“I am transgender,” my teenaged daughter, J., says, her green eyes squinting with anxiety.
“Trans?” I ask. “What’s that?”
I am still thinking about mundane things, like the dirty dishes on the counter. We sit at my favorite place in the house, the round kitchen table by a window with lacy curtains, where I drink tea and read my newspaper every morning.
“Trans, Mom. I am a man trapped in a woman’s body.”
The summer day’s simmering breath coming through the screen suddenly feels like a panting animal.
“What?”
My first fully modern loss.
It does not feel the same as when my father died when I was age fourteen.
It does not feel the same as when the love of my life left me when I was in my twenties.
In that moment at the kitchen table, I experienced a loss only made possible by our current culture, which allows—even empowers—a teenager to take steroids and have “top surgery” (trans speak for a double mastectomy) all before age twenty so his gender can match his person.
When J. legally changed her name to Donald and insisted we use male pronouns to refer to him, I resisted for a short time, but eventually gave up on “she,” “her,” and the entire idea that I have a daughter at all.
But when I said I thought Donald was moving too fast with his physical transition, the counselors, school advisors, and medical professionals told me I must face the inevitable.
When I said I was sad about the unique obstacles my child will have to deal with in the larger world as an adult, they told me to tamp down my homophobia and trans bias. Seek counseling to overcome your prejudices, they advised.
I am not ashamed or biased, I told them.
I am grieving the loss of my daughter, and that does not mean I do not love my trans son.
Modern loss. Modern grief.
None of them grasped any of it, so I share a story with one of the school advisors.
When the school had a mother-daughter tea for Mother’s Day, Donald and I did not go, and skipped over to a nondescript Dunkin’ Donuts in a strip mall instead. As we finished our iced coffees, both milky-white with extra cream, I noticed two guys with heavily tattooed arms sitting two tables away listening as we chatted about Cher’s trans son, Chaz, who had been in the news a lot.
The men’s shoulders seemed tight, their lips closed.
I eyed the pickup truck outside.
I stared at the ice cubes in my cheap plastic cup.
I told Donald we needed to leave.
He thought it was because I’d finished my drink.
In that moment I did not feel shame, I tell the advisor, just fear.
I take no issue with any individual’s right to affirm and assert his or her identity.
But I know that outside the super-accommodating world of my child’s liberal school, approximately 40 percent of Americans still disapprove of homosexuality. Imagine how they must perceive someone who is transgender? Even within the LGBTQ community, the T falls toward the end of the continuum.
In that moment, I explain to the advisor, I understood my daughter would never return. Her person remains, but my trans son faces a day-to-day life I never imagined for my child. As I drove Donald back to school, my fear transformed into something else, something that now follows me through my days, something I can only describe as grief.
I know from reading books and articles about parents with children who do not fall within “normal” parameters, in particular Andrew Solomon’s book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, that millions of families struggle with this unusual form of grieving. Two tall parents might have a dwarf; a scholar might have an autistic boy who does not speak. Counselors focus on “acceptance” of the situation rather than processing the grief first, which, unfortunately, falls right in line with the American Psychiatric Association’s recent decision to identify depression associated with deep grief as mental illness, not a natural reaction that an individual should be encouraged to feel and move through without guilt or shame. Leave it to American culture to take a fundamental human emotion and classify it as a condition.
I reflected on how I handled my father’s death to help me cope with my situation with my trans son, but that only brought back memories of how poorly American culture handles even this most timeless of losses.
All I remember of the moment when I first heard my father had died were the white walls of my small bedroom, my mother by my bedside shaking from the stress of what she had to tell me, the sense of dislocation I felt when she spoke the news. I remember wrapping the cotton bedspread around my shoulders and leaning into the softness and warmth. I don’t remember leaving the room or going downstairs or how I told my friends. I now associate white, not black, with death, and have purple, lilac, deep blue, yellow, and other colors on the walls in my house, but not white.
The general world treated my loss as sad, unfortunate, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I wasn’t expected to return to school, to sports teams, to my student work job at my high school within the week. We had a church service, a burial; I missed a few days of classes and that was it.
Only now, as an adult researching grief and loss, have I discovered that just 4 percent of children in the United States under age fifteen lose a parent. When I asked my sister to guess the percentage (and she’s a health-care professional), she said about 25 percent. In places and time periods in which such losses were more commonplace, the larger society was better equipped to recognize grief and loss as an ongoing experience—not something with concrete stages that you go through in lockstep, but something you carry with you, often always.
In American culture we do not celebrate a Day of the Dead, as they do in Mexico; we don’t have secular altars in public spaces to honor those who have passed, as in many Eastern cultures. Here grief is more of an individual responsibility, a framework that encourages isolation and often morphs into debilitating depression. The fact that modern American life continues to add ever more complex types of loss just exacerbates the problem.
My emotional journey with Donald seems to more closely mirror more nebulous losses, such as moving away from someone I will never see again. The average American moves twelve times in his or her lifetime, and one in five children eventually move far away from their families, a geographic mortality rate, for want of a better term, that’s startling when you consider that for most of human history, the majority of people rarely traveled more than fifty miles from where they grew up.
Similarly, a single woman like me with a decent job can have dozens of romantic relationships over a lifetime, a tremendous freedom that comes with a price: you become intimate with a much larger pool of people, but, conversely, you also experience the loss of that intimacy anew each time it doesn’t work out.
I call that “good-bye grief.”
When Donald came home after the top surgery, he felt freed of the physical binds he had used to compress his breasts for years. He could wear a light t-shirt with nothing on underneath on a hot July day. His shoulders sprang back when he walked now, instead of slouched. He held his head differently, more confidently, and looked outward instead of downward. He felt more at home in his own body.
I looked at his now slim torso and saw a fawn before me—all legs, reddish-brown coat, and so vulnerable I wanted to hire a bodyguard for him.
Donald’s radical adjustment has made it easier for me to remember to use male pronouns when referring to him; I only slip up when I am out of Donald’s presence and around strangers who ask about my family. At one point, while Donald was still in college, a contractor building a porch for me wanted to know if I had children. Without thinking, I said, yes, I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college.
Two weeks later Donald came home, and as we pulled into the driveway the contractor stuck his head in my car to say hello.
“Oh,” he remarked later, “so you have two kids.”
Oh.
I had no vocabulary to explain the complexity of my situation in such quick passing conversations.
Instead, despite taking great pride in being an honest and direct person, I say little and am left with what I wryly call my own grief geography, territory that no one else can navigate or fully know. Of course our ancient ancestors had their own grief maps as well, terra incognita to us now. Which leaves me with the timeless question: Why did we evolve to grieve? It leaves us despondent, lethargic, and plagued by headaches and stomachaches; none of these things are sexy or enhance our ability to interact with others. The trauma is so great that stress hormones can literally cause the heart to enlarge temporarily. Research in evolutionary biology proves that even though we don’t want to experience this emotion, we can’t be fully mature without it.
At a physical level, our faces cannot fake either happiness or sadness. When a person forms a sincere smile, they engage the muscles around the eyes that lead to crow’s feet. You cannot fake that motion in the face.
There is also a sincere grief muscle, the corrugator muscle, which pulls together the eyebrows and wrinkles the forehead.
At a deep biological level we evolved to know for certain if someone is truly happy or sad.
At a deep biological level our entire body systems are programmed to handle losses, to allow emotions to vent and wax and wane as we recover. Indeed, most emotions only last seconds and rarely last more than hours.
I must acknowledge that at a fundamental level I actually gained some benefits from losing a parent young. I turned inward, rethought assumptions, felt less entitled, developed more empathy, paid closer attention to other people with sorrow, and emerged with a new identity, one infinitely more layered than the self-absorbed athlete I had been.
And as a teenager, I had listened to my father. I took his advice. And when he was gone, I had his words, and I did not challenge them.
“Be sure to love your work. Be good citizens and enjoy what life can offer. It can be a lot of fun if you let it,” he advised in a handwritten letter in pale blue ink that now hangs in my study. “Remember me and the good times that we had and don’t dwell on the sorrowful aspects of life.”
I turned down law school and became a writer and a professor of creative writing, in part, because he empowered me with these words and with his early death.
Love your work. Be a good citizen.
I have never admitted that I benefitted in any way from experiencing such a deep loss at such a young age because I’ve somehow felt it inappropriate to express such conflicted feelings. In America, you’re either grieving the loss of someone or you’re “over” it.
I either love my trans son or I don’t.
How do we do a better job of breaking free of such rigid thinking so we can accept a much wider range of griefs (yes, I am making that word up) as we face an ever evolving range of losses in modern life?
Step one: Get over the shame.
When I first started working on this essay, I felt so self-conscious writing about grief and loss for an American audience that I labeled the story file “G-Stories,” so anyone walking in and out of my office area would not pepper me with questions about what I was writing. I feared they would think I was sad (I was not) or depressed (I was not), otherwise how else could I explain focusing my precious writing hours on such a topic?
At least one of my distant relatives lacked such inhibitions.
While clearing out an estate for an aunt on my father’s side, my family came across some handwritten letters in a cloth bag hidden behind a picture frame. The time line at the top of one of the first pages read Clonmel, Ireland, November 12th 1871. My great-grandmother’s father was sending news from the home country to his daughters in America. He wrote of church yard sales, the death of his son, and his longing and sadness because he knew he’d never again see the children who had sailed across the Atlantic. Now that the son who stayed in Ireland was gone, “we are left lonesome,” John Sheedy wrote. “We have neither son nor daughter to call on when we have need of them. The grave and America left us a lone couple in Our Old Days.”
His grief, hidden behind a frame for decades, came fully into my heart as I read his careful penmanship. At first, all I could think of was the Catholic knack for laying on the guilt, but then I also saw that by simply writing, by putting his true feelings to paper and sending it across the ocean for his daughters to feel, he’d let go of shame about his situation.
I am sad. I am lonely. I am full of grief because you are gone and your brother has died.
Clearly his daughters shared their father’s pain, and perhaps even felt motivated by it to do the best they could in America, so that all the loss would result in true gains: good jobs, a good education, and a better world for their own children and grandchildren.
I cannot say these things for certain, but they did save the letters.
Now, John Sheedy’s great-great-great granddaughter has become a grandson. The girl I set sail into the world came back across the water a different gender. Like John, I know my daughter will never return. Like John, I have put my various griefs in a bag and hid them behind a proverbial frame.
But the geography of my grief was terra incognita in his time.
Despite the counselor’s advice, I pull it out now, like a map, with this essay, for all to see.