All blockquotes are from Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then Its Gone, a surreal post-apocalypse story from the point-of-view of a zombie, describing grief and loss better than any fiction I've read.

Shortly before I left the Hudson Valley in August, I was riding Ladybug to an Iron Mavens ride. Along the way, I was hit with a wave of sadness that I never got to take Kirby for a ride. The whole reason I got into motorcycles is because I’d reached out to my friend A in 2024 to see if she’d take Kirby riding, since I thought that’d be a cool experience for him to have. At that point, we didn’t think he had long to live — he'd received a 6 month prognosis in January 2024 — and it was all about letting him do fun things while he still could. Kirby, his girlfriend, and I ended up riding passenger in the New Paltz Pride March on the back of bikes with the Iron Mavens. He absolutely loved it and both of us came away excited about learning how to ride.

And that wave of sadness hit me that I never got to take him riding, which swelled into being sad that he never got to learn to ride himself and that we never got to ride together on some epic parent/kiddo road trip. His voice came to me as it does a lot these days. He reminded me that those last two were never going to be an option and that it’s okay I didn’t get to take him for a ride; that was always going to be hard with where his body was at by the time I had my license and a bike.

I used to imagine how it would be after you died. The way my days would go. It wasn’t bad. I would have had so much in having you and would have lost so much in losing you that I would no longer want anything.

He shows up like this often, like a genie when summoned, though with more comfort-granting than wish-granting. Is he really there when he shows up for a conversation? Is it my mind coming up with skillful means to metabolize grief? Does it matter? I despair, he shows up, we talk, maybe it gets a little easier.

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

My thoughts moved on to future travels and going to the Pacific Northwest, where it’d be rainy and wet during the winter. He loved rain, loved to splash around in puddles when he was little. He pointed out that it doesn’t matter if he liked doing a thing; would I like doing a thing? I don’t need to live for him anymore, he told me. Just do the things I enjoy, he told me. You don’t need to hang around for us, I countered. You also need to live your life, whatever that means now that you’re no longer embodied. Just remember all the lessons you learned here. Take all the kindness and generosity and care you grew into with you into whatever comes next.

I begin to see the intervals between their flashes as connective. A constellation of sentient stars separated by time instead of space. A viscous tick-tock in which I, too, am suspended. I feel it inside me. The static blankness of my arrested cells and the uncertain space between them. The gap between one blink of memory and another. The interval that is relationship. The body of the crow in the body of me. The black hole that is sucking me inside out, the utter unutterableness that I never entered when I was alive.

It is not what Mitchem says or what Marguerite says. Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief.

It’s a run-to-the-ground cliche that you can’t take it with you. It hadn't really occurred to me until that conversation how much that goes beyond just the material. We don’t take our relationships with us either. At least that's what I thought at the time. Based on these conversations of had in the past months with Ghost Kirby, if you can accept that what I've gleaned is something that is really happening, it does seem we can stick around and support the people we love, see the world through their eyes and minds, offer advice, remind us what to live for when that feeling disappears.

And still, all of those relationships are eventually forgotten in whatever comes next. My own sense is that our body contains the energetic fragments of lots of lives. When we meet someone that we just click with or really bounce off of in ways that don’t make much sense, that’s one fragment in our body recognizing another fragment in another body. But that’s just my own imagining. In Buddhist thought, we only take our habit-pattern-cycles with us from lifetime to lifetime (though it's a bit handy-wavy as to how that happens). Kirby grew so much during his cancer treatment, became such an incredible person. May he take all his hard-earned kindness and generosity and empathy into his next life and continue to grow into that.

Marguerite says, “I’m going to leave.” “Where will you go?” I say. “Home,” she says. “Where is home?” “Home is like the moon,” she says. “Filled with grief?” “Never where you expect it.

The journey west didn't go much like I'd imagined. I thought I'd be able to use the van as a basecamp, recover myself in the woods and on/in the water. The reality is that I was and remain existentially exhausted from the last five years of caretaking, from the last six years of transitioning, and from watching Kirby decline and die. He did that with as much grace as possible, and still it feels like I've lost a vital organ, a cosmic heart that moved something bigger than myself through my worn-out body. An already tattered sense of self was disintegrating in the solitude of travel, even as I desperately needed that solitude and space to disintegrate.

Transition is always happening.
Transition can be radical, discontinuous, orthogonal change.

For me (and it's not like this for everyone, transition is also individual), there is no real connection with who I was before my trans epiphany. The first years after, was like living in a run-down house haunted by ghosts and full of junk, driven by old habits and unsure who I wanted to be. It took years of experimenting and inner/outer work before Daisy found their way out of the darkness they'd been buried in, and it was only weeks ago that the Miryam and River and Daisy parts of me integrated into something singular, rather than a trinity of coming-and-going / pushing-and-pulling, usually in opposing directions with conflicting desires.

Death is also transition, a radical change. Kirby was embodied and now he's not. I was a parent doing my best to give him a good life and now I'm a parent with memories and photos, audio and video, knicknacks and ashes. I generally don't know how to people or relate to people-things around me. I say words according to scripts and expectations, but I am lost and confused. I am a child trying to make sense of a world I don't understand.

Because we are so small together in the vast expanse, so small together in the lee of the dune, beneath the sky, within the sound of the ocean and the warmth of the sun, we are more together than we have ever been or ever will be again. This is the very best moment we will ever share.

It is a better end than beginning. It was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.

...

Maybe, I say to myself or to the crow, maybe that end, the end you can only see after it is too late, maybe that end is what makes a beginning what it is. What else is a beginning but the end of something else? The crow says nothing.

...

Or maybe, I say to the crow or to myself, the beginning hasn’t yet begun. Maybe that is where I am running to. Maybe there is a time between end and beginning that is like the time between beginning and end. A time that is to middle as beginning is to end. Maybe this is that time. Middle but without the hope of resolution.

Grief is an object I turn over and over in my body. A ball of dirt is too fragile. A rock is too hard. Mud, too inhuman. It is fleshy, sometimes tough, sometimes rough, sometimes soft, sometimes smooth, always tender and raw. It excretes when touched. It leaks blood, lymph, bile, tears, mucus, acid. There are thorns and spikes, bone shards, things that puncture and tear, mixing my blood with its own. I turn this horrific object over and over in my hands, press it into my body, all over my body.

I notice different aspects of what it needs to whisper to my cells… Never seeing who Kirby would have become. Missing the way we'd joke and laugh together. Getting glimpses of his growing inner world. Losing the purpose and direction that comes with parenting and wanting him to have a better life than I have. Not being there when he died or knowing that the last time we said goodbye would be the last last time. The ways I was absent from his life after I moved away from The City. Losing a north star showing the way to the future.

Grief stirs grief... “I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me.” The years I never had as my trans self and the ways I missed out on queer connection as I grew. My dear friend M, who died two years ago, who I still miss deeply. My father who died last summer. My mother who died sixteen years ago. An aunt in Florida who I cannot visit because of anti-trans state laws. A brother who I'll never have a close relationship with. A country descending into madness that, among many horrors, is scapegoating me and mine and those like us… we know where that leads and it is terrifying. A heating world that seems to be spiraling into chaos and disaster because we as a species cannot seem to figure out how to work together.

I discover I don’t have to decide to move or to not move. I can lie here for a hundred years. Five hundred. The squirrels sit in the branches and eat the plums, dropping the red skins and pits onto me. The apples fall heavily and make a vinegar smell. All the leaves fall. I am covered in leaves. The rain falls.

At first it is a relief to have stopped deciding, and then it’s not. It is not a relief and it is not hard. To not decide. To not move. I thought it was hard, but then I realize it isn’t actually.

At some point I find I am getting up without having decided. I wish I could lie back down and cover myself again with the leaves, but it is too late.

I returned East to the Hudson Valley. The only way I know to survive any of this is to get small and close and quiet. To seek solitude for the winter. To rest in personal hermitage. To focus on movement and photography and art. To seek the love and support of the people closest to me and to love them the best I can. To share these writings with all y'all as a form of connection and a hope for something better.

May each of you find your own forms of healing, of rest, of recuperation this winter. And, for those of you in phases of energetic growth, may you balance that with sustainable care for yourself and for those around you. If these words moved you at all, please share them with your people.

We were adding on a baby to the house of our love. Like a sunroom, but made of wonder and fear and time and denial. It was the future. We pictured ourselves living there. All the imaginary firsts and the world going on as if it weren’t already too late. It wasn’t really as if the baby died. It wasn’t even a baby, really. Not yet. I don’t even like to use the word and wish there were a good alternative. It was more like the future died. It became part of the past.

Time inside of time. Things inside of things. The crow inside of me. The mouse in the belly of the trout. The belly of the girl on the golf course. Things that ache. Real things and unreal things. It is pointless to wish I had the hunger back instead of this endless grief.

xo
daisy
river
miryam

things I listened to while preparing for the journey over the summer, driving across country in September, around the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island in September and October, and back across in November…

• a playlist for loss that originated in a breakup, added songs of survival, and then songs connected to my kiddo (i always shuffle my playlists so the order they're in is just the order that songs were added)
• Bunny
• Nightbitch
• Borne
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In
• A Game In Yellow (by my favorite horror author)
• Daisy Jones & the Six (so much better than the streaming series adaptation)
• Creation Lake and The Flamethrowers (thank you C!)
• The Locked Tomb series (thank you K!)
• Swamplandia! (thank you G! though, heads-up, the whimsical start turned dark af)
• The Dream Hotel
• The Unworthy
• Necessary Fiction
• You Weren't Meant to Be Human
• The Expanse series (3rd trilogy)
• The Iceberg (the most relatable non-fiction book I've experienced about caretaking and inevitable loss)