Letting Them Let Go

Why loved ones grieve us when we begin our transitions

I’m a big anticipatory griever.

Anticipatory grieving is a strange thing; it’s what happens when you find out that someone you love is going to die, but hasn’t yet. It’s far from rare, but I grieve almost entirely when I know the end is coming for a loved one—way, way more than I do when it actually, finally comes.

When my dad was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we knew that it would be the end of him. Pancan is messy and grim to a degree that’s almost impossible to understand for anyone who hasn’t been through it with a family member, because virtually no cases of it are ever detected until it’s spread everywhere. Most cancers give you early warning signs—coughing and shortness of breath with lung cancer, lumps for breast cancer, stuff like that—but usually the first sign someone has pancreatic cancer is that they turn a bright, Simsons-style yellow out of nowhere, when the main cancer grows so large that it chokes off the person’s bile ducts.

And if you’re thinking to yourself, “wait, the bile ducts aren’t anywhere near the pancreas,” well… yeah. That’s kind of the point.

In the fall of 2017, my dad had been living with me for a month as we’d spun through a whirlwind of doctor’s appointments. We were driving back from the last of them, bumping along the freeway, as he sat in silence next to me. He was still groggy from the anesthesia for his biopsy, but Dad had always bounced back quickly. The quiet wasn’t from his anesthesia. The surgeon has told us what kind of cancer he thought he’d found. We’d been hoping for clear cell carcinoma, because clear cell usually responds pretty well to chemotherapy.

It definitely wasn’t clear cell.

Slowly, we pulled into my driveway, after most of an hour of driving, having exchanged not a single word. Neither one of us knew what to say. A lifetime of closeness, of daily, hours-long conversations, and now of all times we couldn’t find any words.

He followed me into my dining room, standing in the nowhere space houses have between rooms in an open floor plan as I leaned against the yellow oak of the dining table we’d made together. I turned to face him, and for the first time in my life, he looked small.

We stood there in silence for a long time.

“I need to get you pictures—” he said, and cut himself off. His eyes brimmed with unshed tears, tears I’d never seen from him in my entire life.

“Dad,” I said, barely able to keep it together myself, and unable to choke another word out.

“Zac, I’m not going to be here for too much longer. I need to get you pictures so you don’t forget me,” he said, and we burst into tears as one. I have no idea how long we clung to each other, sobbing out our grief at losing this connection we’d shared for so long.

A year later, three seasons more than we’d had any right to hope for, he finally passed. We held his wake in his home, and I remember bouncing around from family member to family member, all smiles, and wondering why I’d cried so much harder over the pictures Dad wanted to get me than I had when he actually died.

Endings that aren’t endings

This is an article I’ve wanted to write for a long, long time. It’s a hard one to put pen to paper on, because it touches areas that are generally very, very tender for a lot of trans folks. I’m going to speak as tenderly as I can, as a result—maybe a touch more gently than I often do.

Grief is a funny thing. Not ha-ha funny, obviously. More “what the fuck” funny, by any reasonable measure.

We always think about grief and grieving as something that happens when someone we love dies. Movie after movie, story after story, and always about some noble person dying, and everyone’s very sad once they go. That’s called normal, or conventional grief, and it’s the only kind that really gets any attention.

The reality is a lot more complicated than that.

Ultimately, grief is the process of saying goodbye to someone or something that you have a really strong emotional bond to. People grieve in different ways—I’m an anticipatory griever, for instance—but what sparks a grieving reaction can change how a person needs to grieve that loss.

And it is a need. Grieving is an essential part of loving.

While we usually think of the passing of a loved one as the heart of grief, the reality is that we grieve many, many more things than death. If you’ve ever had to give up on a dream you really hoped for, you probably had to grieve it. If you ever had to move out of a home you really loved, you probably had to grieve it. If you’ve ever been through a hard break-up, where you had to give up the idea of the life you were going to have with this person, you almost certainly had to grieve it.

That last one is important. Let’s hold on to it for a little while.

One of the most common kinds of grief out there, and probably the type that gets recognized the least, is something called either ambiguous grief or disenfranchised grief, depending on who’s talking about it. It happens when you lose someone while they’re still alive, like in a divorce, or if they change dramatically while still being there. Ambiguous grief is most common when a family member gets dementia or Alzheimers—the person is still there, but they’re not who you knew, and the future you dreamed of for them will never come to pass. That’s where ambiguous grief is best-studied.

And ambiguous grief is something that it’s very, very common for a family member of a trans person to feel when we come out. We’re still there, but we’re… different.

It’s not about us

I’ve heard from a lot of trans people, understandably hurt and indignant, that their family says they need to grieve them. “I’m right here!” is the usual, fierce statement that comes along with it, a righteous anger and well-founded. It’s hard to tell folks that the grieving their family says they’re doing?

It really isn’t about them.

The funny thing about ambiguous grief is that it’s the grieving we do when we grieve part of ourselves, not another person—but we don’t generally have a very good way of talking about that kind of grief, because almost none of us have a good example to imitate, which is one of the main ways people learn how to do anything. This kind of grief “erodes our sense of mastery and destroys our belief in the world as a fair, orderly, and manageable place.” It’s what happens when the story we tell about the world falls apart, and we’re left to pick up the pieces.

And I bet it’s the exact kind of grieving you had to do when you finally fully faced your trans identity and what it would mean for your life. The story of safety, of the world and your place in it, that you’d spent your whole life building fell to shambles, leaving you feeling helpless, afraid, and alone. It’s the kind of mourning we, as trans people, often do when we look back at our childhoods, at the pain we endured and the life we wish we could’ve lived.

But just like you didn’t really have the language to explain why you felt the need to cry for the future and the past you could never have had, the people you love usually don’t have the language to explain why they feel the need to grieve you, even when you’re right there in front of them. It makes sense that we’re hurt by their need to grieve, from one perspective—but the thing is, they need to go through that grieving process, and for it to draw their family together as grieving is supposed to.

Remember: they’re not really grieving you. They’re grieving the beautiful dream of the life they thought you were going to live. It was never going to come to pass. Those sorts of perfect dreams never do. But we build them anyway, because they’re how we imagine a better future into reality.

And the thing is, trying to avoid the grief when those dreams fall apart can have some pretty grim consequences.

Complex grief: The price we pay for not grieving

I mentioned a bit ago that grieving is a need, and not something we can avoid. This is the hard part of the article, so be warned:

If your family members feel the need to grieve when you come out or transition? Then they genuinely need to grieve, no matter how inappropriate it feels to you.

When a person tries to avoid grieving—and this is any type of grieving—there’s a good chance that it can turn into complicated grieving disorder. Have you ever met that one old pensioner who’s spouse passed away years and years ago, but they’re just stuck in a never-ending cycle of grief, unable to complete the grieving process and take the next steps in their life? Where their life has become an orouboros of grief, feeding on itself?

That’s complicated grieving, and it’s a special kind of hell.

The most common entry-point to complicated grief is trying to avoid the grieving process completely—to push on with life, as though nothing has changed, when it absolutely has. A bunch of us get stuck in this cycle too, and for the same reasons, especially when we look back on our lost childhoods.

Complicated grief has a particularly nasty interaction with ambiguous grief. If someone’s ambiguous grief gets trapped into a cycle of complex grief, it can be hard to have a relationship with that person at all until and unless they’re able to heal their complicated grief and complete the grieving process, because that person’s very presence can and will trigger the whole cycle.

That hurts everyone involved, and it’s no good.

Moving on, together

When someone you love seems to need to grieve you, or outright tells you they feel that need, one of the best things is to do exactly what you’d do if they were grieving literally anything else: step into the relationship, rather than away from it. The reason for this is simple: the whole entire function of grief is to reinforce and renew social lines of support from the people we love by expressing our hurt and pain. When people respond to that cry for help by meeting the need that the grieving person is expressing, it lets the grieving person complete the cycle of grief.

In the case of ambiguous grief, the effect can be even more dramatic. When our family grieves our transitions, it’s usually a loss of a sense of safety, of security about our future, not theirs. On the other hand, they might be grieving the idea they had of you—not really as your gender assigned at birth, though that’s what they probably have the words for, but the idea that you were happy as you were. And that they might very well have contributed to that unhappiness.

They’re grieving for us. That difference is really, really important.

But when they can see the ways that our transitions bring us light and life, how we’ve found safety and security and joy in our transitions, it helps heal that wound and re-establish their sense of safety. Encourage them to go to therapy, and get help working through their grief, obviously… but you being there for them? It can make all the difference in the world.

Know your boundaries. Know when to give them space, and watch for grief turning into complicated grief. Even well-supported grief turns toxic sometimes, and the situations you’ll have to step away from to protect yourself. Most especially, watch for family members with a history of abuse, because they may use the specter of their grief as a tool of control.

But remember that grief is a healthy thing. It's about bringing our loved ones closer to us, and that out of grief can come relationships far stronger than they were before, a love more boundless than the skies. I’ve watched it happen firsthand. It’s beautiful.

Hard, as all grieving is.

But so, so beautiful.