#My Aunt Ana

by Abe Berglas                                                                                                                                      abe.berglas.net

When you died, my dad told us you killed yourself.

A week later,my cousin said you probably “died from the surgeries”.

The lines of correlation and causation cross in their conceptual fuzziness.
The state of transness becomes the thing that kills you, the threat, the terminal illness.

It didn’t occur to our family that trans people also die from natural causes.
My cousin pulled the family together, across forgotten-siblings and disavowals.

She had a vision of the perfect Christmakkah dinner, the one that fixes everything, the one that exists in a world where our histories can’t hurt us.
I found an obituary for you in the Ottawa Citizen.

You are misgendered and deadnamed, and even without knowing that, the obituary platitudes feel hollow.

You are “accepting and respectful of all”. It’s the thing you say about someone you never got to know.

For most of your life, you weren’t speaking to the people writing that neat paragraph.

It’s the only online proof of your existence.

For most of my life you were a ghost in photographs.

I understand why, up until the months before your death, you weren’t speaking to us.

You were around my age when you cut my extended family off, and braver than me.

You taught me valuable lessons about my family.

I was moved by how, although they once called you Ana and referred to you as a daughter, in grief, when they became the protagonist of your life, they lied about who you were.

When you didn’t fit, you were squished out of sight and into a stilted obituary. Now you can’t talk back.

My mother said I couldn’t bring my girlfriend to a family gathering since it would remind your parents of you.

I’m sorry that you were pointed, your transness erased one moment, and a weapon the next.

I think you did make our family kinder. I like to think that I remind them of you – that you might prompt reflection and shame.

If the afterlife existed, and you were looking down at us, you might be warmed by their tolerance of my transness, or you might be angry that I am getting the love they withheld from you. I would understand either way. Most of all I am glad I don’t believe in the afterlife, so I don’t believe that you had to watch yourself become erased.

I live in a chosen family. I’ve never met your friends, nor do I have any way to reach them. It’s with them that you reside, not us, not the ancestral graveyard and clumsy prayers.

To my family you are the memory to supress, an old face in an old photo, a story that doesn’t fit. To me, you are an idea, floating above my awkward trans life, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes angry, sometimes painfully obviously missing.

Who were you? Who do I ask? What do I ask them?