Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

February is coming around the bend quickly. I’m so determined to just not think about ‘those things’ happening this week that I keep pushing myself to find something, anything, anything at all to anticipate in February.

Tears roll down my face, my face so intently clenched thinking of what could be good in February. It is the month I lost both of my parents, a fact that hits suddenly like a powerful wave while also never far from my mind.

My mum died February 10, 2022. My father died February 28, 2024.

When my mother died, my wife was in bed next to me. She held me and comforted me. For 19 years, she had witnessed and experienced that tumultuous relationship. She understood better than anyone in the world how my mum’s passing broke me. It was ugly, raw even. But she stood with me.

When my father died, I also found out by text message. I was alone in the guest bedroom of my friends who had kindly taken me in after my wife locked me out of our home six months earlier. I sat on my bed, staring at the text. I reached out to my friends who absolutely showed up for me. They understood I was in pain, from my family’s rejection of me to the moment my brother cast me aside the night of the funeral. They witnessed quietly without judgment as I sat keening on the floor hugging the handful of my parents’ possessions unceremoniously dumped at the doorstep.

Everything and everyone was gone.

I just wanted someonne to show up again with all her understanding and knowledge of how I would mourn. I wanted someone, anyone to wrap me in their arms and bear witness to my deep, deep grief. No one did and so I buried it even deeper.

No such person exists. Yes, I have loving friends. Yes, some of them know parts of the story. But there is no one in the world who can replace the person who was there with me. The person who built a family with me when I had to set unscalable boundaries with my parents. And dismantled it in 48 hours.

My parents deserve to be mourned and missed. They have no headstone, no permanent reminder that they walked through this world bearing broken souls and wasted dreams. They kept walking. That is a part of their story and I may be the only person who hears it. Who tries to understand it, to move forward while looking backwards into histories that story by story break down that wall.

My parents were not affectionate people. We did not hug or kiss or say emotional things very often. They did not understand me, how I was so very different than everyone else from my politics to my recovery. It took a long time to realize that I was supposed to fix them – the golden child, the smart one, the resilient one. They flailed about as parents, damaged by the programming in our family as much or perhaps even worse as me. They wanted to be saved. Their parenkts and siblings could not offer that. So they looked to me and my brother with an unhealthy requirement of parentification. That was ultimately the undoing of all of us. But we had no words to break through that pain to understand each other.

When I think about them now, the memories are anecdotes or stories about them – their favorite songs, their rituals, favorite foods, sweet moments that linger around the darker ones. What doesn’t come to mind are moments of us interacting, either me with one or both of them. I can recall those memories, but they don’t seep unbidden into my mind.

Tonight, I watched an older episode of Grey’s Anatomy where Maggie’s mother dies. It was desperate and intense and filled with tropes. It was beautiful.

At one point, her half-sister Meredith tells a would be suitor that Maggie would need her to get through the grief. He understood, sadly.

That’s when I really cried. Maggie had her sisters and work family surrounding her throughout her mother’s death. Meredith nailed what I did not have – ongoing comfort and support from family, those who would put aside dates and commitments to show up for this 30 year old woman who lost her mom.

I miss my mother. My voicemail is filled with her final messages to me. Sometimes I find myself humming a hymn she loved or clicking past a favorite movie. I don’t remember her with me, but the memories are strong.

My father, too. Impressions, conversations, the occasional compliment. I remember my father buying me a tire and helping to build the fence around the home I now occupy. Again, things he did, some for me, but it is harder to think of things we did together.

Circling back to larger events, I am well aware that my parents would have voted for Trump or no one. Neither ever really believed a woman could be President. They were deeply steeped in their programming. We would avoid talking it if they were still here, if I could talk with them. And there would be no companionship or comfort moving ahead.

Trump is going to break more families. They will not all rally like a Walton’s special episode. They will fall away from each other or spend years dancing around the things that they cannot speak. End stage capitalism will rip open the ugly economic resentment of literally one generation of Americans who got to retire to Florida with a pension. Unresolved racism will let fear rip us apart or fuse us in unhealthily circled wagons.

I guess my parents died disappointed with their lives, but before they saw their children and grandchildren succumb to even worse. There’s little comfort there.

I want to go back in time to gather up all the mementos of the moments I don’t remember. The box of my great-grandmothers few items that my father kept in his workshop. My baby book. The Rudyard Kipling volumes that taught me to read. The photos and letters. But it was all tossed into the trash by another victim of this generational trauma.

Remembering that I did love them is part of my unraveling the parentification. Deciding not to have or raise children is another part. Wanting my third stage of life to find peace with the lack of that family love is what comes next.

I miss you, Mum and Dad.