Hi! I wanted to start by letting you all know I am in the process of launching a very exciting project. The Trans Death Care Fund is a community fund for trans people and their loved ones to access end of life support. That can include anything from hospice to funeral costs. If you would like to be involved or access support, please fill out this form as I am gathering more information on community needs before accepting donations.

Not gone, just dead. There are still echoes of you vibrating in my gut, and I look in the mirror that was once yours. I secretly hope to catch you in the corner of my eye watching me dress and undress. I am required to dress business professional, and I don’t know what that means for a gender fucky faggot like me. I collect button up shirts, slacks, ties, I cut off the rattail I’ve been growing out since you died.

It’s weird how grief can make you grow out a rattail. When I cut it off I turned it into an earring and gave it to a different boy I love. A part of me hopes he uses it to cast some kind of magic on me, to control the way I feel because I keep forgetting how to be my own director. He would probably do that if I asked, but asking takes energy.

I keep telling people I don’t have energy for the wounds I spend hours picking open. It would take a minute to patch it, a few days for it to scab over. The scab might even flake off when it’s healed, but you see I’m so afraid of letting things go these days.

During a funeral arrangement, a man said he liked my bolo tie. That his dad, the deceased, always wore a bolo tie. I wondered if that was you talking to me again, catching you in the corner of my conversations seems more likely given how little I tend to look at my surroundings.

The bolo ties, for clarity, were always yours. Of all the items I was able to keep after you died, these feel so imbued with fragments of your soul. The conversations with grieving families makes me think about how separate the worlds are of those who take care of people as they die, and those who take care of people after they die.

One of my first jobs was a caregiver at a retirement home. I worked nights, and saw many people die. I’ll never forget the woman who would specifically call for me, because I was willing to read her pages from the bible. I never told her about the harm that had been done to me under the name of God, but she was only interested in hearing the comforting repetition. Her last word was my dead name.

Dying is fucking terrifying. Now, I see it in their frozen faces. We break their rigor, and it feels like testing the flexible limits of my Barbie’s limbs. We squeeze their fingertips to bring the color back into them. We answer the calls of death…

One of those calls came from the medical examiners office. The same one we picked up your belongings from. Your wallet, keys, phone, dark green bandana. This time I only checked in at the front and was let into the back. Grateful for the work my mask was doing to filter some of the smell of human rot stained into that place, I peered through the window into the autopsy room and imagined you lying on the cold metal table. I read the names on the white board with all their potential causes of death.

When I think of you, I think of the river. You were inseparable in my mind with that much Scorpio in your chart, and the last time I held you was the scattering of your remains. Now, I’ve seen and I’ve smelled bodies found in the river and I am grateful you weren’t swept under the wake that time I jokingly dared you to swim across the river and you went so far everyone on the shore was nearly in tears. You weren’t afraid of the things I am afraid of.

We did have our mutual fears though. I didn’t know how afraid I was to lose you until the day you left to wash your clothes and sleep in your own bed for a night. That rattail boy has offered to fix my dryer multiple times, the one that hasn’t worked for years at this point, but I sometimes wonder that if my dryer had worked maybe you would have stayed.

Sometimes, I am afraid of the things I only know you were afraid of through stories. I started using a cane on the days I worry about my balance, when the floor feels closer than my destination. My OT friend says a rollator walker or forearm crutches might be the best option for my needs regarding a mobility aid. You used a cane when your body hurt, but never around me. When you hurt your knee you barely wore the knee brace you were supposed to wear.

Someone posted in r/EDS today asking if grief can cause a pain flare. I laughed and read through the comments speculating that this could definitely be a contributing factor. Can emotional pain, they asked, become physical? My therapist wants to dive deeper into the parts that live in the places in my body that hurt the worst. She talks to those parts directly, she says she understands that they are just trying to protect me. I don’t want to be protected, but I know I need protecting.

My friend suggests starting a group chat with close friends who might be willing to help with the financial hardship of being a disabled single parent who just spent a summer doing unpaid work at a funeral home. He says, I know this probably makes you miss Woody even more. He was the one who would always take action when you were overwhelmed.

It’s like the whelm has no where to go but over. I am erupted, thick with ash. I learn the “milking” method to get a bag of cremated remains into an urn. Even through a mask I recognize the smell of incineration and ground bone matter.

I learned recently that people with trauma are drawn to the things that have the potential to heal us. Sometimes, they traumatize us even more instead. I don’t know if becoming a funeral director is healing or traumatizing, and I imagine it’s some combination of both. What I do know is that I can’t do anything else. It’s this body that drives, my head is out the window just hear to feel wind. It’s my gut that types emails and fills out applications and puts gas in the car. It’s you, somehow, still showing up to guide me.

You were a trans person who loves trans people, who loves bringing people together, who understood the necessity of taking care of one another. You taught me everything I know about community. Whenever I expect you to feel less significant to me, I realize how much you did, and continue to do for me. You’re dead, I wish you weren’t, but there’s not a world I can even fathom where you’re gone.