Content warning for transphobia, death
After you died, my dad told us you killed yourself. My cousin said that you "probably died from the surgeries". It didn't occur to either of them that trans people also die of natural causes.
I found an obituary for you in the Ottawa Citizen. It misgenders you, deadnames you, and doesn't mention that for most of your life, you weren't speaking to the people now writing your life story. They wrote that you were "accepting and respectful of all" and they destroyed you. It's the only online proof of your existence.
For most of my life, you were a ghost in photographs. I understand why, up until the months before your death, you weren't speaking to us. Your parents are a cold presence at Hannukah. They weaponize their emotional volatility to invoke shame in us. You were around my age when you cut them off, and braver than me.
You taught me valuable lessons about my family. I was moved by how, although they called you Ana and referred to you as a daughter while you were alive, in their grief, when they were recast as automatic victims, they slipped back into misgendering you and deadnaming you. Your mother said there's nothing worse than burying your own child. She buried a fake child, a fake son, a dream of hers that she violently forced onto you. My mother said I couldn't bring my then-girlfriend to a family gathering since it would remind your parents of you. I'm sorry that you were pointed this way, and that your transness is erased one moment and used as a weapon the next. I'm sorry that your womanhood was conditional to them. I think you did make our family kinder. I notice shame in their voice when they refer to me. I like to think they know they broke something that can never be unbroken, no matter how many times I am falteringly called Abe. I like to think that I remind them of you.
If afterlife existed, and you were looking down at us, you might be warmed by their tolerance of my transness, or you might be angry that I am getting the love they withheld from you. I would understand both reactions.
Most of all I am glad I don't believe in afterlife, so that I don't believe you had to watch yourself become erased. I wish you were here. I'm sorry.