Laurustina

I had lunch with my friend Shie last week. After lunch, we sat out on the porch and talked about this and that and whatnots. Shie’s best friend died suddenly, just a couple of months after Ash did, and that connection helped bridge the awkward conversational gap, which I’ve become accustomed to, the one where people hem and haw and I hum a lot and no one seems to know what to say.

“You know what I remembered today?” Shie said, “Giving her (Ashlie) my boobs.”

I cannot tell you how surprising and refreshing and soothing it was to have her say such a thing so casually and I laughed out loud. Because yes, as the parents of a dead child, I know that i am now scary to most people, and as the parent of a complicated dead child, i suspect that i am sometimes downright terrifying. And the more I try to explain the best way to bridge this awkwardness, the more I realize that I often don’t know it until I hear it.

The first bit, I’ve said before, which is that the worst thing people can do is to  not not say her name. I think this weird thing happens, where people completely avoid mentioning her because they think its too sensitive a subject, that if someone  mentions her, I will fall apart and drown them in my grief. Its not true.

In fact, for the next ten minutes, after Shie brought up her falsies (the in-lieu-of-a-bra-stick-on kind) we laughed and I recounted a particular afternoon when Iggy escaped into the backyard with one of them and ran in circles around our then-landlord and his kids, begging them to play tug of war, while Ash and I tried to sneak up on him and extricate the flesh-colored piece of gel-stuff from his mouth before anyone noticed.

Go ahead. Its ok to laugh. We laughed. Me and Ash on the day it happened, and then me and Shie, last week as we talked about it.  And then, we rambled off on some other subject, the road of which had been paved with a casual, comfortable understanding.

What I mean to say here is that what makes me saddest is when people avoid me completely rather than risk offending or hurting me or accidentally releasing some overwhelming ocean of emotion. I don’t want you to be  afraid of mentioning some silly memory or asking an honest question. I don’t enjoy those awkward, guilt-ridden moments when I run into someone who has been avoiding me and they admit (or don’t) that they would have called or stopped by, except that they didn’t know what to say.

Say something. Say anything.

I still like great books and zombie movies, old blues singers, spicy food and stiff drinks. I still curse like a sailor and believe in the Loch Ness Monster. I still sometimes laugh so hard it makes me cry. I am admittedly not the same person that I was two years ago, but I am also not as fragile or scary or as foreign as you might think.

That’s all.

For now.

… which i’m too tired to figure out how to embed tonight. It’s not supposed to be searchable on YouTube, so I think you have to go to it straight from this link.  Anyway, here is a little bit of  Ash with Antony and The Johnsons.

wow. wierd. I haven’t been here in a while. Back in November, when I was writing every day, I got into this mindset of writing first thing in the morning, but way back in the day, when I wrote all the time, I did much of it at night. Now I don’t, and I don’t really know why. Maybe its because my hands hurt by the end of the day, or I got so used to my hands hurting by the end of the day that I just stopped even considering writing at night. And now that Mouse and I share this computer, we trade off a lot at night, so I haven’t fallen into an evening writing groove. But blah blah blah … all of that is really just a long-winded way to say that it feels weird to be here now, and it reminds me of the Capitola years, when Mr. J. and I spent our evenings on opposite sides of that big bedroom upstairs in that tiny condo, when my desk was set up on the built-in vanity which meant that all evening I sat at the computer facing a giant mirror, in which I could see the television, the back of my husband’s head, the children when they wandered into the room, and the dogs (Iggy and Fat Lola) sprawled on the bed. There are things I miss rather desperately about Capitola, but the condo is not one of them.

Mouse called from Capitola tonight. He’s visiting for the week, playing the piano in the coffee house late at night and dancing along the cement seawall on his way back to Mary Mary’s place. I look forward to him coming home on Friday. The house is too quiet when he is not here.

I finished The Letter this week. Finally. Its the one I have been mentally working on for more than a year, the one I wanted to send to the Board of Directors at The Pride Center downtown. Actually, it it a completely different letter than the one I first intended to write. But it is, I think, the right letter; the one I needed to send, anyway.Maybe that’s why it took me a year to write it, because I had to get enough distance to realize that what I needed to say and what was actually important for them to hear were not the same things.

I am sending three books for their library along with the letter. My sister made little stickers for me to put inside each one, which read: Donated to the Pride Center library in memory of Ashlie V.; beloved daughter and fierce friend. There is a part of me that wanted to keep the books as soon as they arrived. (I’ve read them all, but own none of them) but I also hope that some day, someone like me will wander through their door in search of information that they didn’t have when I wandered through their door, and someone will go to the shelf and pull down one of those books and give it to her. It is a small gesture and at this moment, even the small gestures feel like  milestones.

I open Facebook this morning and scroll down the live feed to see what I’ve missed in the night. There is a reminder tucked in among the status updates and Mafia requests and variety of links, a notice that November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

They’re having a candlelight vigil in Santa Cruz tonight and I wish I could be there. I click on the reminder and it takes me to the page of the organization which founded the event, intended to raise awareness of violence against trans-people. There’s a downloadable spreadsheet on the site where someone has meticulously cataloged the names and dates and violent deaths of more than five hundred transgender men and women worldwide. It is a sobering read. In California alone, there have been 57 violent deaths this year.

The first trans-person I ever knew was not my friend The Poet, though he taught me more than anyone about gender identity. The first trans-person I knew was a woman I worked with in a little greenhouse company here in the valley, during my sophomore year of college. She was the daughter of the company’s founder and the sister of its CEO. To their credit, they did not ostracize her completely. To their shame, they tucked her away in a back office and kept her out of the public eye. She was in her mid fifties, a seemingly sad and awkward woman and the butt of many an office joke. Even then, knowing as little as I did about, well much of anything, I thought it was a horrible way to treat someone who so obviously had been through so much. But oh, a “man in a dress” is still one of those things that

makes people giggle
makes people stare
makes people whisper
makes people feel confused
makes people uncomfortable
makes people feel threatened
makes people fearful
makes people angry
makes people violent
makes people do things they wouldn’t do, if she would just

be normal
behave
be a man
be ashamed
be quiet and stay inside
her house
her office
herself
or wherever it is people should stay,
when being who they really are “makes” other people

giggle
stare
whisper
confused
uncomfortable
threatened
fearful
angry
violent

I count myself lucky to have known and continue to know my share of strong and lovely trans men, but somehow this day reminds me especially of the brave and beautiful trans women whose paths have crossed mine, of Edna, and Dax, of my friend who I like to call The Queen of Dangerous Shoes…

…and last though never ever least, it reminds me of a certain fifteen year old boy, one I’d known quite well when he was a child, but who had become a virtual stranger by the time he said quite simply, “See, I know why I’m always angry. It’s because I’m sad. And I know why I’m always sad, it’s because I’m a girl.”

Suddenly, she was twice the stranger that he’d been moments ago, and I can’t even begin to imagine the expression on my own face, when she smiled sheepishly and said, “I am Ashlie.”

Though I cannot be with my friends tonight, I want them to know that I am there in spirit, that I honor and mourn with them at the loss of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and lovers and friends.

I have been thinking about this space for a while now, mulling over its purpose at this point in my life. The joy of my “bloggy youth” is long gone. Even before we tore down lilywhiteintentions I had gotten lazy and disenchanted. Everything got too public. People I never intended to engage were suddenly peering over my shoulder. My words became weapons more than once. Then life got more complicated and I pulled up stakes, wandered around a bit and finally ended up here. I never did find my groove again, which left me frustrated and even more unmotivated to write.

Then, of course, the floor fell out of everything and I find myself changed, barely writing at all, only writing about Ash, and writing out of grief when I do manage to string a handful of words together. Its how I process. That bit hasn’t changed. And I suppose that half the truth is that I’ve been “processing” pubicly for so long that it is second nature, somehow part of the whole, um…process.

And so, I have been thinking, mulling…trying to decide if it is better to give this space up completely or change how I think of it and in doing so, how I use it. I realized tonight, how easy it would be to go back and fill in the blanks of the year before this one, a year of unimaginable changes, whirring and whirling so fast there was never time to write it all down. It would be good to do that. Therapeutic anyway. Not necessarily a spectator sport though.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve been doing this for so long (however infrequently these last couple of years) that I hardly know how to write anymore without it. But that doesn’t feel like enough to a reason (or the right reason, if you will) to write here, to keep this space alive.

Ashlie was fierce about her pronouns and I supported her in that, knowing that every HE/HIM/HIS rolling off the tongue in casual conversation was a stab in her heart. But pronouns don’t matter anymore. Names either, for that matter. And I’ve noticed enough stalling and stammering from the well-intended in the last few days that I suppose it warrants mentioning.

I promise not to be offended if you say Gabriel as long as you promise not to be disoriented if I say Ashlie. Six weeks ago, I wrote “A year ago, we lost Gabriel and gained Ashlie. Now, we have lost Ashlie and gained nothing.” and for us, it really was that stark a split, enough so that I now think of Gabriel and Ashlie as “them”. And while I continue to grieve for the little boy lost, it is HER I miss most viscerally.

I spent this last week reading a book by a group of bereaved mothers, in which one of them wrote “If you love me, say my child’s name” and it struck a chord with me, because there is this delicate dance that people around you do when something tragic happens…they don’t know what to say, they say too much, they don’t say enough, they ask the wrong questions or don’t ask any questions at all…its not their fault. I get that. I have been on the other side of it too.

The truth is, when someone asks me “how are you?”, I refuse to give them the polite answer because I am lightyears beyond polite. I am devistated. gutted. irrevocably changed. shattered to the core. I answer this way, knowing that the question may well have been rhetorical, or that the questioner really DID mean to inquire about my well-being.

What I mean to say, after all the rambling is this; please don’t ask me general questions to which you could guess my response, and please please don’t be afraid to ask specific ones, or to say my child names. Either one. They are both, at this moment, the only music I can stand to hear.

 Just so you know;

She cursed like a sailor.

Her favorite color was pink. Obsessively so.

She beat every version of Hitman multiple times.

She believed in Sasquatch but not in a benevolent god.

She smoked menthol Camels when she thought I wasn’t looking.

She self-identified as a lesbian but occasionally crushed on FTM boys.

She hated novels but loved books on history, science and medicine.

She told everyone that she was 5’6” even after a growth spurt shot her up to 5’10”.

She smelled like a mix of Victoria’s Secret’s “Pure Seduction” and Aqua Net hairspray.

She got angry fast and over it fast. Words were her favorite weapons and with them she was fierce.

She wore scrubs or desert camo BDUs for pajamas every night, but only those she was really close to ever saw her in such comfy casual clothes.

Her MySpace page still lingers out there, frozen in cyberspace. Her last status update, from February 14^th reads: You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special.

She preferred $5 French Tip glue-on nails to $25 acrylics, a fact that would have been handy to have learned $200-some-odd dollars sooner than we did.

Her favorite way to brush off my concerns, admonishments and questions when I voiced them was “Don’t trip”. My favorite response was, “I’m your mother. Its my job to trip.”

She watched Dexter, Scrubs, House, Top Gear (a British show about cars) and Skins religiously. She also loved Smallville, Arrested Development and pretty much anything on the History channel.

Hanging on her wall for months before her death was a quote from an episode of the BBC show Skins, which read: You’re going to have to be quick. I’ve taken a lot of pills. It troubled me then. It haunts me now.

She was the bravest kid I’ve ever known except when it came to other teenage girls, of whom she became mostly terrified during the last year because they could clock her (recognize her as transgender) from across the room.

She listened mostly to Lil Wayne, Gwen Stefani, Pink Floyd and Crystal Castles, but her favorite song was Moonlight Sonata and she went to sleep most nights listening to one of those Natural Sounds CDs titled Thunderstorm.

Her closest friends in this last year were Brianna, a skinny black lesbian girl with a mohawk and a permanently startled expression, Jackie, a 50-year-old trans woman who drove an old Crown Victoria police unit, her jr. high girlfriend Amanda and her old friend James from Santa Cruz who she spent much of her Soldier Boy time in Capitola with and whose whole family accepted her unconditionally.

She spent the last conscious night of her life with her support group friends, having a late dinner at Applebee’s and crashing out on Jackie’s couch around 3 a.m.

In the hours before her death, sixteen of us attended her bedside, held her hand, tucked the blanket over her toes, combed her hair, whispered into her ear, swept pale pink shadow on her eyelids, adorned her with rings and bracelets, covered her with kisses and tears.

We donated her heart and liver through the California Transplant Network. Her heart didn’t survive the process, but her liver was successfully transplanted and gave a second chance at life to a father of four.

My sister Morticia brought me tulips today, a delicate pink with fringed petals. Ashlie would have approved. Each day things get easier AND harder. Yesterday I cried because I couldn’t find anything in her room that still smelled like her. Today I laughed because there were nine lighters in the dish on the back porch, when a month ago, I’d have been lucky to find one because Ash would lift every lighter she could get her hands on. Each time I passed the tulips today, I smiled, realizing that while I’ve spent a lifetime shying away from the color pink (finding it too prissy, too obvious) now it embodies her spirit and beauty and i find a great comfort in that.

Our dear friend Jorge read the following poem from the Great Sufi Master Hafiz at Ashlie’s bedside on our last day with her and our equally dear friend Dan read it again, at her memorial. It was impossible not to notice that today was the 19th again, a full month after the day that this whole nightmare began. There is comfort for me in these words and I whisper them to myself, alone in her room sometimes late at night.