(no subject)
I wrote this on April 9th, 2012, and it is important enough to be shared, I think.
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Kayla's father died last week.
I never met him. I hope he would have liked me.
I'm alone in our room in New York while she's in Denver taking care of the business that must be taken care of when a person dies. I'd never really thought about it before, but after you die, someone else will need to take out the last of the trash that you tossed in the kitchen garbage. Someone will sort the things that were important to you into piles, and then some of those things will end up in the same bag as the peel from the last banana you ate, because just because a thing was important to you doesn't mean that it will be meaningful to anyone else.
I've been buying old wedding photographs from junk stores and trying to track down the families they belong to. My most recent find was a series of photographs of a WWII soldier and his wife. A creased snapshot with a notation on the back, "this is how my husband looked after eight months away from him." I managed to track down that couple. His name was George and hers was Amy. He died in February 2011 and she followed in November. They were married for 64 years and after they died their memories ended up at the bottom of a bin in a musty secondhand store.
My mother's parents died weeks apart when she was in her mid-twenties. Stunned, she gave everything they owned away, except for a brass cup and the keys that were stored in it, both of which belonged to her father, and the diamond ring I now wear. That ring would have been buried with my grandmother, but my aunt insisted my mother keep it.
I half-joke about who would take the cats if Kayla and I both died in a plane crash, but I've never considered what would happen to all the things I've been carting around this mortal coil. Any unlucky executor of my estate would no doubt be puzzled by the box of old photos that don't correspond to any known relatives, so George and Amy's wedding portrait would likely be on its second trip to the junk store. The delicate Lego spaceship on the shelf could end up in the trash, and no one would know that it was a gift to me from a small boy who I loved very much, who is now a teenager but who I hope still plays with Legos. The disjointed pieces of my memoir would be dumped onto a hard drive that would then live in someone's drawer until it became obsolete. If I got lucky, a box or two would be tucked into the corner of a friendly attic, to be opened fifty years later by curious children who would wonder who The Dresden Dolls were and why anyone would need 500 old keys.
I intended to write about how being gay can make a death in the family even more complicated and fraught than usual, but I think I'm too angry. Angry that Kayla has to deal with everything while I'm on the other side of the country, unable to support her. Angry that I never got to meet her dad, even though he probably wouldn't have liked me anyway. Angry that, if I were a man, neither of those things would have been true.
I'm also angry that, unless things in this country change, there are many states that wouldn't recognize us as next of kin, even if we've been together 64 years when one of us drops dead. (My guess is that it would be me, at 91, rather than her at a spry 83.) I hate the thought that some cousin or aunt would be deemed more fit to handle the arrangements by mere fact of shared DNA when we shared a whole life.
My hope, really, is that we'll get lucky and go out simultaneously in a hilarious "Nutella tanker truck ruptures; gay retirement community submerged" accident, when we're so old we can't remember what it was like to have teeth. And maybe if we're really lucky, we'll have a granddaughter who is just as much of a pack rat as I am, who will abscond with the boxes of old photos and the Lego spaceship before the more practical relatives consign them to the bin.
And if that granddaughter doesn't exist, I hope some hopeless romantic finds our wedding photos in the thrift shop and buys them and googles until she finds us, and when she reads that we were in love for six decades, I hope she hangs one of them on her wall as a reminder that it's not impossible.
Love,
Beth
---
Kayla's father died last week.
I never met him. I hope he would have liked me.
I'm alone in our room in New York while she's in Denver taking care of the business that must be taken care of when a person dies. I'd never really thought about it before, but after you die, someone else will need to take out the last of the trash that you tossed in the kitchen garbage. Someone will sort the things that were important to you into piles, and then some of those things will end up in the same bag as the peel from the last banana you ate, because just because a thing was important to you doesn't mean that it will be meaningful to anyone else.
I've been buying old wedding photographs from junk stores and trying to track down the families they belong to. My most recent find was a series of photographs of a WWII soldier and his wife. A creased snapshot with a notation on the back, "this is how my husband looked after eight months away from him." I managed to track down that couple. His name was George and hers was Amy. He died in February 2011 and she followed in November. They were married for 64 years and after they died their memories ended up at the bottom of a bin in a musty secondhand store.
My mother's parents died weeks apart when she was in her mid-twenties. Stunned, she gave everything they owned away, except for a brass cup and the keys that were stored in it, both of which belonged to her father, and the diamond ring I now wear. That ring would have been buried with my grandmother, but my aunt insisted my mother keep it.
I half-joke about who would take the cats if Kayla and I both died in a plane crash, but I've never considered what would happen to all the things I've been carting around this mortal coil. Any unlucky executor of my estate would no doubt be puzzled by the box of old photos that don't correspond to any known relatives, so George and Amy's wedding portrait would likely be on its second trip to the junk store. The delicate Lego spaceship on the shelf could end up in the trash, and no one would know that it was a gift to me from a small boy who I loved very much, who is now a teenager but who I hope still plays with Legos. The disjointed pieces of my memoir would be dumped onto a hard drive that would then live in someone's drawer until it became obsolete. If I got lucky, a box or two would be tucked into the corner of a friendly attic, to be opened fifty years later by curious children who would wonder who The Dresden Dolls were and why anyone would need 500 old keys.
I intended to write about how being gay can make a death in the family even more complicated and fraught than usual, but I think I'm too angry. Angry that Kayla has to deal with everything while I'm on the other side of the country, unable to support her. Angry that I never got to meet her dad, even though he probably wouldn't have liked me anyway. Angry that, if I were a man, neither of those things would have been true.
I'm also angry that, unless things in this country change, there are many states that wouldn't recognize us as next of kin, even if we've been together 64 years when one of us drops dead. (My guess is that it would be me, at 91, rather than her at a spry 83.) I hate the thought that some cousin or aunt would be deemed more fit to handle the arrangements by mere fact of shared DNA when we shared a whole life.
My hope, really, is that we'll get lucky and go out simultaneously in a hilarious "Nutella tanker truck ruptures; gay retirement community submerged" accident, when we're so old we can't remember what it was like to have teeth. And maybe if we're really lucky, we'll have a granddaughter who is just as much of a pack rat as I am, who will abscond with the boxes of old photos and the Lego spaceship before the more practical relatives consign them to the bin.
And if that granddaughter doesn't exist, I hope some hopeless romantic finds our wedding photos in the thrift shop and buys them and googles until she finds us, and when she reads that we were in love for six decades, I hope she hangs one of them on her wall as a reminder that it's not impossible.
Love,
Beth