Memoria

I recently finished reading She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan.  It's a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it; it's very well-written, poignant and funny by turns. I was struck both by the similarities and vast differences in the experiences of each transgender person.  And reading the book reminded me of a time in which I was briefly in physical proximity to Ms. Boylan.

It was 2007, at the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta.  SCC is one of the largest and longest-running transgender conferences in the world.  It was two weeks before my wedding; for my wife-to-be and I, it was our fourth straight year at SCC.  It was a strange, scary, and wonderful time; we were excited about our upcoming nuptials but worried about her health.  She had a lump in her neck that was growing rapidly; it had, in the space of a couple of months, gone from being about the size of a quarter to the size of my fist; large enough that it was about to cross her collar bone.  In about another month we would learn that she had small-cell lung cancer; the lump was a swollen lymph node, filling with cancerous cells.

This particular SCC, despite the worries, had been the most enjoyable for me so far.  I had had the opportunity to finally meet in person several online friends that I had made in the past year or so.  Also, for the first time, I was spending the whole extended weekend as a woman, from the time we left the house until we returned.  I was in love with my soulmate, a woman who loved me just as I was.

This particular morning we were sitting in the large hotel atrium, next to a Starbucks stand; my fiancée was having her morning coffee.  She had befriended the elderly barista, with whom she seemed to form an instant connection.  The barista seemed very gentle and very wise; she had had cancer, and seemed to see in my fiancée a reflection of herself.  She went so far as to give my dear a Starbucks travel mug, gratis.


A couple of tables over, an attractive woman in jeans, with long, blond hair, sat with her feet propped up on a chair, engrossed in a book.  I recognized her as Jennifer Finney Boylan; even though I had missed her presentation the conference and had not even read any of her books yet, she was (and is) a celebrity.  I was struck by how comfortable and unselfconscious she seemed; just an ordinary woman enjoying her book and coffee.  I longed to be so centered; I had spent nearly ten years oscillating between two identities, one male, one female.  Paradoxically, this kept me sane; though it could be egregious at times, I was able to be a woman at least part of the time, which I needed, and to maintain the semblance of a normal male life, which I was holding on to.  I wished that I could think of something to say to her, but really, what could I have said?  I left her in peace to her book and coffee.

The morning drew on, and all of us sitting next to the Starbucks stand went our separate ways.

A year later, my wife and I were at the same hotel for SCC 2008, our fifth and final year.  She was emaciated and bald from the radiation, but had been pronounced cancer-free.  Though we didn't quite understand it yet, she was also exhibiting some early signs of dementia; her brain was cloudy much of the time.  Leaning on my arm for support, she made her way to the Starbucks stand, only to find a different barista working there.  She asked this new person where her friend was.  "She died of cancer earlier this year", was the sad reply.  My wife, who had only known this woman for a couple of days a year before, put her head on my shoulder and cried.

Nearly eight years later, she is dead, too.  In the intervening period, we both suffered much as her health declined.  I also realized, and grudgingly accepted, that I needed to stop the oscillation between genders and become, at last, a woman solely.  I read Jennifer Finney Boylan's books and wonder why I didn't read them before.  I think it's because I was afraid that, in reading her story, I would see too much of the dream of myself I was trying not to see.  I think that my wife saw herself, and the future she dreaded, in the barista.

And so the world goes; we intersect, sometimes we travel in the same direction for a while, and then we diverge, each pulled along her own path.