Today I had what will most likely be my last phone call with my grandmother. She’s nearly 93 years old, dying from a metastasized tumor from lung cancer, and within the last couple of weeks has experienced significant cognitive decline. We didn’t talk on the phone for very long, I’m not sure she knew who I was. I told her goodbye and that I loved her, and after I hung up I cried. I had been afraid to call, but I’m glad that I did because even a little small talk seemed to give me some closure with her.
“Fraught” might be a good word for my relationship with my grandmother. I can't really give any examples of happy memories with her, she was a very critical woman with a sharp tongue. Talking to her on the phone and hearing her say how happy she was to be surrounded by her family was honestly deeply disturbing. She was an incredibly ambitious woman, with a career that ran the span of her adult life - especially a hard thing to do having 4 kids in the 50s-70s. She made the choice to further her ambition over having a meaningful relationship with her family, and now at the end of her life it's really obvious what that wrought with her kids' relationships. But I don't know if she even wanted to have children in the first place, so much of her time and place denied her agency and I can empathize with scrabbling for anything she could get.
I was so afraid to come out to my grandmother, she was a dyed-in-the-wool Barry Goldwater conservative with Fox News constantly on TV any time my family visited. But amazingly the few times we've talked since were seamless, she used my name and pronouns and made no fuss at all, even seemed positive. I guess she really surprised me in that way, and I'm thankful for that. So I guess to put it all together - personally we didn't connect, and I question some of her choices in life, but at the same time I have some respect for her drive given her life circumstances. I think we have a lot in common personality-wise, and there wasn't ever going to be a moment of recognition between us on that.
Also - she was a terminal internet head. Got her first ThinkPad in the mid-90s and was up smoking and browsing the net til 2am most nights until this year. Ridiculous, unrelatable. 🙃
Speaking with my grandmother today made me remember when her husband died 20 years ago. I was 14 and had just arrived back home from an evening bike ride to find a house of crying family members. I was stunned, and went into my room and felt… nothing. I felt the absence of something, like there was an emotion I couldn’t quite experience. I remember worrying that I was some sort of sociopath because I couldn’t seem to access the grief that I knew was in me for a man who had meant a lot to me. Something was in the way.
I finished my second read through Imogen Binnie’s Nevada this weekend, and there’s a part at the end where the protagonist Maria is reflecting out loud on the bravado that trans people have to put on when they come out in order to assert their gender to the people around them. Maria wonders if needing to act so sure of oneself might become a roadblock for the transitioner, because it could keep them from continuing to evolve as a person. I think Binnie is burying a lede here, which is: trans people experience a lot of doubt about their transitions. The doubt is not because we’re not trans, it’s the messaging we receive from the world all our lives that tries to convince us of the impossibility of our existences. Accepting oneself marks the start of unlearning these messages. It’s why we joke about childhood or “egg” signs so much, we’re looking for something in our past that reminds us of who we are.
Maybe there’s room for signs in the present, too. My grandmother isn’t dead yet, but she is gone. I cried when I heard about her rapid decline, and when I got off the phone this afternoon I sat with my grief and let it roll over me until eventually felt a bit better. I could not have done that before transition, it just wouldn’t have happened. I needed transition to access my emotions. It’s so much better to feel grief and experience that hurt than to feel cut off from emotion altogether. I made the right choice to accept myself. Hard moments like these remind me of it.