Loss and Grief

Trying to reconcile what I am now with what I can never go back and have.

It’s been a bit of an intense week. Mostly this has been trying to get various tasks at work to either completion or stopping points before I have a week off and do my best to ignore work for a week (and that was successful enough). But there has also been a few things outside work that I have had to contend with that were - are - of a somewhat heavy nature.

My Dad passed away a little over 4 years ago. But he’d mentally gone, for the most part, at least 6 months earlier due to dementia. The details aren’t important. What matters here is that there are now things I can never tell him or show him and hear what he thinks. I had a moment of this today, driving down the coast on some small adventure - I don’t remember what it was, but it reminded me of Dad. How he thought, how he did things, how he spoke. And I suddenly realized all my memories of Dad are now tinged with sadness that I can’t make new ones with him.

This is loss. Loss of a parent. Loss of a relationship.

I don’t think I understood the first time this really happened. It was shortly after we got him into a nursing home. One of his projects from decades earlier was trying to build an electric car. He had an old Mini, older than me, and had put an electric forklift motor in it instead of the internal combustion engine. It worked, too, but all he had to power it was a single 12v car battery, which was not going to give you much mileage! But he kind of got stuck on how to put batteries in it. And this was long enough ago that lithium batteries were not a thing. So the project sat stalled for decades.

However, the EV industry itself did not stand still. Through one thing and another, I managed to buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 a few years ago. Very sadly, Dad was not in a position to appreciate how far electric car technology had progressed - I couldn’t even tell him what I had because it didn’t even make sense to him.

It was a loss. And this loss hurt.

It still hurts. But like working through grief, you never get over it. You just learn how to live with it. It’s part of your life now.

There was another event this week, too. In an online meeting of friends this week we were asked to fantasize about our ideal prom night¹. What dress would we want to wear. What music would we want to dance to. What would the after-party be like. People, not unreasonably, started by describing their real prom nights, some many decades ago.

Mine was several decades ago, too. I’m pretty sure most of my high school year didn’t know what we were doing or why it was put on for us. Most of the girls had acquired similar types of dresses and most of the guys had hired similar types of suits, me included. But we generally spent the night with our existing friend groups. I only got up to dance because some girls I knew in my year that most of my friends did not came and pulled me up. Yes, it surprised my friends, but I wasn’t going to say no. That was, in fact, part of why I wasn’t going to say no…

But that was not my ideal prom night. I didn’t have anything like my ideal prom night largely because I had no clue that long ago that I am trans. Not that my school would have accepted that. Not back then. And not that school, either. I’m truly not sure what my ideal prom night would have been like - but it would have included a prom dress, that’s for sure. Probably pink or lilac, tight waist and flared skirts. I could probably make one, to be honest… but wearing it now would not really be the same, certainly not without the sense of occasion.

For transgender people who transition later in life, there is very a often a desire to re-create experiences and memories that they did not have when younger because they were the wrong gender. This is difficult but still compelling - and it comes out of a sense of loss. Loss of what they never had when younger. Loss of what could have been. Should have been. And a lot of those things sadly can’t be re-created to what the trans person wants. And that hurts.

We can’t stop it hurting, either. It’s like grief. A way has to be found to live with it. Sometimes that means a re-creation that is better than nothing. I’ve heard of middle-aged trans women having prom nights or similar for this very reason.

But sometimes the hard work must be done to re-frame it instead.

That’s what I’ve started doing this week. Or at least, started trying to understand what to do. I can’t disentangle the “I wish I transitioned years ago…” from the “but I have finally started!” and I don’t really want to, either. But I can change the priority of the two sides of this. I can choose to celebrate what I can do now and use that to help heal the hurt of what I will never be able to do.

Because it will never stop hurting. It’s a deep loss, after all, and one we frequently didn’t know was a loss until long long afterwards.

1. We actually call them “high school formals” here, I should point out. And they are (to my knowledge) quite a lot less lavish than what prom nights are like in the US and lacks most of the ceremony around the US ones, too. It probably didn’t help I went to a small private high school, so there would not have been more than 70 of us kids there on the night.