Ghosts

I received the most shocking text of my life when I was sitting in the BYU library a few months ago. It was from my mom to the family group chat, texting to say that my thirteen-year-old cousin had collapsed during cross-country practice. Emergency services did everything they could, but my cousin passed away within minutes. It couldn’t be true, though—we had just seen my cousin two days ago for the Fourth of July, at the family barbecue in my family’s backyard. We had all played Kubb together and laughed about how bad we were at it. How could it be possible that my cousin would be alive two days ago and not today? 

I spent the next week crying on and off (sometimes on more than off). I wasn’t just mourning for the loss of my cousin; I was also mourning for the losses that my aunt, uncle, and other cousins were experiencing. All ten of my mom’s siblings came for the funeral. It was the first time they had all been together for years, and if the occasion hadn’t been so sad, it would have been almost festive. A shared belief that we would see my cousin again one day helped some, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t shaken to my bones when I saw the body in the coffin. As time has passed, my grief has receded somewhat, and now I can (usually) think about my cousin without tears immediately springing to my eyes. But it’s still there. My family will grieve for my cousin for a very long time. Grief doesn’t disappear, but you do get more used to it. Humans have an incredible ability to get used to things, even things that tear the heart.

When I came out to my parents, they asked me to meet with them in my dad’s office the next day. I have a hard time looking directly at the memory of that conversation, but the gist of it was that they didn’t understand, and that they didn’t want me to kiss girls, and that they didn’t want me to tell other people. And later, when I fell in love with a boy and we told my parents we were getting married, my mom cried as she asked if he was okay with my short hair and the way that I dressed (like a prepubescent boy). And when I decided to wear a suit to my wedding, my mom and I fought all the way up until the wedding day. My parents still don’t have any pictures of my wedding in the house—except for the last ten minutes of the wedding, when I wore a dress for the send-off. 

Part of my relationship with my parents was lost that day in my dad’s office. Sure, we’re friendly, and we talk, and things on the surface are really good, actually, but that’s because we don’t talk about the hard things. I don’t share all of myself with them. Because if I were to be completely open about my identities and my beliefs, even more of the relationship would be lost—maybe all of it. I do have a relationship with my parents, but not an accepting one, and that hurts deep. Mostly I ignore it, and mostly things are okay, except for those times that the hurt bubbles up and leaves me gasping.

For me, losing relationships is pretty devastating. (I think that’s probably how it is for everyone.) One of my deepest childhood relationships was with God. It was basically the only thing that got me through the deep, spiraling depressions of teenagehood because I didn’t tell anyone about my problems—not my parents, not my siblings, not my friends—but I told God, pouring out my heart to the wall by my twin bed in the basement late at night, trusting that God heard me. I clung to the lifeline the LDS Church gave me, safe in the knowledge that as long as I did everything the Church asked me to do, God would take care of me. 

You can imagine my dismay when I realized that I didn’t fit into the cisgender, heterosexual demands of the Church. It felt like a betrayal: the Church and the God that had taken care of me and loved me for so long suddenly seemed to turn their backs on me, and I was left confused and alone, unmoored from the anchor that had kept me grounded for so long. And things will never be the same. I can’t go back to the person I was. I don’t agree with all of the teachings of the Church, and I don’t want to lie to myself that I do. I don’t believe that a God who has created such diversity in the world would ask everyone to fit themselves into a designated box, chopping off sticking-out limbs as needed to stuff themselves in. My relationship with the Church is complicated, bound up in my personal beliefs and my education and my community and my friends and my family. Figuring out how to navigate it all has been a long and convoluted journey, and the end is still nowhere in sight. Along the way, I carry a grief for the simple faith of my childhood, the absolute trust in God, and the clear sense of direction I used to have. And it is a grief; it almost feels like someone died. And maybe someone did—maybe I did, or at least a past version of me did. 

But maybe this grief is part of what helps me process the past and the present so that I can move forward into the future—not completely leaving little me or my old relationship with my parents or my cousin behind, because that seems unimaginable, but allowing myself to recognize that things aren’t the same anymore. Maybe grief is what allows me to keep taking steps into the future, the ghosts of the past trailing behind me, framing the past in holy remembrance.