Reflections on Trans Day of Remembrance after Club Q

It’s been three weeks since the trans day of remembrance ceremony I went to in so-called Fort Collins, Colorado. A little over two weeks since I got back into cell range from the hot springs to 40+ messages and the news of the Club Q shooting, news that there was more to mourn.

I wish I was surprised. I wish my lack of surprise wasn’t an indicator, a reminder, a reality check that I’ve actually spent a good part of the last year worrying about this happening, worrying who would violently show up to my performances, which person shouting a slur walking past my queer teen dance spaces would decide to escalate. Sometimes passing thoughts, sometimes circles of insomnia, not knowing if my hypervigilance is rational or irrational. I wish this didn’t mean that maybe, it is rational. That maybe, this fear is a natural response to the uptick of national and local hate.

I’ve been at a trans day of remembrance ceremony nearly every year for the past 7 years. Always because I’m performing — singing, playing piano, reading a poem. Some years, with trans choir, going to several ceremonies. Packing up my keyboard and driving from Denver to Longmont to even a church in Lafayette, Colorado.

This year, save one song, my role was minimal. A blessing in the swirls of my insomnia and the many-monthed edge of my burnout. But the ceremony was not without art. Seated in the audience for most of the performance, I took in the local LGBTQIA+ heroes — the trans woman who works at the DMV, who clocks us when we walk in and nudges her coworkers aside so it can be her helping us with our legal name changes; the queer woman who has spent more hours texting trans teens off the ledge of suicide than anyone else I know; the many hands who hand wrote over 300 names on card stock to carefully tie to the stems of carnations for this ceremony; the many eyes dotted with tears.

Previous years fold in on each other and I hear all the songs I’ve sung in rooms like these.

“How am I loving, how do I serve?
How am I celebrating?
How do I grieve and let go?
How do I re-emerge?”

How song weaves ritual of our lives.

“We are here in the memory of those who have fallen
Here with the courage to be who we are.”

In my darker days, I remember sitting in these ceremonies feeling the tumult of guilt, wondering if I would be mourned here if I died by suicide, not wanting to be mourned, not feeling worthy of mourning. I still have the broken shards of a plate painted in genderqueer flag colors on my altar, “And to those we lost to suicide,” the pastor said before, startlingly, smashing it with a hammer. The broken ceramic echoing out, holding us in that moment of breaking, in that moment of crash representing how so many of us get ripped from this world.

Then, my beloved trans chorus singing —

“I love you. I need you to survive.”

Working in suicide prevention has only strengthened my conviction in art. Especially the role of an artist in crisis — how the song can offer an exhale, how the poetry can remind us of something unnameable and divine about ourselves.

I feel the sacredness of this role, hearing the poets wrap us in their mystery, Ali Owens reminding me “your existence a resistance in their holy war,” reminding me I am holy.

This year, singing —

“There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s true, it’s true.
There’s something wrong with the village…”

We read the names of the dead. I am blessed that all these names are strangers. It’s odd, sometimes, mourning strangers. But we claim them as ancestors, ritualize our power to reach beyond bloodlines as if to say: “You — I love you. You are family. Yes, we belong to each other.”

I whisper to myself among the carnations —

“What is remembered lives.”

Hum to myself—

“Weaver, weaver weave our thread, whole and strong into your web…”

I hug my trans Elders. Remind myself that here — we are miraculous. Here — we will rewrite the statistics about our life expectancies. Here — we can cast the spell of our survival. That if there’s any constancy to queerness, it is that we are resilient, that we are a Mystery that can never be destroyed. Here, we offer each other a song, as if to say —

“Let’s find each other in the impossible.”

Because we do, and we will, always. Miraculously.

Blessed be.