Rations and regret
By: Reading Gaol
Tags: Inadequacy, Support System, Trauma Recovery, Grief And Loss, Anger

A transmasculine person sitting and thinking (The Gender Spectrum Collection)

On a rough day, I’ll sometimes take a quick whiff off my grandmother’s sweater (which still has her fragrance). When times are especially bad, I feel the urge to hold on to the sweater, her smell, and I feel scared of its predictable disappearance. So I ration my smelling, for fear of wasting the fragrance too easily today, when a pang of longing and grief could take my breath away later and make me regret losing this small comfort too, so soon, when the need of it is even more needed, desperate.

(In the meantime, I’m aware that simply letting the sweater be won’t keep it intact and that I’m losing bits of the fragrance that I won’t even have had the chance to smell. So far, grieving my grandmother has been a no-win situation.)

I limit the areas of the sweater I touch. I seldom apply my palms to it, when in reality, I feel like holding it tightly and burying my head in the fabric. Though I miss her everyday, some days are especially hard, I remind myself. “Let’s keep it for such bad bad days, or I’ll regret it.” So I ration the smell. I breathe in these reminders of her in small doses, just to keep going.

And sometimes, a sudden anger takes a hold of me. I wish I hadn’t learned to ration. I wish I hadn’t been taught to make do with as little as possible at the time there was still so much available. I wish I hadn’t been twisted up to the point of being unable to enjoy a moment of nourishment without unease and shame. I wish these lingering feelings hadn’t developed until I turned into someone who needs a time of preparation to handle the fear that automatically comes with taking, the fear of not having given enough, of never being able to give enough back. Of not having earned what is too generously put in my hands.

I wish I had gorged myself with the smell of my grandmother’s skin, rubbed my skin raw on her hands and arms, and held her — too tight — until I was actually told to let go, instead of tentatively taking her am, already calculating how long I had left until I was formally breaching the hugging etiquette.

Last year, I suddenly found myself resenting the people that first taught me the feeling of inadequacy. I was told about my grandmother’s demise the very day she passed away, to which I expressed, clearly, the necessity for me to see her. I asked for a minute to pull myself together, cried my eyes out on my own, took the phone, called my relative back, and told her : “OK. This time, I need to see her. I really, truly NEED to see her.” Pleading, I emphasized the word, as if it was enough to convey the philosophy of rigid self-discipline a lifetime of abuse and deprivation had led me to. How could I explain the exceptional seriousness of my demand to someone as privileged and sheltered as my relative? Someone already self-entitled and now even more blinded — understandably — by the pain of loss? I was told that this was a non-issue, as she’d be cremated the next week, and there was time. Living more than 250Km away from her place, I asked to be told if I needed to come earlier than the day of the funeral. This could be done, but my workplace needed to know as soon as possible, and I obviously needed time to get organized. I was later assured I’d get to see her. My relative was obviously more interested in spending the little time we had on the phone talking about how my grandmother’s passing was going to be the new hardship in her life, her ways of coping, her partner being an everlasting rock she could lean on. I was on my own, in another country, plagued by an abusive relationship, no real support network, C-PTSD and dissociative disorder, juggling classes, in a very cis-heteronormative space that granted me with micro-agressions every day, with work in a difficult workplace (by that point, two of my colleagues had resigned, and there would be two more between that time and my own resignation) and now, the loss of the one person that had been the closest to a mother to me. Over the following days, I was present and available for this relative, listened to her whenever she’d reach out. I felt I owed her for letting me know. When she was part of a greater situation that made me leave in the first place, and miss my grandmother’s last years. I never mentioned it, nor my current struggles. Thanked her several times for calling. Never mentioned my current endeavours. Still, I owed that relative for letting me know. Why? Because she could have decided not to. She held power and decided not to wield it against me. I felt I had to give back.

Turns out, seeing my grandmother was going to be an issue, as I found out the day before the cremation. I asked my relative by text repeatedly to ask the funeral home. She did ask but only about the time the casket would be sealed, not for any delay. Her calculations done, she wrote back, stating the obvious: that I wouldn’t be there in time. No fucking shit, Sherlock.

I had asked three days prior at work if I could have the day off to leave a day before the cremation took place. One of my bosses asked me to work the early shift after I returned (quite late) from the ceremony, which I refused, as I didn’t know in what state I’d be and would already work that day. I also knew this was illegal of her to ask, as a paid day is granted for such occasions by law, but I felt unable to bring this up. I felt uneasy that she was asking for something as inadequate and untimely as this, when I, myself, could never have behaved like this. On the morning the day before the cremation, my body felt too weak to let me cry. I knew I’d made a mistake in not using everything I had a right to. If I had, I could have seen my grandmother one last time.

I nodded to it all at once, recognizing the signs (as many a times before) that I wouldn’t get what I’d asked for, however necessary I felt it was. “It’s okay. I cannot expect anyone to help me with this. I won’t see her again. That’s it. Other people are touched by her loss. I cannot be seen expressing as much pain as the others, when I was absent. It’d be inadequate coming from me. But not from them. But they’re not me. I have to make do.” I felt disappointment wash over me, quickly replaced by shame, disgust and my inner rhetoric about fake needs sounding to my ears: “If I can stand without it, I don’t NEED-need it.” But that wasn’t true. I saw what I didn’t have myself: mutual support and acknowldgement of each other’s hurt, everywhere I looked. How it helped my relatives. I’d get back to a messy home, a nesting partner burdened by insecurities so crushing, they had to take it out on me even while I was grieving, my boss uncomfortably letting me know that I “actually could’ve taken that other day of if I’d needed to” (I brushed it aside, not wanting to think of it when my grandmother’s body was no more already). I felt ashamed and undeserving, I spent the ceremony trying to cry as silently as I could. I barely touched the coffin, feeling too self-conscious in front of my relatives, wanting to go back to my seat as quickly as possible. I felt the hostile stares piercing my back and retreated from my grandfather’s graceful and loving embrace (who, upon finding me, didn’t ask any questions, just cried grateful tears, expressing happiness at our reunion). I wouldn’t allow myself to feel relief at my parents’ absence, even though they were responsible for two decades of physical and psychological abuse and this was making my life just a wee-bit easier, that day. I didn’t give myself the space to grieve and process my grandmother’s demise, even though this funeral was meant to be just that. And it was to everyone, except to me.

My grief process has been blocked ever since. My grandmother had already been unaccessible to me prior to her death for years due to her declining health and my relatives’ standing in the way. The pain my family is experiencing is one I’ve been dealing with for years, already. This new passing has added new depth to my desperation, for I know this departure to be the last one. But it hasn’t sunk in, yet.

Yet, something stirred in me, after the thirty nightmarish hours spent in my homeland and the façade I had to put up in order to stay safe during my trip. Something I’d bring home with me… Irrepressible anger. Boiling, destructive anger, that came out in screams, material damage, as well as new eyes and bitterness. I started being a vocal witness to some of my recent acquaintances’ and friends’ self-entitled behaviours. Truly inadequate and harmful behaviour. I started spitting venom. I started hating their guts and saying it. Out loud.

I could’ve been granted this last moment with my grandmother. But, when faced with a dismissive no, I was taught to let go, express genuine apologies for even asking, dismiss the need justifying the demand, if I’d dared to express it and move on. Quickly.

The scary truth is that I NEED-needed to see her, her lifeless body in front of me. I NEED-needed that day off to not miss her. I NEED-needed validation of these logistical preparations and my own loss. I discovered that I am entitled, as a part of my bio-family, to any news regarding my loved ones, whether one feels comfortable reaching out to me or not, yet I always chose shame and boundless sympathy for relatives’ discomfort, when my own path brought on so much more (such as homelessness for one). I NEED-needed validation of the different pain, and I dare say it, bigger pain experienced not only by the loss of such an extraordinary human being, but also that of my coerced exile away from people that endangered my very life for the sake of their own comfort. I NEED-needed a safer space to ritualize these goodbyes, where I could let her go without the burden and the distraction of my social fears.

I discovered that a need is more than something frivolous I have to shove aside time and time again for my worthiness and self-discipline to be proven. Fulfilling my needs is the one way I have to turn my life from an experience of survival into a fruitful experience, by allowing myself to express creativity and seizing any opportunities and chances for easiness in the face of hardship and trauma.

My anger flares daily, reminds my body of the injustice and the painful circumstances of my loss. So I hold on to it. I hold on to the lesson I desperately wish to keep.

My grandmother’s passing has been a slow and painful wake-up call, from which I find myself unable to move on. I’ll sniff the life out of that sweater, and bawl my eyes out once the last olfactive cell has left its fabric. I’m rationning the smelling, because I have no choice: my grandmother isn’t around anymore for me to try and save up scents, memories, touches and words of hers. Maybe, if she was, now would be the time to discover that it’s been ok all along for me to ask for them as many times as I wanted and needed. That I’ve had a right to be loved by her. That my embrace would never have been too tight.