Almost every evening after dinner, I restart the series “Heated Rivalry” from the beginning.

The story centers two closeted hockey players — Shane and Ilya — who fall in love. One gay, one bisexual; one Canadian, one Russian.

I first heard about the program as its fandom started growing in the U.S. after HBO Max picked it up for distribution.

My reaction was immediate, weighty and visceral.

I think I’ve watched the entire series no fewer than a dozen times, likely more.

It’s become like therapy for me.

I sometimes think about all the people who exist that I’ll never meet, or those I’ve met but no longer know.

Similar to how if you plot your individual presence within the reality of the universe you start to realize you are but an almost imperceptible blink of energy.

Here … *poof.*

While here, I am a collector.

My mind squirrels away tiny moments I have no logical reason to document and rarely understand their meaning beyond small, seemingly mundane remembrances.

But noticing, quiet observation, is my way of knitting myself into this world.

Shannon, the photographer, my head in her lap, her fingers in my hair as she drove me back to my dorm the weekend we graduated from college.

Andy, muscles and tank top that if you were judging books by covers might make you think he was a frat guy instead of a person who would let a mosquito drink her fill from his forearm. “I mean, she already bit me,” he explained when he saw me staring.

Leah, who one night leaned over and asked if she could kiss me while we were sitting at the bar. One, short but slow. Years later she’d text when one of our favorite bartenders died. “Hey you. Pretty sure Ed was our bartender a few times. Loved these nights looking out onto Dearborn.”

Tim, a true punk rocker with spiked platinum blond hair, leather and Docs, who spoke so eloquently in my freshman seminar class about how the first step to being able to kill someone is dehumanizing your target.

Suzy, tiny and fit, thick English accent, in love with a much older man and independent films.

The longer I live, the more I open myself up to letting my feelings saturate my internal landscape, deep and nourishing if occasionally intimidating, steered by raising my trans son and losing two of the greatest loves of my life.

I want to be in this world fully.

I did not learn intimacy growing up. My parents didn’t model closeness.

There was no hand holding or hugs. There were very few “I love yous” spoken either casually or seriously. Kisses were scarce and awkward, saved for occasions like an anniversary or birthday. Affection was for behind closed doors, which when you’re a child feels like secrecy and shame.

Their relationship looked more like a division of labor than a love story. My mom the emotional bedrock, my dad the provider.

In a conversation not long before she died, my mom shared she’d spontaneously kissed my dad on their wedding day, after the ceremony but before the cake. “Why’d you do that?” he’d asked her in response.

“I knew I was in trouble,” she told me.

The trouble here being a person who felt deeply, needed her roots generously watered with emotion and compassion, had herself grown up in a house punctuated by cruelty and coldness and somehow still managed to want more.

The way, as a kid then teenager then adult, I always wanted more, too.

I just didn’t know what I was wanting or the depth of the deficit I was carrying.

Kurt caught me off guard, both in life and death.

My experience before him was shallow and insignificant, not just in romance but everything.

I was always, always too much.

My feelings like a chasm, deep and endless, with no proper channel, just me, their imperfect and stunted vessel.

I had no way of taming my need, my desire to give meaning to the entire world and make sense of my own place. Imagine carrying all your senses on the surface, heavy and burdened with input, but not having the understanding or skill to process the overload.

That was, that is, that can be me, then, there and now.

Circuits screaming for relief and me — dumbfounded and raw — unable to find the shut off valve or rewire.

I didn’t want avoidance or absence.

I wanted conversations that would help me unravel the disorientation created by having such big feelings with no real place to put them. I wanted people to recognize themselves in me. I wanted fellowship. I wanted deep connection in ways both big and small.

Kurt taught me how to slow down, stand still long enough to let someone take in the emotional view, get acquainted and acclimated.

“Are you …” he began, before trailing off, having just sung the entirety of Me and Bobby McGee in honor of his mother as we sat together nursing beers at the bar.

I knew the question and answered, a little bewildered he’d even wondered. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

In therapy, I finally come round to my point.

“When my mom died, she took my entire history with her.”

Trying to put a bun in my hair when I begged her, even though she knew it was too thin to hold.

Grabbing a stuffed animal like one Ben had gotten for his birthday that I liked, the shopkeeper asking, looking at Ben, “Is this for this little cutie?” My mom responding, looking at me, “No, it’s for this big cutie.”

The blueberry pie she’d make from scratch for my birthday every year. The poppy seed thumbprint cookies every holiday. Godiva truffles in the mail and bags of Cool Ranch Doritos on the counter whenever I visited.

Silently sitting on the edge of my bed after hearing me cry in my sleep, waiting for me to wake up, a hand gently resting on my side.

Watching my son take his first breath. Yelling at the doctor to do something about the pain. Waiting for his dad to leave the hospital room before giving me a necklace with Ben’s sapphire birthstone. “I wanted you to have this.”

I think of her brain cascading away, sweeping everything she ever knew into the abyss, collapsing under the weight of oxygen deprivation.

“This is where everything that makes you, you is stored,” her doctors told us, explaining the brain top to bottom, finally arriving at the brain stem, the only thing really left of my mom, giving her the involuntary but essential ability to take a few breaths on her own.

The person who knew me best and loved me most was already gone before I was at her side in the ICU.

And, in ways, me with her.

Grief loops back. “You’re talking more about Kurt,” my therapist notices.

It’s true. Even knowing you can’t compartmentalize grief hadn’t prepared me for how much losing my mom would revive the loss of Kurt. Then, the ache was physical, like someone had scooped out my center and left a furious, gnawing void.

“I feel a lot of the same feelings I did when he died,” I admit. Close to three decades of absence suddenly feel stifling and near. “We didn’t have the decades my mom and I had together, but he was the first person to really get me, show me care, be vulnerable so I could be vulnerable, too.”

When I told him how often I woke up at night just to slip my hand under his shirt, craving skin to skin contact, and he responded by just not wearing a T-shirt to bed anymore.

Stepping outside when the door at the bar was slow, him leaning against the building, me leaning into him, kissing, unbothered by the outside world.

My feet resting in his lap, his thumb slowly smoothing over my skin as he talked to his twin brother about a soccer game.

Driving home from a long road trip to a friend’s wedding. “How does it feel to know you won’t ever have to do this drive alone again?” he asked out of the blue.

Sitting on the curb of a gas station in the early morning hours one of the first nights we met, talking about how he came home sick one day to find his then fiancee fucking someone else on their couch.

Driving to bingo when I started to worry I’d left a candle burning and him quietly turning around to go check with my asking.

Sitting on the couch, visiting with his family when he gets up to go do something. He leans over and gives me a slow, unreserved kiss before leaving the room.

Playing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” on the jukebox every time we shot pool together.

In ways both similar and different, my mom and Kurt both gave me cover and a way to continually renew my promise to myself.

They both held up a mirror and introduced me to my tenderness, not as a weakness but a strength. Taught me how to protect her while at the same time coaxing her out into the open so she could seek herself in the wild, unafraid and gutsy.

“I think that’s why ‘Heated Rivalry’ is such a balm to me,” I tell my therapist. “I’m replaying what two of the best people I’ve known in my life taught me about intimacy. Ilya and Shane are like both sides of myself.”

One cautious, one a little more audacious. Both with their own reasons for not believing they can either have or deserve what they want and need but still, somehow, finding ways to reach and reach and reach, compelled to nurture their feelings, attend to their softness, over and over and over — after joy, after disappointment, after heartbreak, after contentment.

Against every impulse that suggests self-preservation requires distance and solitude.

Intimacy, in all its forms, demands daring and patience. A resolve to dampen self-doubt and cultivate resilience while knee deep in unease and insecurity, because beginnings, and endings, are always plump with both potential and peril. Being that open, that alive, is a definitive and unambiguous kind of exposure.

You … laid bare.

In the show, I come to realize, I find the heart of both my mom and Kurt reminding me that living is, at least in part, a conscious choice to remain entangled.

I want to remain entangled.

Woven in and around, in spite of death, in celebration of being, vital and essential, knitted to the cosmic human experience, moment by moment, again and again, from ever to end.

I Want to Be Entangled was originally published in Grieve With Me on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I found a book I gave my mother more than a decade ago when looking for something in her office. It was a last minute purchase one Christmas, and I’d gotten one for her and my dad and brother, a templated “I have some questions for you” type thing meant to probe a little deeper, give the reader insight into you as a person they might not get otherwise.

I’m almost certain my dad and brother threw theirs away, empty.

But my mom kept hers and seemed to be working on answering piecemeal and very slowly. She’d folded several sheets of legal paper into her book alongside two slim pieces from a note book.

My hope was they would all be filled top to bottom with her stories, but only a page and a half had writing.

Last time my son, Ben, visited with his Nanny he encouraged her to take classes at a local college. He was worried she was spending too much time alone, wanted her to have something of her own, an opportunity to make friends and see people.

“I think Nanny’s lonely,” he’d sometimes tell me after talking with her.

I agreed with him, but also knew Nanny probably would not act on his suggestion.

For the past half dozen years or so, I’d been encouraging my mom to have and hold boundaries, with family, myself included, and friends and the entire world.

She was a lighthouse, always steering everyone else home.

One of the last times I saw her alive, we had a conversation that was raw and heated. I was frustrated she wasn’t taking care of herself, still caregiving full time, her resentment building at never being shown even the most basic courtesy, a house of mostly silence and expectation, fatigued, both literally and figuratively.

“Don’t you want to be around for your grandchildren?” I begged her. “You can’t keep compromising your own health.”

She answered with a sob: “I don’t think you really understand how I grew up. How hard it is for me.”

I knew she left me to fill in the blanks of what was so hard for her: “How hard it is for me to care about myself.”

My mom’s childhood was peppered with insult until she mostly came to understand herself as a nuisance. “I tried not to cough when I was sick because the sound aggravated her,” she once told me of her mom. Nothing was ever right. She was never good enough.

I’d known her mother. She was cold and domineering and often purposely cruel.

The only stories with any substance she left on those legal pages are from some of her happiest moments in childhood. “All of the neighborhood kids played together,” she wrote. “I can remember driving one of those pedal cars with Jerry Langfitt. Sometimes he would pedal and I would sit on the front. We would go all around the neighborhood.”

Much of her memory unfolds on her grandparents’ farm, a place she loved and visited every Sunday alongside her cousins. Apple trees, red raspberry bushes, chickens, hay lofts, tractors, cows and horses. “For a little kid, it was paradise,” she remembered. “We pumped water at a pump outdoors and used kerosene lamps and I never had so much fun!”

I wonder, knowing what I know, if in her mind she returned to that farm so often because some of the more consistent memories, the more formative experiences in her childhood house, were heavy and abusive.

There is of course more nuance to how we define abuse now than in the 40s. Nothing about my mom’s childhood might appear outsized or overbearing in terms of parenting when looked at through the lens of that era, but what else do you call weathering a child’s self-confidence so thin they often defined themselves by who they were to others?

My mother’s life was largely in service, to her family, to her friends.

In the most concise and plain way possible: Her life, lived for most everyone but her.

I know some people might read that and misinterpret my understanding of my mother. They’ll assign judgment where there is none or believe I’m mistaking my mom’s kindness for weakness.

Neither of which is true.

She found real and honest joy in helping others, of being the kind of person who could listen even when she’s heard the same complaint 100 times or given you good advice you refused to take. She wouldn’t have wanted to be someone who couldn’t see the best in people. Her core and most uncompromising principle was compassion.

In the corner of one of the notebook pages she scrawled: “Best Qualities” — listener, see best in people, compassionate.

That’s true, and I think of those qualities as not only my mom’s best but also the nucleus around which everything else took root.

Over the years, when the balance tipped away from parent/child to friend/friend, what I hoped for her, though, was … I’m sitting here trying to get this exactly right, but all I’m finding is the apparently continuous thread stitching this loss to my heart.

Same, same but different.

I wanted her to remain loyal to the tenderness she extended most everyone in this world — deserving and undeserving — but I wished for her to turn that same attention and generosity toward herself.

She deserved to bask in the warmth of her own light.

If you paid attention, you could glimpse her sometime desire for something different.

As a young child, I remember being in the kitchen with her one evening. She was at the dinner table on the adding machine doing timecards, fingers flying across the numbers.

She must have had enough, a day where too many things had already roiled her usually steady nucleus so by the time I’d started whinging about whatever it was in the moment the tiny simmering bubbles became a full-blown boil.

“Maybe I should just leave and never come back,” she said, pure, unfiltered frustration.

I instantly started to cry. Her unfiltered frustration matched by my own unfettered terror. Even then I knew my mother was my anchor.

She snapped back to her center quickly, reassuring me she wasn’t leaving, a little surprised, maybe, that I’d taken what she’d said at face value.

Now, I wonder where her imagination took her. What other lives was she allowing herself in those brief moments? What forgotten or buried parts of herself was she unearthing and briefly turning over before settling back into the here, the now?

I miss my mom terribly.

I miss the person who would still come into my room before bed when I was visiting and give me a hug and tell me she loved me. The one who would worry about me and my son. The one who would have lazy conversations out on her deck with me and wonder what to do about the moles tearing up her lawn and why her lavender hadn’t come back. The person who one day stopped chasing squirrels away from her feeders but still fretted over if the birds were getting enough then.

I have countless, beautiful memories of my mom taking care. She is, at least in part, why I am so connected, can live so freely with my heart swelled endlessly to capacity.

I also mourn the person I could have known more deeply. The one with a great eye for photography. The person who longed to take piano lessons and had a sharp sense of humor. The strong and willful advocate and passionate, engaged citizen. The person working to reconcile a personal history that was complicated. Where to put the long-simmering anger, the ever-developing understanding that some of what she endured wasn’t normal?

“In my next life,” … she’d often say, casually.

“You still have this life,” I’d remind her.

Unfinished Business was originally published in Grieve With Me on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Grief is not just sadness. Maybe not even mostly sadness.

It’s everything, often at once.

Self-pity, rage, confusion, disbelief, emptiness, fullness, fatigue, sleeplessness, hatred, love, guilt, loneliness, community, vulnerability, strength, fear.

One of the first questions I asked myself today: Why hasn’t my son called me? Why hasn’t he made sure I’m OK, asked how I am, told me he knows how hard this loss must be for me?

Then, I moved to rage at every thing that dared to be alive and awake as I walked my dog this morning. How is it possible that you are alive when my mom is not?

That’s not just me, right? Nobody deserves to remain when who you love is gone.

I jerked my dog back around when a neighbor pulled his tractor out of his garage, muttering “Just leave me the fuck alone, Lyle,” as I pulled on the leash. He wasn’t even coming my way, I realized, but just the thought of having to make small talk made me want to punch him in the face.

Or, if he asked about the house again, I would have just bloodied him.

Of course that’s all in my mind, like those movies where the protagonist is violently taking someone apart and then the scene cuts to polite conversation and you realize what you’ve just witnessed is only desire.

I took aim at my mom: “I hate you,” I seethed, boiling with anger that had no place to go but the worst most useless place, an emotion void of all reason, just white hot, instantaneous but gratefully short-lived loathing.

I felt acutely isolated. I don’t have the vocabulary to even put words to my feelings. So, I just grumped at my dog and thought about smashing my mom’s favorite dishes while emptying the dishwasher.

Take that, lady.

When Kurt first died my parents brought me home for several weeks.

Every morning I’d wake up and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes I’d walk their driveway and other times I’d just sit midway up the little incline just outside their garages.

I did not have the will to be purposeful about death. My approach was lazier and uncertain. I was tempting death to come and get me, but not too fast. Or fast. I didn’t care.

I just didn’t want to actively hand myself over.

This loss is different. (Or, same, same but different.)

My anchors are more secure. The heartbreak I couldn’t bear to manifest by making a deliberate decision to leave after Kurt died is even more unthinkable now.

But similarly, there is a hazy nothingness about my days. I don’t think I’d name the feeling indifference, but something close, like status quo or complete neutrality. Those still don’t feel quite right either, though.

This feeling is absence, not just the physical absence of my mother, but all her absence means, directly and indirectly, today, tomorrow, the next day. The expanse between was and is seems massive and insurmountable even when bridged by 60 quick seconds: September 21, 6:19 p.m.’s was to September 21, 6:20 p.m.’s is.

I always knew I’d lose my mother. I understood that at 82 there were probably no longer decades stretched out in front of us, but I counted on months. I was banking on years.

Can we just live in September 21, 6:18 p.m. for a few weeks? So instead of cradling your mostly lifeless face I could sit with you and tell you that I’ll never be ready for 6:19 p.m., but at least there’s time to tell you how much I love you and how much I’ll miss you.

Could we laugh one more time about how you spit sweet corn straight out of your mouth one evening at dinner because it wasn’t Fincels? “Yuck!” you grimaced. “Field corn!” Or how you held up that package of brats where they’d made a clever play on “better” to match the spelling of “cheddar” and you shouted across the grocery story: “I don’t know what Beddar is, but these have cheese!”

Could we have one more season of lilacs? How about one more trip to Lowes to get flowers in the spring, you telling me to pick out herbs (basil and rosemary) and telling me to get cilantro, too, even though it always goes to seed. You know I love cilantro.

I’d like to sit on the stoop and chat with you one last time as you water your flowers. Bug you about having the hammock ready and how you need a new umbrella stand because the one you have is shit. Tease you about how you still love Flonase even when your allergy tests years ago showed nothing. Can I tell you one more time that instead of buying a million bottles of water you should get a purifier or fix the refrigerator?

Could you walk with my son hand in hand one last time? Could you tell me, again, that you love me?

I HATE when people talk about a “new normal.”

I HATE when people describe the stages of grief as though they’re biblical and resolute and all I need to do is wind my way through each and then — “Praise JESUS! She’s cured! The demons of grief have been excised!”

Grief is messy and ugly and beautiful, and on bad days I wouldn’t wish honest grief on my worst enemy and on good days I hope we all love someone so much that to lose them feels unbearable.

Grief is personal, truly containing multitudes, and everybody will react and live through loss in their own way.

No wrong way.

Just a string of bad days.

And a string of good days.

Over and over and over and over and over.

Bad Day №1 was originally published in Grieve With Me on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They came and interrogated my mom’s pacemaker while she was in the ICU. They could pinpoint when her heart went into ventricular tachycardia, somewhere around 6:10 or so.

“She had a small run at 3:48,” the tech said. “Then one at 6:10 or so that was more than a minute long.”

Back in February, I was visiting when she fell over like a tree. I heard her as I came back in from walking my dog, though at the time assumed it was my dad. When I got up to my parents’ bedroom, she was conscious, but her voice was a forced whisper.

I called 911 and went back and forth between her and the window, checking in every minute or so, asking if she was still with me. “Yes,” was always her answer in a low moan.

She spent two nights in the ICU and another two in the cardiac unit.

At discharge, I was talking with a nurse who told me a heart can’t sustain a v-tach rhythm for more than 20 seconds or so. “Then, you go into cardiac arrest.”

After she died, my son told me he’d gotten a Facebook message from her that simply said “I didn’t send this!” She was talking about a previous message that was probably from my dad poking on his phone and sending things by accident.

Her message was sent at 6:05 p.m.

I sometimes wonder, suddenly and without any deep meaning attached, how close I am to dying.

Do you ever think about that?

Like, you’re sitting or driving or working or chatting with friends and, unbeknownst to you, you’re living the last 30 minutes of your entire life.

When my mom wrote that message to Ben, her heart might already have been in v-tach. During the earlier episodes, nurses in the ICU would come running in, alarms from my mom’s heart monitor blaring, only to find her sitting up relatively unfazed.

“You don’t feel that?” they’d ask her incredulously, looking at the wild rhythm on the screen. “You’re not lightheaded or dizzy?”

“No,” she’d answer.

I think about that now. The bottom chambers of her heart — bumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbum — on a rapid race to oblivion, sprinting to its own demise.

She was talking to the same friend I’d only minutes later ask for help when she arrested, not in a panic or pained gasp, but quietly.

“I heard your dad shout “Flowers, Flowers,” she told me when she called from the ER, “but I thought he just needed her help and our call had dropped.”

I wonder if she’d been standing instead of sitting the v-tach rhythm might have been interrupted by a fall. I wonder if a pacemaker with a defibrillator would have saved her. I still type in the symptoms she was experiencing prior to the cardiac event, imagining the questions I’d encourage she ask her doctor.

I wonder about those minutes and seconds that were ordinary and mundane until they were anything but in an instant.

Death, swift and greedy.

Grief is unknotting the wonder and knowing what you can let go and what you need to resolve. My problem has always and forever been my resolve for resolve.

I know nothing will bring her back.

And yet, searching feels like clawing something back from death.

Maybe what I’m really hoping for is a way to make those last moments count for something more.

Last Moments of Life was originally published in Grieve With Me on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

She died more than a week ago, but titling this “My mom died one week and one day ago” seemed too precise, and in ways that feel unexplainable and murky, my mom does die everyday, over and over.

When I was 26, I lost the love of my life on a dark road. He was walking home — home to his own mother — after working the door at a local bar, a job he did some nights after he finished as a mechanic at one of the dealerships.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve stayed with my mom,” he told me as I got into my car to go home after we’d had dinner together. I made him promise he wouldn’t walk, he agreed, and then I kissed him goodnight and left him, standing there, hurrying to get home because I wasn’t feeling well.

I get a lot of calls from 800 numbers that are spam so when I looked at my phone that night I let it go. A couple of minutes later I noticed a voicemail. The transcription was something about my parents medical alert system and how my dad had called because he couldn’t get my mother awake.

I started to pace. Always a bad sign.

My dad’s hearing is bad, and truth be told I wasn’t ready to hear what I knew he was going to tell me, so I dialed her number instead even when I knew the chances of anyone picking up were slim.

I messaged her friend and let her know my mom was having a medical emergency. Can you go over there and see what’s going on? “On my way,” she wrote back to me in an instant.

Next, my brother, who was driving his daughter to college. When he answered he thought I was his wife who he’d been spoofing, trying to make her believe he’d seen Snoop Dogg in a restaurant. “Mom’s had a medical emergency,” I told him. “I can’t get in touch with Dad but Cindy’s on her way.” He would try dad, he said, and call me back.

The details came from a Sheriff and an EMT who’d responded to the call: She’d been down for 20 minutes without a pulse. They shocked her twice and administered four shots of epinephrine.

“I’m sorry, Shellie,” my brother said when he called back. “She’s gone.”

Kurt’s dad woke me from a dead sleep. When I picked up the phone, my voice was still froggy and thick. “I’ve got some really bad news,” he blurted out, probably unsure he would be able to finish if he waited. “Kurt was killed.”

The part of my brain that processes incoming information slammed shut, unwilling to let those words have meaning, letting them sit outside, useless and undefined. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I screamed back at him.

“I have to call my mom,” I said, hanging up.

“She’s still with us,” Cindy exhaled, and everything I’d been holding back and pacing away across my floor came rushing to the front of my mouth. “Really?” I sobbed.

She was, in that moment, the sickest person in the hospital, the ER doctors said, but they’d intubated and sedated her and were going to transfer her to ICU.

When I summed up for the doctor what I thought I’d heard him tell me, he agreed I’d understood: “There were some positive signs that suggested she might make a recovery, in some way. There were a lot of critical signs that suggested she would not survive. The next 24 hours were going to be critical.”

“She’s alive!” I shouted to my son in Vermont, who’d been at the library when I first called to tell him his Nanny was in trouble. He’d muted himself so he could be sick in the bathroom.

My mom was in the room when I gave birth to my son. Watched as they delivered him to this world, poked him under the lamps and cuffed him with a bracelet that said he was mine.

“He’s beautiful,” she said with true wonder, as though seeing something otherworldly for the very first time. Their hearts instantly knitted together.

“She’s alive?”

I immediately tempered the expectation infused in that word: “She’s very, very sick,” I added. “She’s was down for 20 minutes without a pulse. She is still critically, critically ill and may still die.”

The guy who hit Kurt left him in the road, turning back toward home to get his son. He’d been drinking, or that was the assumption.

A nurse who saw Kurt stopped and called an ambulance.

“When they put us in the small consultation room, I knew it was bad,” his sister told me later.

Doctors said he died instantly. His neck had been broken.

When I first saw my mom laying there, intubated, a ventilator doing some of the work of breathing, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

My dad was in a wheelchair at her side, stroking her arm. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, “Dad,” I said, bending down to give him a hug.

“Oh,” he exhaled over and over.

Out in the waiting room, my mom’s friend grabbed me, my aunt and uncle enclosing me in a hug, everyone shocked into near complete silence. A short while later with my dad falling asleep in his wheelchair, I went back to be with my mother.

Finally, alone, I laid my hand on her forehead. “Hey pretty lady,” I whispered. “Looks like you just got your hair done. You went a little shorter and spicier with the color. I love it.”

I bent over and kissed her cheek and told her that I loved her over and over and over.

Two days of peaks and troughs — hope and heartache —were followed by three doctors visiting with the same definitive and devastating news: She had sustained a massive and irreversible brain injury.

The pulmonologist was the last to leave, telling my brother and I that he would write orders such that nurses could access as much morphine as needed. They wanted to slow her respiration so when they removed the ventilator her breathing wouldn’t quicken too much, and they wanted to help with any anxiety.

As the ICU nurse explained what would happen, I asked, as I asked every nurse who’d provided care to my mother, if she’d always wanted to be an ICU nurse. She was the only one over the two days my mom was there who’d answered “Yes.”

“Have you ever seen ‘Dying for Sex?’” I asked her. When she said “No,” I told her she might enjoy it, that one scene in the series stuck with me and came to mind as she was walking us through my mother’s death.

“There’s a hospice nurse who tells those caring for the young main character who is terminally ill that ‘the body knows how to die,’” I described. “I thought that was such a beautiful way of talking about the process.”

She agreed on both counts.

My mom needed loads of morphine to get her respiration down far enough to remove the ventilator. Everyone in the room had a chuckle about how this woman who didn’t drink was now high as a kite. “She is flying,” the nurse confirmed.

When the ventilator was removed, my dad and brother and I stayed next to her bed, my son on the phone. She shepherded him into life and he would usher her into death.

I rubbed her forehead, tears traveling down my face and dripping onto her neck, a continuous stream of love and gratitude and sorrow and promises poured into her as her breath rattled and rattled and rattled and, finally, stopped.

Years ago, I had a friend who was traveling abroad. We kept in touch via email. During one of our exchanges, he answered one of my questions with “same, same but different.”

That’s how loss feels to me: Same, same but different.

The loss of my mom feels familiar in ways. The deep pit in my chest as I tried to work out for myself that my mother no longer exists. The catching myself thinking of something I have to tell her. The wondering if in some other plane of existence she is alive, well, either saved or never sick.

All of those and more I’ve felt before. Same, same but different.

What never changes is that loss follows what I’ve found to be life’s larger pattern: A study in opposites, an ask for all who make her acquaintance to test their ability to hold what feels contradictory together.

My Mom Died Today was originally published in Grieve With Me on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here, you’ll find links to some of the latest news and research.

WPATH | World Professional Association for Transgender Health

The mission of WPATH is to promote evidence based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health. They are the organization that many providers look to for care guidelines.

Standards of Care Version 8

WPATH recommended reading

Erin Reed | Erin in the Morning

Erin covers legislation that affects trans people. Her reporting is indispensable. Please support with a subscription if you can.

Post-Election 2024 Anti-Trans Risk Assessment Map

A Line By Line Analysis Of Trump’s Youth Care Ban Executive Order

School Systems Across US Declare They Will Not Comply With Trump’s Anti-Trans Executive Order

Research

Recent Pew Research | I was talking to my son about this recently released (Jan/2025) Pew Research. I was surprised that more than half of kids his age were answering they believed gender was determined by sex assigned at birth.

Stay Current was originally published in Complicit | Accomplice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A common response I hear when a person asks people to use different pronouns — especially when those pronouns are the gender neutral they/them — is: “I’ll try, but don’t get mad at me if I make mistakes!”

On the face, this response seems perfectly reasonable, and in many ways, it is reasonable. People often do make mistakes. And, that’s OK (as long as you’re committed to continually doing better and honestly hold yourself accountable).

But, underneath what’s reasonable about instantly admitting you need patience is an anxiety, discomfort and defensiveness that even when unintended can be harmful, because the subtext is akin to reinforcing that the person making the ask is “other” and “different” and requires your labor in ways you’re not sure they’re worth.

In reality, though, we all want to be affirmed in our personhood, and that happens (and doesn’t) in many different ways.

The Basics of Binary Pronouns

In a gender binary, he/him and she/her pronouns are most commonly used by people who are cisgender and assigned female, cisgender and assigned male, trans girls and trans women, and trans boys and tans men.

The Basics of Gender Neutral Pronouns

As noted, many non-binary people use they/them pronouns, most likely because they are easily recognized, though that is not a hard and fast rule and people who aren’t non-binary use gender neutral pronouns, too.

Neopronouns are less common, and though neopronouns may feel more difficult if you are completely unfamiliar, they are really no different than any other pronoun once you practice and become comfortable using them. The Human Rights Campaign has a helpful guide outlining neopronouns, the history of neopronouns and how to use them.

Why Is Respecting A Person’s Pronouns Important?

For many trans people, pronouns are one way they feel affirmed, and getting someone’s pronouns right is, at bottom, a show of the most basic respect.

Cisgender people often take being properly gendered for granted, but imagine how you would feel if everyone started using the wrong pronouns for you.

When you continually misgender trans and non-binary people, you are at the very least making them uncomfortable and at most doing active harm and potentially putting a person at risk of violence.

How Will I Know What Pronouns A Person Uses?

The easiest way to ensure you’re using the right pronouns for someone is to ask. Even with people who present traditionally or stereotypically masculine or feminine, asking is better than either guessing or assuming because you truly don’t know until you are told.

Remember that non-binary people do not owe you androgyny. A non-binary person may have a gender expression — the way they dress, wear their hair — that conforms to feminine or masculine expectations but still use a gender neutral or binary pronoun that is different than you might assume.

What If A Person Uses More Than One Pronoun?

For more and more people, having more than one pronoun is common. You might see email signatures or bios that include two sets of pronouns, like she/her and they/them.

How do you know which to use? As with pronouns in general, asking a person what makes them most comfortable is the best way to ensure you’re affirming them. Some people may have pronouns that are their first preference but another that feels OK, too. Some people might feel good about both, so people can use their pronouns interchangeably.

For a person who is comfortable with both he/his and they/them, for example, you might say: “I saw him walking to the store, but I don’t know what they needed.”

I will periodically check in with people who use more than one pronoun to make sure I am still using what feels best. You can ask: “Are they/them pronouns still the most comfortable for you?” In doing this, you give people the opportunity to update you or reconfirm that you are using what makes them feel best.

Are People Who Change Their Pronouns More Than Once Just Confused?

The short answer is “No, absolutely not.”

All people grow and evolve, and for those who are self-aware and take time for self-reflection, better understanding they’re own feelings and personhood is natural and good. Sometimes this growth includes changing pronouns, going back to previously used pronouns, or deciding that multiple pronouns work best.

But when a person changes pronouns, especially if they go back to previously used pronouns that may more closely align with their sex assigned at birth, a common refrain you hear is around a person being “confused” or “faking being trans.”

In the years I’ve been working alongside my trans son, one of the largest and most harmful myths I’ve encountered around trans and non-binary folks is that the journey is linear, consistent and without any doubts or deeper consideration.

Some of this problem is directly related to the gatekeeping that happens around gender-affirming care, where to access care you can’t really talk about any nuance. Some of the problem is related to the broader social community being unwilling to believe trans people and their experiences, only offering affirmation when trans people remain stagnant, and using any personal growth or change as a “GOTCHA!” moment to delegitimize a trans person’s truth and personhood.

We all contain multitudes, and we are all unique in what carries weight when we think about how best to manifest our personhood. Those things that make a person feel most themselves, allow them to fully embody their truth, are sacred, and deserve both honor and respect.

Why Are Pronouns Important? was originally published in Complicit | Accomplice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What some of the real stats tell us.

One of the questions I was most asked as my kid started navigating gender, even among family, was: What if they change their mind?

Well, … let’s talk about that.

First, you have to understand that nothing is happening in terms of transition that can’t be reversed until a child is heading into puberty and some trans kids will start hormone replacement therapy.

You may hear a lot of misinformation that suggest puberty blockers are hormones and they’re not reversible, and that simply is not true.

Read about how puberty blockers are prescribed.

Puberty blockers are reversible, and any risks that do exist (like with bone density, for example) are discussed frankly and in depth prior to treatment starting, and general health and bone density are monitored throughout.

Prior to puberty blockers, which are generally prescribed when a child is 10 to 11, gender-affirming care consists solely of social transition.

What does social transition mean?

Social transition is allowing a kid to explore gender in whatever way feels good to them.

When my kid was five, for example, they cut their hair short. They were always allowed to wear the clothes that were most comfortable to them and made them feel happy, and most often those items were more traditionally masculine.

Though, as target did with toys back in 2015, a lot of retailers have started questioning the need to separate children’s items by gender, especially clothes.

My trans kid did not change pronouns until closer to puberty, but also didn’t often correct people when they used he/him/his.

His experience is not every kid’s experience.

Social transition for trans kid’s who know early that their gender does not align with their assigned sex at birth may include wearing clothing that aligns with their gender, cutting or growing their hair and using different pronouns as young as they can vocalize the need for these changes.

There is no medical component to social transition. That is worth repeating: There is no medical component to social transition.

All that is involved with social transition — which is the only gender-affirming care that happens with children before puberty — is that family, friends, educators, everyone, affirms them in their gender.

But what about when medical intervention starts?

So much of the mainstream media coverage of trans kids focuses on the potential for regret, and many cis writers who cover the topic treat gender-affirming care for trans youth as though it’s a topic to debate, a thought exercise.

The problem in that approach is two-fold: 1. They get a lot of things wrong. 2. They dehumanize trans kids.

Gender-affirming care around both puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy is highly individualized care, necessarily so. Some kids are ready for hormone replacement therapy earlier than others; some kids don’t choose hormone replacement therapy until later, or choose to remain on a low dose. Some choose not to pursue hormone replacement therapy at all.

Because so much of the coverage of gender-affirming care starts from the assumption it’s practiced as one-size-suits-all, people unfamiliar with trans kids assume these patients are marched through affirming care like cars on an assembly line: social transition to puberty blockers to hormone replacement therapy to gender affirming surgery.

In reality, gender affirming care sometimes loops back on itself. Progresses, then halts. Progresses then slows then halts then starts again. Progresses then halts entirely. The pace is wholly determined by the trans kid in collaboration with their family and a team of health care providers.

My kid cut their hair short but didn’t change pronouns. Then, they tried out a new name, but a short time later went back to the name we gave him at birth. A few months later, he tried another name that stuck. But, he didn’t want his name legally changed until a couple of years after that. He took the opportunity to change pronouns when he changed schools. Puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy were easy choices.

In all of this, conversations were happening with me, with his therapist and with his providers at his gender clinic, and at each step, everyone was on the same page, understood the risks and weighed the benefits.

When detransition statistics enter the conversation, they’re most often incorrect.

Those who don’t want to support trans kids often insist that detransition is almost inevitable and that a majority of trans kids regret transitioning.

One of the studies most often cited, however, — wherein 84 percent of kids were thought to be desisters — has been shown to be very problematic because the researchers did not differentiate between kids who showed genuine gender dysphoria and those who simply socially transitioned or presented more masculine or feminine. In short: general gender nonconformity was treated the same as gender dysphoria.

Additionally, close to half of the study participants who didn’t follow up were categorized as desisters.

When these same researchers revisited this flawed study in 2013, they found that intensity of gender dysphoria was actually a very good predictor of who would transition.

In 2015, another study showed trans children and cisgender children were virtually indistinguishable in their understanding of their gender.

Researchers noted:

“Using implicit and explicit measures, we found that transgender children showed a clear pattern: They viewed themselves in terms of their expressed gender and showed preferences for their expressed gender, with response patterns mirroring those of two cisgender (nontransgender) control groups. These results provide evidence that, early in development, transgender youth are statistically indistinguishable from cisgender children of the same gender identity.”

More recently, and more telling, are the results of a five-year longitudinal study out of Princeton University’s Trans Youth Project. This study followed 317 transgender youth for five years after they socially transitioned to provide a preliminary estimate of how many trans kids eventually desist and retransition.

The findings were clear: Only 2.5 percent of kids identified as cisgender at the end of five years.

A large majority — 94 percent — identified as trans girls or trans boys, and 3.5 percent identified as non-binary at the end of five years.

Researchers explained:

“These results suggest that retransitions are infrequent. More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.”

Wait, are you saying detransition never happens and it’s no big deal?

No.

Detransition absolutely does happen, and sometimes happens after irreversible gender-affirming care has been provided. Parents of trans kids and the trans community do not ignore this fact, mainly because understanding reasons for detransition strengthens gender-affirming care.

But, detransition remains extraordinarily rare, as evidenced by some of the recent research, and the reasons trans people sometimes choose to detransition are not without nuance.

For example, a 2021 study on factors leading to detransition among trans adults asked more than 27,000 trans people in the U.S. if they had ever detransitioned, as well as some of the driving factors of the decision.

Of the more than 17,000 participants who reported pursuing gender-affirming care, broadly defined, 13.1 percent indicated they had a history of detransition. Importantly, 82.5 percent of those individuals who detransitioned reported at least one external driving factor, including pressure from family and societal stigma.

Internal driving factors like fluctuations in or uncertainty regarding gender identity was reported by 15.9 percent of respondents.

Researchers concluded:

“Among TGD adults with a reported history of detransition, the vast majority reported that their detransition was driven by external pressures. Clinicians should be aware of external pressures, how they may be modified, and the possibility that patients may once again seek gender affirmation in the future.”

Some of what we learn from detransition data is that earlier care and more general acceptance and support of trans kids can make a difference in adult outcomes.

The top five external driving factors from the above study were:

• Pressure from a parent: 35.6 percent
• It was just too hard for me: 33.6 percent
• Pressure from community: 32.5 percent
• I had trouble getting a job: 26.9 percent
• Pressure from other family members: 25.9 percent

Puberty blockers that prevent development of unwanted secondary sex characteristics and are commonly used in gender-affirming care for trans kids mean that trans adults are less likely to have to navigate sometimes expensive gender-affirming medical care that can make transition difficult or impossible.

Building a more supportive world, generally, that is less reliant on stringent binary codes around gender would likely also improve outcomes.

Learn more about separating fact from myth when talking about detransition.

The real takeaway is that recognizing detransition exists should not be the main argument against providing gender-affirming care, especially when we’re talking about trans kids.

Instead, detransition data can be helpful in understanding how to improve gender-affirming care.

Have questions or want to contribute content to Complicit|Accomplice? Let’s talk.

Is Detransition Common Among Trans Kids and Adults? was originally published in Complicit | Accomplice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Support people who are doing good work.

I approach almost every issue I care about in multiple ways, and sometimes one of the best ways I can show support is to donate to people doing the work, people who, most often, have been doing the work for a long time.

NOTE: Have an organization you think should be listed here? Let me know.

Legal Aid + Justice: People Getting People Help

ACLU: Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Project, is instrumental in fighting for justice for trans people. He models strength for me every time I read or listen to him. Donate.

Lambda Legal: Advocacy, education and legal work across almost every aspect of LGBTQ life, from health care to criminal justice to immigration. Also, they have a tool that lets you check your state’s protections. Donate.

Transgender Law Center: The largest national trans-led organization advocating for a world where people are free to define themselves. Donate.

TGI Justice: TGI is focused on providing resources for trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people both inside and outside prison, including a Black trans leadership program and a Re-entry Program. Donate.

Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois: This group works in three project areas: legal services, support community survival and educational resources. (They helped with my own kid’s legal name change!) Donate.

National Center for Transgender Equality: Founded in 2003, NCTE focuses on advancing transgender equity through policy change. They’re goal: provide a powerful transgender advocacy presence in Washington, D.C. Donate.

Social + Educational Resources

Marsha P. Johnson Institute: This organization protects and defends the rights of Black trans people. (Black trans women experience violence and discrimination at some of the highest rates among LGBTQ people). Donate.

Don’t know who Marsha P. Johnson is? Learn more.

Gender Spectrum: This organization was key for me as I was learning. They have educator workshops, family workshops and workshops for social services and health professionals who work with LGBTQ kids. I love them. Donate.

The Trevor Project: Described as the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis prevention organization for LGBTQ youth, the Trevor Project also does research and studies on LGBTQ youth mental health and provides a variety of educational resources for parents and allies. Donate.

#IllGoWithYou: This organization has a special place in my heart, as #illgowithyou buttons were the first advocacy step I took in support of my trans kid. Seeing these pins still helps my child feel safe, and I wear one wherever I go. Buy or Donate Buttons.

Brave Space Alliance: A Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ+ center serving the West and Southside of Chicago. Donate.

How You Can Make A Difference was originally published in Complicit | Accomplice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What do people mean when they talk about gatekeeping health care?

There is some nuance around gatekeeping gender-affirming care, at least for me. But, as the years go by with my kid and as my kid gets older, I appreciate the conversations I’ve had around this topic with trans people, as well as some of the insights I’ve been privy to on Twitter and other social media where I follow trans people.

Generally speaking, gatekeeping describes how trans people are required to meet specific benchmarks of pathology (experience enough gender dysphoria, be enough at-risk of self-harm, spend enough time considering options other than being trans) before they’re allowed to access gender-affirming care.

You can read more about how puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy are prescribed and some of the gatekeeping practices around that care.

The OK and The Constraints

As a parent, having my child explore gender prior to starting any medical treatment (even treatment, like puberty blockers, that is reversible) felt appropriate.

But, I do wonder if that’s more about social expectation than any true feeling that my kid needed time to sort their experience. And I say that because parents of trans kids — especially parents like myself who may have had a rather large learning curve — are often told, via media, via well-intentioned family members and friends, to doubt their kids.

What do I mean by that? Almost every message a parent of a trans kid receives around gender-affirming care (except the information they receive from their kid and their kid’s health care workers) centers caution.

And of course, that sounds right. Right?

But there is a point where caution becomes gatekeeping, and you’re forced to forget that your kid’s experience is unique, which means their needs are unique.

For some kids, waiting makes absolute sense and I know that because I’ve witnessed trans kids request more time, saying themselves that they weren’t ready and putting off medical intervention until they figured out what they needed, if anything.

Other kids, though, know, and are undoubtedly ready but are still required to pathologize themselves in ways that are sometimes untrue. For example, some kids, like my son, naturally and authentically come to understand their truth but still need to confirm longstanding, detrimental gender dysphoria in order to access gender-affirming health care.

In reality, my son’s gender dysphoria, what he had, was more a tangible signal to him that transition was necessary and right. His body was signaling he needed change, and when kids are allowed to vocalize that need and access gender-affirming care, much of what trans kids are screened for — much of what they must indicate they experience to get care — isn’t present in the breadth or depth required by those who guard access.

Going In Circles

What happens when you talk about the latter, though, the kids who do know and are ready for gender-affirming care without long conversations about their mental health or aching dysphoria, is that you inevitably hear: Oh, then your kid’s not trans. They shouldn’t be able to transition.

That is where some of the harm is in such stringent gatekeeping. That is where some of the harm is in constantly framing trans kids with suspicion, asking they prove they’re not cis instead of simply trusting they know who they are.

Of course, someone will almost always reply to that with: But kids are so impressionable and will just follow their friends! Kids want to be all kinds of things, like dogs and cats and superheroes!

Read why trans kids are not a social contagion in the Common Myths Around Gender-Affirming Care section.

Not only is this idea wholly disingenuous, but saying kids have no ability to discern genuine internal feelings from play or pretend does not give them the credit they deserve, particularly as they grow older and particularly if they’re raised to trust themselves.

The times I have asked my kid about his certainty around gender-affirming care, his answer has always been some iteration of: “Mom, I wouldn’t do x if I didn’t feel right about x.”

That’s true of most — if not every — trans kid who is navigating gender. Trans kids are not a monolith, and instead of treating gender-affirming care as though it’s a screening process that will help limit the number of kids who are trans, we should look to the kids seeking care, ask them what they need, and trust what they tell us.

Because contrary to what the sensationalized reporting on this care suggests, not every kid is rushing to receive gender-affirming care — and not every kid wants to wait!

Approaching gender-affirming care as less a uniform set of requirements that need to be met and more as providing trans kids the individual health care they need to feel whole is what many parents, trans kids and providers would like to see.

Gender-affirming care for trans adults has moved toward more informed consent versus the gatekeeper model, where, for example, mental health assessments aren’t needed and a patient is educated on benefits and risks and allowed to make the decision for themselves. (Like this, for example).

Some may balk at this suggestion, but from my experience, it’s worth exploring how treating trans kids more as individuals than a homogenous patient demographic who must all meet specific requirements in order to access gender-affirming health care would be good for everyone.

Additional Resources:

Barred from Transition: The Gatekeeping of Gender-Affirming Care during the Gender Clinic Era

It’s Time to Stop Gatekeeping Medial Transition

Gatekeepers vs. Informed Consent

Gatekeeping Gender-Affirming Care was originally published in Complicit | Accomplice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.