The last time I saw my grandmother, she kept asking, “Is the other Frances your sister?”
Her dementia had turned her into a time traveller in the last years of her life. She was convinced her mother, who had died when my mom was a teenager, was still alive and living in a separate assisted living facility. She would sometimes forget and then suddenly remember two of her children had died in their thirties, the memory crashing over her with the same force as if the information was brand new again. And she seemed to remember that she had a grandchild named Frances, but I did not look like her anymore.
By the time of our final visit, I had been on testosterone off and on for a couple years through changes in insurance and occasional needlephobia. The changes were slow, but apparent, and perhaps especially so to someone who had an earlier version of me affixed in their memory for comparison. I always shave my facial hair before I see family because I am conflict-avoidant, but my forehead had begun to change shape, my hairline receded slightly at my temples, my voice had deepened, and my shoulders were broader.
My grandfather had noticed the changes to my shape in the months before his death, too, remarking every time I saw him that I looked fit. We would talk about the tomatoes and garlic I was growing in my small garden plot, how I still had not grown any tomatoes as fragrant or flavorful as his. A compliment he repeated was, “Farming looks good on you, Fran.”
My parents, on the other hand, rarely commented or asked questions. When my voice first dropped, I said I had bad allergies. Eventually, they adjusted to the new normal, a mostly innocuous form of gaslighting on my part. My parents read my publications, they’ve seen my professional bio. My dad follows me on LinkedIn where I use they/them pronouns. Though I have never formally had a sitdown coming out conversation with them, they know I don’t identify as a woman anymore, we just don’t talk about it for the same reason my mom and I agreed to no longer talk about politics after the last Christmas I spent with the family: someone is going to end up crying. Like so many families, the foundation of our relationship relies on talking around and not about things. So, in some ways, their lack of comment is their acceptance, but the reactions from my grandparents felt affirming in ways I did not know I craved.
I have no delusions that my grandparents would have understood or condoned my transness, but in the wake of their deaths, I found myself longing for their patient non-judgement. Once, in middle school, I dyed my hair fire-engine red at a sleepover. My mother was furious and tried to enlist Grandma in her fury, to which she only replied, “I don’t know, I think it looks kind of nice.” When I would stay at her house after Wednesday youth group at our church or ride the bus to her house after school while I waited for mom to get off of work, she didn’t comment on big middle schooler feelings, was just there with a pot of tea or freshly made bed.
Grandpa, similarly gentle, complimented my hair when I came home from college with it boyishly short. He taught me to clean a fish when I was seven, an important skill for his oldest grandchild to have regardless of birth sex. My mother’s mother and father’s father both seemed to accept that their grandchildren did not need to be understood to be loved.
This is largely projection. As a child and into my early adulthood, I was too timid, too self-absorbed to ask them questions about themselves and their feelings. By the time I had the wherewithal to do so, their minds were slipping. There was so much I didn’t know about them. There is never enough time. This is an almost universal experience of grandchildren everywhere. An unnamed phase of grief is realizing much of the experience of it is a cliche. Transition is also riddled with cliche, though I am grateful I have not yet had the experience of my parents treating me as if I killed their girl child as I become more of myself. Which is not to say I haven’t experienced a parade of people’s bafflement.
Funerals are nothing if not a chance for all sides of the family to come together and judge the lives of relatives they haven’t seen in years. Sitting by the hotel pool after my grandfather’s memorial in June, my dad’s half sister mentioned out of nowhere that, while she loved everyone — gays included — she couldn’t condone my lifestyle because she was a devout Christian. After my grandmother’s memorial three months later, my mom’s lifelong best friend asked me, “So, what’s the deal with your pronouns?” And my mom chimed in with, “I know she’s non-binary or whatever, but I still call her my daughter. I’m just glad she’s not militant about the pronoun thing.”
In these instances, I chose to channel Grandma’s lack of temper. Quietly sigh, “Oh, goodness gracious,” and move on.
Another common experience in transition and death is the reorientation of the family structure. It has only been a few months since their deaths, and I am still watching my parents feel out their new roles. After Grandma passed, I overheard my dad joke to my mom, “Hey, now we’re both orphans.”
After his graveside service where I laid Grandpa’s urn in the ground, the Marine Corps color guard in attendance asked my father if he would like to receive the folded flag. My dad said, “Of course, I am the living patriarch.”
I was somewhat surprised at his immediate claim to the title. While it is factual, I hadn’t thought of our family as needing someone in that role. It will most likely be a long time before I have to contend with my own parents’ deaths, but who knows, maybe by then, my mustache will have come in more fully and I too will want the title.
Grief still passes in waves, but the grief I feel for my grandparents passing cannot grow exponentially. Having exited life, they are now static. They cannot change. They cannot say anything accidentally hurtful out of ignorance. They cannot say anything at all. But my parents are alive, not merely objects of memory. And the living have a way of compounding grief through misunderstanding. They and the people around them will certainly find new ways to misinterpret each other ad nauseum until death.
I am grateful that, in their absence, they left me with an abundance of small joys that are compatible with every past and future version of myself: my love of libraries and gardening, very much informed by both of them; the memory of Grandpa mistaking a mound of wasabi for a piece of avocado or Grandma digging into an ice cream sundae in a comically large martini glass; the smell of oolong tea; the taste of smoked trout.
Once we move past the pain, grief has a way of revealing what is left and, from what is left, we must sort through it to find what we want.
This was so so beautiful. Thank you for sharing your many layered grief with us.. it made me think of my own grandparents and all the ways they affirmed what they did not know in me.