The different layers of mourning

I was talking to a parent the other day. They were trying to explain what goes through their mind when they think of their trans-identified child. Lately, I have been trying to understand very similar themes — trying to unpack what I mean when I say that I am mourning for my son. There are different layers:

1. There’s the abstract, macro level — I mourn that our son (to paraphrase Brando in On the Waterfront) could’ve been somebody. But that mourning goes away soon. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of us are going to die in obscurity. Only the (very) rare get “touched by God,” and even that act seems like a random toss of the dice (Salieri’s famous oath comes to mind). You really cannot mourn the cosmic insignificance of such pointless aspirations.

2. Then there’s the practical level of mourning — I mourn that he is not a functional adult, and that my wife and I will have to bear his weight for the rest of his life unless, by some miracle — or more possibly, from the sheer weight of life — he snaps out of it and decides to face life as it is rather than how he wishes it was.

3. And finally, the one that I mourn the most is at the micro level — I mourn the loss of the relationship. How he and I used to sit in the car in a parking spot by a shrub and carry out an elaborate, surreal, and silly conversation with the shrub as the third participant. Or how we decided that a llama in Peru should be spelled with three L's, because it was, you know, a lazy llama. Or when one day, when coming back from school (this was in eleventh grade), he explained to me how the concept of the integral did not make sense to him from the formulas, but only did when he looked up online and understood the Riemann sum.

What I mourn most is the loss of that magical relationship. And talking to the parent made me remember once again how that relationship crumbled for me. Gone was that whimsy, gone was that sense of magic when he was around me, to be replaced by the snarls and accusations and bizarre words and actions. And a regression to early adolescence.

Usually, with mourning, there is a sense of finality: the person is gone. Dead. And so, after a period of mourning and grieving, there is a formal funeral, where you eulogize the best of the person who left you, and not their final days of suffering. You remember them through their fond memories. Over time, the fresh agonies of their final days fade to be replaced by the fond glow of your remembrance.

But here, we are deprived of the opportunity to mourn the relationship. The relationship does not die, at least not physically. The fact that he is around makes you hope that maybe it will come back one day. And so you go through the constant drip, drip, drip of new rounds of ignominy and insults and bad faith, while you watch them wither away physically, mentally, psychologically. The fresh wounds do not heal. New wounds are formed around them. Like bedsores all over your body, there’s nowhere you can turn to for even a minute of solace.