There were drains hanging from my chest when I made the first phone call. Not even two days before, I was under the knife, having a surgeon — an artist — remake my chest. These are scars that you will never see.
“Hey,” I say softly into the phone. “I think you should come over. I’ll explain when you get here.”
When I hang up, I straighten my spine and I slap myself across the cheek. Our friends are coming over, and I remind myself that I can’t crumble, not now. I’ve never had to disclose that someone is dying, to shatter the world as they knew it with a single sentence. I guess because I was the one that was usually on the brink of death.
This was not the thunder I wanted stolen from me.
There’s a knock on my door, and the words are falling out of my mouth before I can think of how to say them. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “Cris isn’t going to make it.” We hold onto each other for dear life, the drains pressed between us, filling with my blood.
The color is already gone from my face; I’m waiting now to see your ghost.
/
You are difficult to contain. A neuroscientist, a poet, a drag queen, a teacher — queerness, for you, was simply your way of being in the world, the shimmer held in every cell in your body.
“They” as a pronoun was the most natural thing in the world, because I can’t imagine how “she” or “he” could hold everything that you are, that you were. They, as in, “I hold the contradictions and make them beautiful.” They, as in, “I wear my trauma as drag and spin it into gold.”
I never understood how anyone could look at you and not see “they,” or hear the mirth in your laughter and not believe it to be sheer magic or mischief, or look at your delicate hands and assign you any essence other than “everything.”
Everything, the totality.
You were the scientist who loved astrology. You were the poet who could seamlessly reference Grey’s Anatomy without missing a beat. You toiled in a lab with mice by day and wore eight-inch heels and glitter on a stage at night.
You moved between worlds, always chasing something — the secrets you found studying zebrafish, the catharsis in lip-synching pop songs in gay bars — and I fear that neither one was enough.
You could find the wisdom in a Kelly Clarkson song and in the DNA of a jellyfish. I remember thinking, I’ll follow this queen to the ends of the earth.
If only you had let me.
/
Your memorial is organized by email. This is, I think, the first time I really understood what it meant to die as a millennial. You’re just a few months shy of your 30th birthday, but if I think about that for too long, I want to set the whole world on fire.
It was foreshadowing, I realize, when you told me how your novel was going to end, just a few weeks before you died. How the characters, realizing the world is irredeemable, decide to burn it to the ground so something new can grow in its place.
You lit the metaphorical match in your bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, and I still don’t know if it was a smoke signal or a death wish. I’m not sure if you knew, either.
My whole world burns down with it. Your remains nourish the ground underneath me. Grief is a brutal and unforgiving teacher, offering lessons I never asked for. Your tombstone is a mirror reflecting back all the ways my story could’ve ended just like yours.
Your mother makes me promise that I won’t end my life like you did.
I have to grow in your place now, become something new.
You used to tell me that no one understood trauma quite like we did, like it was a language that we spoke fluently, sometimes morbidly and always earnestly. In that way, I’ll never stop hearing your voice.
/
Your graduate advisor responds to the email about your memorial. Gently, I remind him of your pronouns.
I think back to all the conversations we had about what it was like to be a transgender scientist — struggling to be seen, carefully measuring how much of yourself you could be and how much you had to hide.
Sometimes, over coffee, you’d admit to me, “I’m so tired.” The resignation in your eyes was like the dimming of a thousand stars at once.
Your advisor snaps back so harshly that the wind is knocked out of me. “That’s the side you knew, but Cris, the young man I knew, had many sides,” your advisor lectures.
How can you call it “sides” when you never asked to be deconstructed? When it’s the world splitting you apart, never allowing you to be whole in the first place?
How could he speak of you as though everything you were in life — all the magic that moved through you — was simply too inconvenient to acknowledge? How can you take a prism and demand one color?
I’m trying to find the words to explain to him how painful misgendering is, but my rage is boiling over — not just at him, but at a world that was never good enough for you, determined to take the beauty of your queerness and grind it to dust underneath a heavy heel.
I tell the professor that he should be ashamed. He calls me a “hectoring, self-absorbed, pompous twit.”
The aftertaste of the same poison that killed you is sitting on my tongue. The taste is familiar, metallic, and cold. I remember the anguish of being invisible, how it eroded your spirit, how it clipped your wings into pieces that neither of us could stitch back together.
Without wings, there was nothing to break your fall.
/
When a transgender person commits suicide, it’s almost always murder in slow motion.
When you cut a flower at the stem, no one is surprised when it wilts. When your petals fell, I tried to hold onto them as long as I could. The world might know you now as a statistic, but I knew you as you breathed and bloomed.
The morning memorial begins with a passionate plea about pronouns from a trans femme you knew, and I’m silently grateful for her courage. But I’m left trembling when I realize that you never lived to see the day when your life didn’t require a disclaimer — instead, your death now required one, too.
The professor gives the closing remarks. He stumbles over his words.
When he misgenders you, he tries to correct himself, stuttering. The pain in the room is palpable, a living reenactment of the pain you held in your last breath.
When he refers to you as a son, your mother — in a moment more powerful than my words can hold — adamantly corrects him.
“My child,” she says.
Her child who, after being flown to New York for a final time, would be turned over to ash. “I blew glitter over their body just before they were cremated,” your mother tells me.
And this is how you left us, anointed by the shimmering breath of your mother.
It was one final gesture to remind you that, while the world may not have seen you, we still did.
If you’re suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386, or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741741.
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Photo by h heyerlein on Unsplash.
Heart-wrenchingly beautiful. I’m sorry for your loss. May they fly free at last, and encircle you when you need them ❤ G
LikeLiked by 8 people
It was an out-pour of a heartfelt, incredibly gratifying, Your thoughts go to show how indebted was your commitment.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Such a heartbreaking story, but you write it so beautifully. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend ❤
LikeLiked by 7 people
Tears in Atlanta. This was beautiful, Sam. Thank you.
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So sorry for your loss. 😦
LikeLiked by 5 people
I have no words. My tears are with yours.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I can feel your pain here, for them, for the state of this world, in your own struggles. I see you. I hear you. I hold your pain and hope it lightens the burden. So much love to you, to Cris, and to their loved ones who continue to grapple with this pain of loss and so much more.
LikeLiked by 8 people
So much love and light to you through this loss.
💖🙏🕉
LikeLiked by 7 people
So very sorry for you loss. 😦
LikeLiked by 6 people
Sorry for your loss Sam. Thank you for sharing the grief and anguish with us. Holding you in my thoughts this evening.
LikeLiked by 7 people
This is breathtaking and heart breaking and absolutely beautiful! My deepest sympathy is with you, and I pray that one day we can all just be exactly who we are. My best friend is a transgender male so I understand to a degree how trying it can be, but who are others to judge and tell you how to live your own life?!
I pray “they” rest in paradise! 💔🤗
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Sending you so much love and light. ❤
LikeLiked by 5 people
I send my condolences to you and their loved ones.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Sorry for your loss⚘
LikeLiked by 7 people
I am gutted by your loss and pain, by the representation of their suffering and perseverance but also by the glimpses of reflection I see in your words. This needed to be written, thank you for that.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Sorry for your loss.
It’s a heartbreaking story! 😢
LikeLiked by 7 people
Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for bringing awareness that is so desperately needed in today’s society. My heart breaks for you, their family, and their friends. I am so sorry you lost someone you love so much. Hugs from Orlando. 💗
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I am so sorry for your loss. May they shimmer among the stars in the night sky, at peace, at last 💜
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This was so hard hitting yet so beautiful. These words needed to be spoken for the world to hear it and to understand. I am so sorry for your heart break and your loss. I hope you find peace and some healing. I’m so sorry they were misgendered even at their memorial, where the most respect should be given it was overlooked🧡
Alex x
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Thank for charing with us👊
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I know how it pains to say good bye, enduring it is the only alternative as it has happened. Sorry for your loss
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This is so heartbreaking, and you penned it so well.
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I’m so sorry for your loss.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Reblogged this on Neal O'Reilly: Le Blogue.
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Thank you for seeing all of your friend and gendering then correctly.
May they fly free among the stars.
And there’s nothing “pompous” about insisting on their correct pronoun.
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Oops, typo, should read “…gendering them correctly”
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Amazing
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You wrote a beautiful tribute…how can words take the pain we feel when a piece of our soul departs in so called death…never forget my friend those that touch our souls so deeply are a part of our soul …you have lived many lives …we do not ever really die…just change our form, our clothes for awhile… when my sweet Euan left, his spirit taught me so much, and then I read the After Life of Billy Fingers and it made sense…do not let this world break you…or make you forget…we are more so much more then just this human… we are soul….your friend lives on…and so will you…
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful tribute to real love…the kind that just is…😘❤
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I’m so sorry for your loss. This is the first post I’ve read that got me goosebumps….
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Beautifully heartbreaking and sadly devastating
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I am so very sorry for your loss. Your writing is beautiful, I did not know your friend, but now feel like I do, and what a loss it is. X
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Heartwrenchingly beautiful. This line – How can you take a prism and demand one color? – is pure poetry. I´m sorry for your loss.
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What a beautiful remembrance and powerful reminder.
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💖
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Really sorry for your loss
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I wish I had $$ to invest in anybody. I’d be supporting all my trans folks.
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Thank you so much for your courage in sharing this with a world that so desperately needs to hear it. Thank you for giving your friend the memorial they truly deserve. Wishing you peace amidst all the grief and wishing you hope that one day we can all be known for our true selves. Your writing makes a difference.
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Achingly beautiful. Thank you for sharing beauty in the midst of pain.
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Heart touching
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Opening my eyes to a new world, thank you.
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Beautifully written and so sorry you had to lose them. Does it help you to live the life you want to or make it harder? 🧚♀️
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This is a beautiful tribute. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights and love with us all.
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They sound like such an amazing person. Too bad They had to go
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Reblogged this on Spidah's Writing Den and commented:
Amazing writing 🙂
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I’m so sorry
For your loss – heartbreaking
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Beautiful words. And not just words. Your soul and your friend’s shine out from this post.
I’m sorry for both your losses ❤
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It is heartbreaking that the love and acceptance of such friends as you and such mothers as theirs sometimes isn’t enough to save such beauty as your describe so eloquently.
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Sam Dylan French beautifully memorializes a friend.
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You write so beautifully of something so very painful. I am truly sorry for your loss and truly sorry that the world we live in cannot accept each and everyones own inner beauty. It’s so very sad your friend left this world so young, but your love for them is so strong and I hope you take solace in the memories you have.
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When a loved one passes, I like to believe they live a second life – this time without limits. They stay free and limitless in our minds and thoughts, and in a hundred and more memories.
This was a great piece, a good enough tribute. And even if your friend couldn’t read this, I’m sure she knows; that you miss her. Sometimes that is enough.
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