and person out there who in their own beauty make this world better.

There will be no us without them, and I will not cast a vote for anyone who thinks, acts, legislates, strategizes, speaks as though that’s possible, period.

And what I’m inviting everyone reading this to do is commit to the LGBTQ+ community with this same force: Let your legislator know, now, today, tomorrow, for all the day going forward, that action, words, strategy that betray the LGBTQ+ community will cost them your vote.

Take action today:

1. Go to the Congress.gov Find Your Members website and enter your zip code. You will be provided the names and phone numbers for your congressperson and senators. If you additionally wish to contact your state legislators, you can find them via 5calls.org by entering your zip code.

2. Julia Serano provided this sample copy, and I love it’s directness and passion. But, please feel free to customize:
   
   Hello _____, my name is _____ and I’m a constituent from _____. As an LGBTQ person [or ally, or family member of, etc.], I am calling to express my dismay at the number of Democratic politicians who have proposed retreating from trans rights since the election, and the lack of Democratic pushback to speaker Johnson’s and representative Mace’s congressional and proposed federal anti-trans bathroom bans. It’s clear from states where Republicans hold a trifecta that they will not stop with restrooms, or sports, or with trans people—their goal is to roll back all LGBTQ+ rights, censor all LGBTQ+ content, and force all LGBTQ+ people out of the public sphere.
   

   We need our Democratic representatives (like you) to vocally speak out and push back against [and filibuster, if speaking to a senator] any and all anti-LGBTQ+ policies and legislation. Democrats also need us: LGBTQ+ people comprised 8% of voters in November’s election, 86% of whom voted for Vice President Harris. So I urge you to work together with our community to fight back against this GOP anti-LGBTQ+ onslaught starting now!
   
   I promise, I will remember what you did in this moment—whether it be strongly standing up for us, or capitulating to Republicans’ anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic—when time comes for the next election cycle. Thank you for your consideration.

Start Your Own Learning Journey

Here are a few resources for you to start your own dismantling of internal biases that keep us all captive:

1. A digital resource my trans son and I created that talks through in plain language how gender-affirming care happens.

2. Other writing I do around parenting my trans kid to give you a personal perspective on this care.

3. Julia Serano’s work is invaluable and who I turned to often when doing the work of understanding my trans child so I could show up for him the way I wanted and need to show up for him.

4. Erin Reed, an award-winning trans journalist who I depend on for the latest news that affects the LGBTQ+ community.

I avoided conflict at all costs when I was growing up. The reasons for that are many and varied and, as with almost everything, there is nuance and complexity.

We don’t need to go there right now.

A consequence of that impulse, however, is some of what I talk about when writing about raising my trans son. Mainly: I had very few if any boundaries of my own to solidify and reinforce my person, my sense of self.

How was I going to be the best parent for this kid who was wholly embodied when I really had no I to ground me?

Instead, like water insisting on taking the shape of its vessel, I became what and who people wanted or expected. To put a finer point on this: I became what I thought they wanted or expected. So, in reality, I was twice removed.

You might imagine how out of my depth I was, then, when first coming to understand my transgender child. I often and most accurately describe that time as feeling like I was thrown in a lake of ice cold water, and, when I finally come up for air, I’m in an entirely new universe where all my internal messaging has been erased and reset.

Honestly, those first years were almost exclusively filled with personal unpacking, so much sitting with myself and really untangling my own history. I questioned every assumption. I turned every reaction over and over and over.

I quickly came to realize that to be the parent I wanted to be to my trans child, I had to first find myself.

Gratefully, my son, unknowingly, perhaps, helped birth a much truer and more authentic version of myself.

I mention this here because without this work, my ability to take risks, to challenge myself to really sink in and meet the unknown with eyes and heart open, would be stifled and stunted. I would likely still be running on autopilot, unaware my foundation was continually in jeopardy of folding underneath me in an instant.

Not long ago, I started a professional coaching program. I want to eventually focus more specifically on working with families of LGBTQ kids, as well as people who are dealing with grief, because I feel like my experience lends itself to these two demographics well.

With the personal work I’ve done and my own commitment to self-awareness, I thought I’d be a natural. I am curious and genuinely engaged with my world and the people in it, I told myself, and these seem like essential qualities for success.

The first classes were beautiful. I felt invigorated and sustained. I am going to rock this!, I thought.

I imagined being for others what I really needed in my own journey: safe space to be messy and tender. A place to take myself apart, poke at the depths and then put myself back together, sometimes multiple times. A place to explore my contradictions without judgement, and to honor what is so basic and yet so easily forgotten—being human is complex and nuanced.

Then we did some coaching in class and I … flopped. I stacked questions. I had trouble giving the person enough space to explore their own thoughts. I was nervous and felt like my brain was always on the verge of going completely blank. I was so caught up in thinking about the next question I had trouble really tuning into what the person in front of me was telling me.

In other words: Two thumbs all the way down.

Nobody but me might would likely describe the time that way, and I’m not meaning to be unnecessarily hard on myself here. I know myself well enough to believe that I’ll get better. I can assess through the soft lens of self-compassion: I didn’t know we we’re going to be coaching so was caught a bit off guard. This was literally my first time doing any coaching.

But I’d be lying, too, if I said there wasn’t a tiny voice in the back of my head that told me: Hey, maybe you’ll never be any good at this.

So, how do I quiet that voice and continue to do things that scare me?

First, I go back to what I was talking about at the top. Mainly, sinking into vulnerability and letting myself really feel the potential for failure.

That means quiet. That means sitting with myself. That means when my stomach starts to turn flip flops and my toes start tapping and I feel like I need to get up and move, I take a deep breath and sink deeper.

Because when my body is calm, my heart and head usually let me know the story. They serve up to me in sometimes remarkable clarity what is at the root of most my feelings, especially those I experience as conflicting or uncomfortable.

When you know where many of the most tender and sometimes darkest parts of yourself are rooted—and what they’re helping you believe about yourself, the world, yourself in this world—you can start to chip away at the hold they have on you.

You can start to more consciously decide who you are and who you want to be. You can choose what has importance and what doesn’t, and you can more easily quiet the noise, the constant hum of a world that isn’t always very good at acknowledging we are whole humans with a wide range of thoughts, feelings and experiences.

When you can do that work for yourself, the reward is freedom from the perception that only the ideal will do and only the best version of yourself has value.

The tricky part is that I’m not always ready to know what I need to know.

But that’s another post.

I think about community all the time. I try to really remember my connection to both my local and global community in everything I do, and use my belief that I am obliged, by virtue of being human, to care, to do what I can when I can with what I can.

That’s not new and I am not unique in that belief. I am unique, as we all are, in how I choose to live out that commitment.

At least for me, deciding to live with intention inevitably means I make a fair amount of mistakes. Personal growth is evolution, and that is experience and learning and vulnerability and stumbles, some that make me want to fold back into myself and decide that good enough is good enough.

One of my dogs got up early one morning, so we were out the door before six, which is not usual for us. Rounding the corner in our alley, there's a line of six garages.

The last garage in the first set of three had about an inch of space left open at the bottom. The other two were closed tight. As we got closer, I could hear a car running inside.

I thought that was odd, but knew I was out of coffee so was going to run up the street after taking the dogs in, so quickly reminded myself to grab my phone. On the way up the back stairs, I quickly contemplate a few things: 1. Is an inch enough ventilation to prevent co2 poisoning? 2. Could there be someone in the car attempting suicide? 3. Do I have a moral obligation to try and help if there is someone attempting suicide?

No. 3 will likely make some of you bristle, but as someone who has lived in the deep end of misery at various times in my life, I do truly wrestle with my role in prevention (and it's not a question that comes up often, if at all). I believe in body autonomy. I also know that the darkest days are often followed by pinholes of light that eventually blow wide open.

When I'm back outside and hear the car is still running, I kneel down and smell for exhaust but don't get much. I stand for a second, then decide that *if* someone is inside, I needed to do what I could. I bang on the garage and shout "Are you OK?" Nothing. I bang again and ask the same question. Nothing.

Reading this interview with Tracie McMillan, the author of a new book called The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, wherein she details some of the financial advantages she and her family—as well as four other families—have experienced because of race, I couldn’t help but wonder if we’re asking the right question.

I want to be clear I’m not casting doubt on McMillan’s work. I agree with her that many of the conversations happening around white privilege are too nebulous to be helpful. I believe there is value in having a more concrete accounting of what’s at stake.

But instead of thinking about what and how much white people have gained, is the more appropriate question: What do we owe?

Of course, it’s not wholly for me to decide. Maybe not for me to decide at all, even. We know from states like California, where Gov. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 to create a nine-member Reparations Task Force, that calculating harm is, at the very least, possible. In fact, Evanston, IL, passed a reparations resolution in 2021, and since then, other cities have started considering reparations, too.

One of the most common responses you’ll hear from white people when you mention reparations is fairly predictable, if tired: I didn’t own slaves.

Then, some will follow up with some version of America’s whitewashed mythology: I worked hard to get where I am today. No free hand outs. The American Dream is possible for everyone and if you don’t succeed, it’s because you’re lazy.

Yawn.

Even a cursory understanding of (honest) American history and the founding of this nation is enough to understand that the past informs the present in ways both big and small, and though no, you may not have owned slaves, your whiteness continues to afford you many and varied and valuable advantages.

The 2014 The Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-nehisi Coates is what first got me seriously thinking about reparations. You can’t read that piece, so deeply researched and deftly reasoned, without acknowledging that much of the America you know today is the result of thievery: stolen land, stolen labor, stolen futures.

More importantly, perhaps, the piece expertly lays out why reparations can no longer be just a thought experiment nodded to by progressives and people earnestly interested in equity. You can’t truly understand the scope of what’s owed and not find ways to act. Reparations are required for this nation to move toward any real embodiment of wholeness.

I call 911 and explain. The operator asks if I saw someone go into the garage. I didn't. For all I know the car is empty, I add. She connects me to the fire department and the person who answers asks me the same questions. When I answer "No," they tell me they're not going to respond at the moment and hang up. The 911 operator comes back and asks me if I know that some people have remote starters for their cars.

Yes, I do, I tell her, but I guess my point is that if there is someone in there, I'd rather they stay alive today. She told me she'd have the cops swing by the alley, which is not what I wanted at all, but couldn't stop now. So, I left my name and number in case anyone needed to contact me.

Coming back with coffee, there is an older Black man taking a bag from a car that is just outside the garage I heard a car running in, though the garage is still shut (or shut again). I assume his car was the one in the garage and perhaps he does have a remote starter, but when I catch his eye and think about asking he gives me a look that says "Not today white lady," which I can actually appreciate and so just keep walking.

I find, in myself at least, a real tension exists between being engaged and minding my own business. When is it best to leave well enough alone? When does being community minded slide ever so softly into being the Gladys Kravitz of my neighborhood? When is inserting myself less helpful and more intrusive? When am I even more of a burden to people who are already oppressed and distressed?

These are honestly questions I grapple with regularly.

I consider this nation’s debt my debt.

So, how do I boil down and clarify for myself how I can best show up without getting so in my head that I become paralyzed?

Truthfully: I don’t know, and that answer is unsatisfying but honest.

I find I’m hardly ever certain of the exact right way to approach most situations I witness or think on. I'm often drawing on what I feel I can be sure of in any given moment and doing the best I can, which sometimes feels right and other times feels ... like I don't really know what I'm doing at all.

And maybe that's OK. Maybe, as I often think to myself in reflection, that's just the human condition.

The one constant I will not compromise, however, is a commitment to action, in all the ways action manifests for me, including but not limited to:

1. Tipping BIPOC servers and gig workers at a higher rate

2. Never being your dependable white ally

3. Donating to organizations and people doing work that aligns with my principles

4. Continually pushing myself to find ways to show up for my community

5. Reading and listening to people who allow me to sink into discomfort and stretch my understanding

6. Being intentional about raising my trans son and exploring the ways this experience intersects with other forms of systemic oppression

Do all of these matter equally? Do all of these even matter? No. Probably not.

What does matter, to me, is that I’m not afraid to try. I’m not so afraid of getting things wrong that I instead do nothing. I’m not afraid of being corrected, called in or called out. I’m not afraid to sit in discomfort.

I am afraid of not having the guts to participate in building the world I want to live in—the world my trans kid deserves, the world so many people who have been denied so much for so long deserve.

• At the height of the pandemic, I started more seriously watching birds. The hobby dovetailed with my picking up my camera again. During that time, birding proved an exquisite way to stay centered. Now, I regularly check in with resources I found then, like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and their bird migration forecast.

This resource also does live migration maps which show the night of April 6, 2024, some 123.7 million birds were on the move in the early morning hours. Wow!

• Speaking of migration, I got curious about the longest migration in the bird world and found a fascinating article on 7 seriously interesting bird journeys.

The whole feature is worth a read, but the longest migration belongs to the Arctic Tern, who travels roughly 55,293 miles pole to pole every year.

(For comparison, the average person drives roughly 14,263 miles per year.

• As the robins come back North in more significant numbers, I’m reminded that I once wondered how these birds find worms when I was watching one hunt in a neighbor’s yard, assuming the head cock and sudden snagging of a snack suggested auditory cues.

Interestingly, I found a study that suggested robins were almost exclusively using sight!

But (isn’t there’s always a but), a subsequent study found they do in fact use auditory cues.

So, I’m splitting the difference. Eyes and ears for the win!

Hummingbirds are some of my favorite finds when I’m birding. I wait patiently for their arrival in the Spring, and when I first hear that zippy buzz of their wings, my heart soars.

The swordbilled hummingbird has the honor of being the bird with the longest beak (not hard to guess from the name). A South American bird native to the Andean region, the swordbilled hummingbird is one of the largest of all hummingbirds and is the only bird with a beak longer than it’s body!

(The video embedded in the article is worth watching, as is David Attenborough’s Hummingbird documentary.)

Tell Me What You're Curious About

I see two young Black boys cross the street and head toward us, running south down the alley my dogs and I are using to get to our back gate.

Backpacks bouncing, the boy in the lead is trying to keep his pants up as he runs, behind him his friend is working to catch up, arms pumping.

One of my dogs who is relatively new to the busyness of our neighborhood stops cold and crouches low. The other stands and stares.

I turn my head slightly downward to reassure the one who’s nervous.

According to recent census data, the diversity of the roughly 55,000 people who live in Rogers Park, my north side Chicago neighborhood, closely matches the breakdown of the entire city’s nearly 2.7 million residents.

In other words, in our 55,000 you can see the 2.7 million.

The breakdown still favors white residents, who make up roughly 44 percent of the neighborhood’s population, followed by Black, Latino and Asian residents at 27, 20 and 5 percent respectively.

But my little corner, the microcosm I step out into daily, feels more diverse than those numbers suggest. Migrants and refugees are my neighbors. I hear several languages every time I travel my block. A Krishna temple sits across the street from a Catholic church. Community fridges make food available to anyone in need.

There’s a middle school a block from my house. Data show the student body is primarily Black and Latino.

Sometimes when I’m late walking the dogs in the afternoon, we hit the final bell when kids are pouring out onto the sidewalk. Students walking home catch us in their current and we’re left navigating groups of two, three, four kids with end-of-the-day energy.

Playful slaps, loud, booming voices, shared phone screens and raucous laughter.

Often, I’ll head off into the parkway grass, coaxing the dogs to follow me to the curb.

Shomari is a friend from when my kid played baseball at our local park district.

We don’t see each other regularly or often, but in the years we spent our summers together, him running the park baseball league, me coaching or helping my kid’s team, we got to know one another pretty well.

When my child came out as trans, I emailed him prior to the season starting to let him know what had changed for my kid and asking for assurance that he wouldn’t be bullied.

Asking a Black man to assure me, a white woman—even when I was asking for my trans kid—felt … like I needed to overtly acknowledge that it was not lost on me that I was asking for safety from a person who navigated an unsafe world every day, and had to watch his own kids do the same.

Talking about our kids later, he recalled a time when he and his daughter went to the wrong door at her school. It was pouring rain outside, so they ran to the one that was nearest.

But, a white woman just inside wouldn’t let them in, gesturing instead to the door they were supposed to enter.

In the moment, wet and angry, he muttered: “God, I hate white people.” Now, he laughed, think about your child going into a school where they are one of the only Black kids and repeating that, which is what his daughter did, he told me, only instead of “I” she told her class that her dad hates white people.

If you’re white and reading this you might be shaking your head. You might think he shouldn’t be saying such things in front of his child. You might be wondering if saying you hate white people isn’t just as bad as the racism you’re constantly told to work against.

The short answer is: no.

I’ve heard my Black neighbors say they hate white people.

I’ve been summarily dismissed when casually greeting BIPOC neighbors, and I’ve noticed BIPOC people cross the street away from me (though, to be clear, I don’t mean to suggest my being white is the only reason they crossed).

I’ve been taken to task by the mother of a Black child who didn’t think I was being fair to him when I made him sit an inning out.

In all of these moments, and countless others, I could have leaned into my defensiveness. Many people do. (Maybe you are right now. Maybe you did above).

But instead, I leaned into my vulnerability. I leaned into admitting my ignorance, that I likely (most definitely) have very large blind spots around existing in America as a BIPOC person.

I leaned into listening without speaking.

I leaned into listening without looking for a reason why what they were telling me wasn’t racism.

Because I’ve seen BIPOC neighbors rolled up on by police.

I’ve stood with my phone as a witness as a Black man prayed in his car as two white police officers ran his license and then let him go.

I live in a city with a long history of police torture of Black men, false confessions, phony convictions, and $74 million paid by taxpayers to resolve lawsuits alleging police misconduct (and that figure is down in comparison to the year before).

Chicago is a city where police shoot young Black men 16 times and then lie to make themselves the victims, a city where I watched my own alderman try to help Chicago’s mayor cover up this paticular and particularly heinous crime.

I’ve sat in the backyard of my friend’s house enjoying a barbecue only to catch their white neighbors peering out over their half curtains every so often.

I know the history of my neighborhood’s chronically underfunded schools, schools that primarily serve BIPOC communities.

I know the conversations my BIPOC friends are having with their kids because I’ve had some of the same with my trans son, though it’s different, because until my son I didn’t have to (and often didn’t) worry.

So, when I consciously choose to lean into my vulnerability, what I find is compassion and empathy and a willingness to honor the experiences my BIPOC neighbors and friends are sharing with me—without question.

And just so we’re clear, it’s not just Chicago.

I grew up in a mid-sized Midwestern city that was nearly exclusively white and Catholic. Out of curiosity just now, I looked up 1980 census data for Dubuque, Iowa. I would have been nine years old that year.

What I found isn’t surprising, but still remarkable, nonetheless. Of the 93,745 total census of the county, 93,015 of the residents were white.

(Quickly browsing income data, median family income in the county that year was $22,484, with breakdowns showing that 1,265 white families had income of $50,000 or above. The number of Black families with income of $50,000 or above was zero.)

In the 90s, after a cross burning, then mayor James Brady put together what was named the “Constructive Integration Task Force.”

This group developed a nine-page plan that focused on enticing 100 Black families to move to the city. The plan dedicated public funds to the effort, most in the form of hiring incentives to private companies.

The effort, as you might assume, backfired spectacularly.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with any real and honest intention believed a plan so brief it could barely qualify as a book chapter could somehow roll back decades of openly racist policy and hateful local attitudes.

The truth, whether deliberate or just the effect of the arrogance and naiveté of unchecked white supremacy, is that the seriousness of the city’s issues was steamrolled by a classic but dangerous white conceit: I want it to be so, so it will be.

Dubuque officials weren’t really concerned with repairing inequity or dealing with a city history steeped in racism. They just didn’t want the reputation that comes with cross burnings happening in the 1990s (and in 2016, too).

So, they devised a program that would give the appearance of a city capable of a true reckoning and reparations that in reality required neither the reckoning nor the reparations.

In a last cruel twist that is almost if not entirely unforgivable, some of the families that moved to Dubuque as part of the plan reported years later they were left further traumatized.

At a Starbucks one morning near my kid’s school, I stand in line waiting for my coffee and notice just how few BIPOC people are in the shop. The whiteness is palpable.

Census data on the neighborhood where my child’s school is located show a full 85 percent of the residents are white, though the school demographics are better, split pretty evenly among white, Black and Latino populations.

In this Starbucks on this morning, I’m not sure anyone notices the casual privilege on display. The lack of any type of courtesy—a small smile, an “excuse me” when you bump me with your thousand dollar Bugaboo stroller as you reach for your mobile order, zero eye contact—suggests, at least to me, most of these folks are not accustomed to giving up space.

They wear their own right to navigate this world freely and unimpeded like a second skin, because they have what as a nation we’ve been duped into believing makes someone beyond reproach—whiteness and wealth.

I check in with myself, a habit I’ve developed in the years I’ve been untangling some of my own blind spots and casual and unconscious bias around race, gender and gender identity, and disability.

I realize that I miss what I’ve come to cherish about my neighborhood: a very real sense of community, an obligation to care for one another, stranger and friend alike, that is born not from pity but genuine affection.

I also realize I am no longer comfortable in spaces this white.

So, back to the boys and the students after school up top.

Why do you think I turned my head, and why do I leave the sidewalk? If you’re immediate reaction assumed I was nervous or annoyed—or if you were nervous for me and thought I’d be better off not taking the alley—the truth is much more simple.

The boys were laughing and running in joy. The kids after school are almost always shaking off their day with amused exuberance.

And when I can, when I’m self-aware and deliberate enough, I work to remove my whiteness from their immediate world as often as possible. I don’t want BIPOC young people to have to think about whiteness—subconsciously or directly—for one second when I’m around.

Because I know that whiteness is overwhelming and, most often, petty, unscrupulous, dangerous and … everywhere.

I understand how absolutely childish and even—what? weird? bizarre? stupid?—that might sound.

For activists who spend nearly all of their time working for equity on various fronts, some putting their lives on the line and many within the vulnerable communities they’re fighting for, a white cisgender female thinking that not facing kids running in an alley or yielding the sidewalk to BIPOC students has any immediate or lasting effect on inequity is farcical.

I get it. I do.

But this action isn’t the only way I try to show up, and though it’s likely not relevant or obvious to anyone but me, perhaps that’s the point? Perhaps that the gesture is personal and my leaning into my own growth is OK, necessary even?

Maybe having our own simple, quiet and singular ways of accounting for our communities—both local and global—is just as essential as the bigger, coordinated efforts?

I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.

And, I’ll keep stepping aside, listening to the laughter and joy, the sometimes anger, from the sidelines.

Share Your Thoughts With Me!

We're just out the door with the dogs when he comes across the street, heading south, yelling into his phone: "Are you going to be here soon?" Two kids are trailing him. He has a dog, too, and Romeo tenses and barks.

They all stop at the corner.

The guy on the phone is a middle-aged white man, the two kids are late-ish teens and Black. "Why'd you push my friend?" one of the kids asks. The man is still yelling into the phone, and I now understand he’s talking to the cops. "They're following me and threatening me," he tells them.

I catch the eye of one of the kids. I want him to know there's someone there. I didn't see the start of whatever's going on now; I'm not taking sides, I just want to be sure someone, from this moment on, is witness.

The man turns to me and asks if I can stay.

I've got Ben and my dog's upset, but I stand there. Ben pulls Ginger a little up the street. The guy keeps hammering away to the cops. The kids are still yelling, though they stand their distance. "Fuck you," one finally says. "Fuck you white people."

His anger is palpable, emotions raw and on the surface.

And ... sure, the language is heated, but I understand. Here is a white dude calling in the CPD on two Black kids because they, what?, as far as I can tell all they’ve really done is yell at hime.

I am fairly sure he could have de-escalated the situation any time he wanted, and he wasn't blameless. These kids weren't in his face; there were no weapons. The call to the cops was a demonstration of privilege and power. A threat.

Because everyone in that moment knew the score.

The kids walk away yelling and Ben and I head around the block. As we round the last corner toward home again the guy is still at the corner waving cops down. A cruiser pulls over and he looks our way and shouts: "Those two are witnesses."

I say clearly: "I didn't witness what happened.”

He responds: "Well, you witnessed them threatening me."

And, no, I really didn't.

Read More Content on Community

I thought I heard him tell the cops the kids threatened to kill him, and when he turns to me for confirmation, I let them know they did no such thing. "I didn't say they threatened to kill me," he says incredulously. "I said they threatened to come back and take my dog."

But, I tell the cops, I didn't hear any threats to either the man or his dog. "I heard one of them ask you why you pushed his friend," I add.

I don't have all the facts. I wasn't there when the argument started.

But here's what I do know:  I saw two kids who were frustrated and angry and disrespected (and, yes, disrespectful, too). I also saw a grown white man who could have and should have disengaged but instead impulsively called the police. 

"Yeah, maybe the kids shouldn't have said what they said," I tell Ben on the way upstairs. "But who knows how many racial slurs they’ve heard today? Who knows how many times CPD pulled up and slowed down? The man could have just said he was sorry, walked away and let cooler heads prevail."

"Yeah," he nods.

And I think he gets it. I hope he gets it.

In last night's, Ben was graduating. In parts, I was helping him get ready. In parts, I was giving away clothes from his very early years, many feminine presenting, all well past fitting.

There was an emotional tension I could feel acutely, even in waking.

The honest nostalgia for his youth, of being able to carry him, literally, his weight in my arms and against my body. The tension of letting go, over and over, not just of what was, whatever was, but in age, too. The letting go that independence has always and will always demand.

But also, ...

The tension of knowing that in advocacy, most specifically parental advocacy for trans kids, there is shame attached to grieving. More precisely: The shame around the idea that you'd ever grieve an embodied and very much alive child. And with that specific sentiment, that shame, I can wholeheartedly agree.

But shame also subsumes and swallows the tension I experience here, in this dream and in this life. There is no room to miss what was, again, whatever was, without labeling that longing shameful. Even "longing" is not precise enough.

So, I come to realize time and time again that there is no word for my experience. And all the words I have are fraught and charged with the potential to batter those humans, my own included, I most want to protect and lift up.

My mind makes up the difference, I suppose. Giving me imagined opportunities to say goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, to every old and new part of my kid as their own growth continues to outpace my heart.