It has been more than 15 years since the last time I talked to my family and it still feels like a sensitive subject. I don’t think I’ve ever written about it publicly before. I don’t even know if they’d recognize me if we passed in the street tomorrow. The long curly hair that sat around my shoulders is now shaved off. My face and jaw line have been transformed by hormones and the sun. I stand up straight now in the way they always nagged me to.
That last call wasn’t some big fight or something. Their disappearance from my life was slow after I came out to them in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel down the road from my grandmother’s house on a windy day in December. One unreturned call turned into two. A missed birthday call. After they all missed my wedding to my now ex-wife, I didn’t try to call them back anymore. They didn’t try to call me either.
Since then, I’ve missed funerals, weddings, birthdays, and holiday dinners. But I don’t just miss them on the holidays. I miss them all the time. I’ve missed the cackles of laughter that would echo down the halls every time we were together. I miss the way the women of my family squealed with delight while playing Spades at the dinner table. The same dinner table where they taught me to play cards and I ate my first vegetable. Most of all, I miss the way my grandmother’s perfume lingered on every piece of clothing I took from her closet long after it was washed a million times.
They visit me still, at least in my mind, every time I hear Otis Redding or attend a Catholic mass. When I smell cigarette smoke lingering in the warm, humid air of a Southern night or the gas burning off an old truck at a stoplight.
Even after all this time, I love and respect who they were to me, how they influenced me, and the pieces of them that never got the chance to heal. As I’ve talked more about their influence on me during my presentations over the years, people have asked how they’re doing. “They’re good,” I say quickly while I wonder what they’re up to. If they really are ok.
As much as the relationship ended, the love never left. Decades of memories are buried inside my soul. They shaped my values. They shaped how I saw this world and instilled rules I had to rewrite later in life just to be happy. In the pursuit of becoming kinder to myself and others, I had to learn how to live with pain. To be born again as someone who could hold hurt without being hurtful. I had to learn how to feel pain without causing it. I had to learn how to love without their love.
The only cure, I’ve learned first hand, is time. You can’t rush grief.
I know every person who has lost someone they love understands in ways my words can’t quite capture. After 14 years of therapy to try and figure it out, I know this is not some solvable equation with one right answer. It is complicated and requires that I rewrite the rules that never served me each day. Rules that made me believe if someone behaves this way, something must be wrong with me.
But in the meantime, I’m grateful the Universe has been especially generous in delivering divine lessons and support right on time. Friends who invited me to their family tables. Families who have claimed me as their own. People who cheer for and with me. Kind souls that always show up right on time. Most of all, I’ve been graced with finding the love of my life, Lauren. The kind of human who makes room for my unhealed parts and spoils me with love, GF baked goods, and any other joy I would ever try to deny myself. A kind of love that has made this happy adult almost unrecognizable to the child inside that dreamed of being loved as is someday.