Month: October 2024

When Will was a fifteen year old boy and told us he was gay, the first thing I said to him was that we loved him just as he was. My immediate thought after that was that his dad and I would protect him at all costs from the hate and vitriol that was surely going to come his way.

A few years after he had told us, I went with him and the girls to see Barack Obama at a rally nearby when he was running for president the first time. As we walked to the venue Will spotted members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a ragtag bunch of a religous zealots who gained notoriety for their hatred of everything. Their specialty was their God Hates Fags signs and promises of eternal damnation for anyone who was not straight. Will grabbed my arm hard and said, “Mom, we can’t walk past them,” and I could hear the fear in his voice. We crossed the street and avoided them, but I wanted to confront them, I wanted to grab their signs, I wanted them to fear my wrath like my son did theirs. But the funny thing about this group was that they were heavily protected by the police wherever they went unlike my young, gay son.

That was many years ago and as a country we have since graduated to hating the transgender community because now everyone knows somebody who is gay so there’s no novelty in that. But that group of people? Well, they’re coming for your bathroom, your swimming medals, the dressing rooms at the moonlight madness sale at your local Kohl’s, and in the course of your kid’s school day changing their sex in the nurse’s office.

When I worked at a local university, our office was home to LGBTQ Affairs so seeing students of every identification was a normal part of the day. I was working with a student group on one of their events via email. The student rep’s name was Katherine, but every email was signed off with a different name which kept confusing me. When they came to the office to meet me in person and talk over details, the person at our front desk came to tell me and said, “Just so you know, they are presenting themselves as male,” which I was grateful to have a heads up on. What followed was a conversation on the business end of things and then a different conversation about the difference in name and my apologies for the confusion. We had more emails, and phone calls over the weeks that followed and their event went off without a hitch. Through it all I stayed solidly female.

Last fall I took a writing class sponsored by our library where a trans woman was in attendance. Her look was over the top and garnered lots of attention which for me would be so uncomfortable I’d probably end up hiding in the bathroom out of embarrassment. A few hours later we were in a class together where she furiously took notes which I admired because I was having trouble staying interested. As the class wound down and the instructor asked if anyone had any advice to share about their method of writing, she raised her hand and proceeded to wow the room with a multitude of tips. In that moment her look melted away in light of her enthusiasm for writing and supporting everyone in the room who was struggling with the same thing – making time to write. I often think that trans people are the bravest of us out in the world. We all package ourselves in order to be accepted and they have the courage to rip the packaging off to show their true selves and face ridicule, and often violence, at every turn.

I cannot accept punishing anyone who has purposely been pushed to the fringes of society for being who they are, for wanting the same things all of us want, for daring to dream that they, too, get a chance. As the holidays get closer and we are starting to think of our celebrations, for those of us missing someone (and isn’t that all of us?) there are so many bittersweet reminders of how it used to be. Mark loved pumpkin pie, my mom used an old-fashioned meat grinder to crush her cranberries, my dad loved stuffing. As the turkey is in the oven the memories flood in and the longing of setting one less plate never goes away.

The airwaves this election season have been flooded with the vilest of commercials demonizing the other. We are being groomed to hate. But there is a person on the receiving end of that, a chair being made ready for them, sisters who can’t imagine life without their brother, and parents desperately praying that they can shield them from that which they do not deserve.

Hate has consequences.

My family lived in a suburb south of Chicago – minutes actually from the city limits. Prior to that, my mom and dad lived in an apartment with three small boys that was bursting at the seams. I don’t know much about those years except that my mom talked so fondly of their neighbors, Gladys and Al, that I felt like I knew them even though I never did. My dad credits my Uncle Moe (the never-married brother of my grandma who lived with her and my grandpa until his death) with giving them the means to buy a house. My dad said his uncle watched them struggle to keep things afloat and gave them money for a down payment on the house we all grew up in. My Uncle Moe was mostly an elusive figure in my life. He wasn’t in many family photos as he worked nights at the steel mill, but I knew my dad was grateful to him his entire life for the help he gave him when he was a young father.

The house by any standard was a starter home. Small, no basement, one full bath, another with a sink, toilet, hot water heater, freezer, and a plastic bucket taped to a vent in the ceiling to keep the birds out. Eight people were crammed into that little house – it’s saving grace a big backyard where we all played.

We spent the first eight years of our school lives at St. Jude the Apostle – an actual barn when my parents first moved there. For all of us life revolved around the church and school and Mom and Dad volunteered for a lot. How with six kids they found the time I do not know. But because of that nearly all of their friends were fellow parishioners, fellow parents with many kids, fellow adults who knew how to be of service and have fun doing it.

One of those friends was named Joan Kelly. Her husband, David, ran a drywall business and they had eight kids. Many of their kids were the same age as some of us so the Kellys were part of our lives for a very long time. Mrs. Kelly knew everything about everyone. My sister and I were a year apart and nobody could get our names straight except Mrs. Kelly. She never even had to guess – she just knew. She knew each one of my brother’s names, who their teachers were, which one of them were the same age as one of hers. My mom loved Mrs. Kelly – if she told us that once she told us a hundred times. Joan was funny, she was a spitfire, and she was a dear friend. Mom would cross paths with her and hear one of her kooky stories and would retell us at dinner. “That David is a saint,” Mom would say. My dad was the first of their large group of friends to die and years later David and many others would follow. I was so sad for Mrs. Kelly when I heard the news. From the stories my mom and dad told it seemed that David was the straight guy to her comedy routine. What was Lucy supposed to do without her Ricky?

Years later the people who started that church and school started moving further west (my mom included) and they would have yearly reunions. When she would see Mrs. Kelly at one of those (or more likely a funeral) she would fill us in on what she was up to – it was like getting an update on your Auntie Mame.

When you live to be my mom’s age you don’t have many friends left and the ones who are either don’t get around very well or are in assisted living. Most of the people who came to her wake were people who knew my mom through all of us which was our own sort of reunion. A few hours into the visitation and balancing on two canes, in came Mrs. Kelly with her niece. News of her arrival spread fast. My sisters talked to her first and then I made my way over to her as she sat in a chair in the front row. She had hardly changed, her eyes the kind of blue that looked like a pool you could dive into. She watched the screen with tears in her eyes as it showed photo after photo of my mom’s life and said, “Oh will you look at our girl? She was beautiful inside and out.” I sat on the floor at her feet and she turned to me and said, “I loved your mom and dad.” “It was mutual,” I said and pulled my grade school friend over and told Mrs. Kelly her name. “Oh, yes, of course I know you Pat. You’re Chuck and Helen’s daughter, aren’t you,” she said and then listed family after family that she knew who lived on the street Pat grew up on. We had a long talk with her and caught up on Peggy, the daughter of hers that was in our class. Will was standing nearby and I motioned him over to meet her, “My god, you look just like your grandfather,” she said when she laid eyes on him. She was the same Mrs. Kelly we had always known and told us a story of becoming the girls softball coach because somebody asked her if she could. She agreed without have any idea what she was doing, pushed a stroller with one of her babies across the field, and winged it from there. “That’s what we did back then,” she said, “and nobody cared if you knew what you were doing or not.” She filled us in on the rest of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. I’m not sure if I was distracted or someone I knew was leaving and I got up to thank them for coming, but when I looked again Mrs. Kelly was gone. I hoped she would be at the funeral the next day but if she was I never saw her.

I think most families have a Joan – the relative or family friend who lights up the room with their stories, their interest in your life, their humor and kindness. To have my mom and dad gone and see Joan walk through the doors of that funeral home, which like my mom for many years was a too regular occurance, was a beam of light on years gone by. She knew things about both of them as her and David’s friends, carried stories within her we could never know, and hobbled in with her niece and canes to tell us.

If you ever have a fleeting thought that your presence at a funeral is not necessary I hope you realize that you are the living record keeper of a story that a family may have never heard, a story that will bring light and a smile as you say farewell. How else would I have known that the time our not-even-five-foot mom played Tattoo, dressed in a white tux with her short dark hair and pointing to the sky saying, “De plane, de plane,” in a Fantasy Island spoof that was a church fundraiser, would be talked about by Joan and all my parents’ friends for years. As she lay in a casket just feet away it was Mrs. Kelly’s storytelling that erased the dementia and made Mom shine again.

If there was a prayer I had after that night was over it was gratitude followed by a plea to the universe to protect The Joans in our lives at all costs.