Queer people, QPOC: Where did you go after Orlando?

Queer people- where did you go after Orlando?

Here’s where I went on Monday evening:

 

I tried to sing along. My voice cracked.

And then I went here:

I went to Pantibar. It was packed. I found a seat. Got a goddamn drink. We raised our glasses: to calling out homophobia wherever we see it. Then we raised them again: to being us. To being as unapologetically queer as we can.

This is important.

Two days before, a man had walked into one of the Orlando Latinx LGBTQIA community’s most necessary spaces. He’d walked into a space where people who have been told that they’re nothing from so many angles go to celebrate one another. And he gave his life to destroy that space.

Queer people, trans people, QUILTBAGgers, POC: where did you go when you heard? How many of you went back to y/our spaces? How many of you went somewhere where you could be seen? Continue reading “Queer people, QPOC: Where did you go after Orlando?”

Queer people, QPOC: Where did you go after Orlando?
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First Derby-versary!

Today marks exactly one year since my first ever roller derby fresh meat training session. A whole year! Only a year? Derby feels like something I’ve been doing forever, and it feels like something I just started yesterday. It feels like it showed up, swept me off my feet (literally), and I’ve never been the same since. I’m a substantially more bruised and aching human being since a year and a day ago. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

I have derby training this evening. These days, I train three evenings a week with Bray’s own East Coast Cyclones, and normally spend another evening working on my skating skills to cheesy 90s music at the roller disco. That’s four days a week that I skate, and every single time I still have butterflies. Packing up my gear, making sure I have everything, and heading out the door to training may be something I do every second day- but every time, I walk out that door feeling that glorious mix of excitement and nerves. I never, ever know how it’s going to be. I know that it’s going to be tough, and it’s going to be intense, and I hope that there are going to be moments where it feels right and I know what I’m doing, and I know that there are going to be more when I feel exhausted and hurt like hell. And I know that it’s going to be worth it.

And that’s just the training sessions.

When I put it like that, I feel like I need to defend what I love so much about derby. It hurts, it’s hard, it’s exhausting, I’ve seen a lot of people injure themselves doing it. I mean, I like that I’ve gotten this far in life without ever having broken a bone. I’d rather like to be able to say that again this time next year, y’know? I can’t say I haven’t thought long and hard about whether this is worth it, and whether it’ll be worth it if I really manage to hurt myself doing it. Every single time, though, the answer is yes. Because in spite of- or maybe because of- how tough it is to play this game and the risks I take to do it, something about it just won’t let go.

Derby is fun in a way that nothing else I’ve ever done can match. I don’t think that means it has to be that way for everyone, by the way- I know people who find skating dull as dishwater who rhapsodise about things I shudder to imagine, like trapezes or running or climbing or sports in fields with balls in. Or people who’ve never found a sport they find joy in, who find their unmatched fun somewhere completely different.

It’s all good, but for me? There’s never been anything as fun as roller derby. From the first moment I put on a pair of skates in Spin roller disco almost two years ago and tottered around the floor, I know that I loved to skate. From the first derby bout I saw, a couple of weeks later, I wanted to give it a go. I never thought I actually would or could, though. To be honest with you, it wasn’t until about halfway through my first bout (last month!) that I realised that this is a thing that I really can do.

And that’s, I guess, why I love it. Derby, for me, is that mix of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, the most physically tough things I’ve ever done, some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met (and I get to be one of them! How flippin’ cool is that?!). It’s learning every day that I can do more than I thought I could. It’s clever, it’s strong, it’s sneaky. It’s hitting your friends for fun, and it’s so much more than that. It’s packing my skates and gear with me every time I go anywhere, popping an email over to the local team and rocking on over to their training. It’s carrying around with me every day that you never know what you can do until you give it a go.

And, yeah, it’s butterflies in my tummy three times a week, every week, and that’s one hell of a thing to be able to say about anything.

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First Derby-versary!

Death, atheism and middle of the night belief: being kind to ourselves.

I’m an atheist. I try to be a skeptic- I’m hesitant to identify as A Skeptic, because I think that skepticism is something that we do, not something we are. I believe in things that we have evidence for, like apples and kittens and spaceships and love. While accepting that I live in and am a brain optimised for staying alive and making more brains over logic, I try to not believe things without evidence. I don’t believe in gods or homeopathy or decent books by Stephanie Meyer. Because my beliefs are based on evidence, they are always conditional and subject to change. Which is why I now accept that Lovely Housemate can, in fact, cook pasta without burning it, and I am coming around to the conclusion that there are advantages to not sleeping in until lunchtime every day, and that there is such a thing as too much chilli.

My skepticism is one informed by the real world. My skepticism is based on valuing truth and empathy together. It is based on an empathy informed by truth, an honesty about the world, and a belief that we are at our most honest when we are also compassionate. And an understanding that honesty requires that we accept who and what we are. Sometimes, that means that we accept being brains that do things that aren’t logical. We are brains that are optimised to see agency in the world around us. We can personify and empathise with just about anything. It’s part of how we empathise with and love others. We create images of those we love in our minds. Those we love, in a way, live within us.

I read this yesterday.

Libby’s impending mortality has reminded me that even that belief is one in which I can—and probably have—become just a little too certain. Sometimes, I think—I hope?—there is a value to a belief, even an irrational one, whose main purpose is to comfort. Sometimes even a rigorist may admit a moment of cognitive dissonance if doing so salves a wound that makes life, at that moment, too painful.

If at this moment I allow myself to believe, more or less unquestioned, that Libby has something in her that’s immortal, it doesn’t mean that I will stop accepting as valid the conclusions of modern science…

My critical discipline is good. I will not disparage it. But I will also try to learn that I can distinguish between the consequences of particular irrational claims, and to affirm that there are some that I am morally allowed to hold.

Go read the rest. It’s blisteringly honest and sweet and compassionate, acknowledging the irrationality of believing that those we love go on and yet accepting that sometimes it’s what we can’t help but do.

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believe that we have this one, short, wonderful life and that there isn’t really any way to tell what happens after. Except that our brains stop working. And that it looks like our brains are where our consciousness and our selves live.

There are times, though, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t believe that those I love who have died are truly gone. I hear their voices in my mind, remember what it was like to talk to them, hug them and hold them close. I can feel their closeness, love and compassion deep within me, as if they were next to me. In those moments, the belief and understanding that they no longer exist just isn’t there. It’s not that I don’t want to believe it. It’s that the parts of my mind that came into being through my relationships with them are still there. Those mirror neurons haven’t stopped firing. My mind wants, with everything it has, to feel that they’re still there. Somehow. Somewhere.

I don’t believe my mind. But sometimes I do let it be. While accepting logically that there is no known way by which anyone can survive beyond their death, I let my mind feel that the people I love still exist. Not because I think it’s true. But because this thing that I know not to be true is comforting. Because of this. Emphasis mine:

When I call the vet in to euthanize Libby, I will do so because I want to spare her a degree of pain that will make her life more of a torture than a joy. Perhaps her tacit lesson in that moment is that it is also acceptable for us humans, psychologically and spiritually, to extend a small amount of that same mercy to ourselves.

I feel that it is essential that we are as compassionate as we are honest. That compassion, if it is to be truly genuine, needs to be extended to our selves as well as to others. When I let a part of my brain feel (not believe) that my departed loved ones still somehow exist, I’m not denying reality. I still know that they are not. I know that my memories of their voices and presences are just that- precious memories that I hope I will carry with me all my life. But allowing a little conscious cognitive dissonance into my mind is a comfort. It’s a way to let my mind bring those memories to life. A way to let the relationships continue past the lives of one of their members. A way to let the people I love continue to influence my life beyond theirs. A way to get back to sleep in the middle of the night.

Death, atheism and middle of the night belief: being kind to ourselves.

Love in the Present Tense

I loved her. And she loved me.

Bereavement and loss are strange things when you don’t believe in gods or afterlives. Our brains seem to be wired for a befuddled incomprehension of the fact that a person can end, that they stop and are no longer there and no longer exist. We can easily intellectually understand the fact of mortality. Feeling it in our hearts and in our guts, though, is a lot harder. Especially when it comes to others, to the people we love. I know in my head that some of the people I love no longer exist. My heart still calls for them, yearns for their presence and company, and sees them behind half-open doors. Sometimes being a brain that can think but can’t stop feeling is no fun.

The things that believers say often don’t do much to help. Well-meaning and loving assurances that the deceased person is in a better place or looking down on us just make me want to scream. “No, she isn’t!“, I think.  She’s not in a better place. She doesn’t exist, and everything that made her up is in the ground in a box. And we’re still here, trying to make sense of it.

She doesn’t exist, but I do. And how I love her still exists. I cannot make her be alive or exist again. I can keep being a person who loves her, who loves her memory and who she was and all of the bits of who I am that only exist because she did. Because she was someone worth loving.

I love her. And she loved me.

 

Love in the Present Tense

Anniversary rekindling

Today is the second anniversary of my grandmother’s death. All the cliches apply. I find it hard to believe that it’s been so long. I find it hard to accept that she is really gone. Most of the time everything is fine, but sometimes I still get hit right in the guts, left breathless, dizzy and sick by the reality that she is gone and she will never again be. I suppose that we all do.

Something I’ve been reading, over and over, in the past few weeks is this passage from I Am A Strange Loop. It’s a beautiful secular way of articulating what survives of us after our own death.

In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And then those people in turn pass on, the afterglow become extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.

The slow process of extinction I’ve just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has once and for all gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being–truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig–is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.

It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and this solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.

On this note, I’d like to share some things with you. Namely two posts I wrote this week two years ago in my old blog. One was barely hours before she died, and the other was a few days later. Neither has been edited, except to remove names- sorry about initials repeating.

So this is the second night in Killarney. My granny lost her swallow the other day, she can’t eat or drink anymore. We’re all here.

It’s strange.

I was really upset before I got here, after I heard. Having a really lovely day with lovelypeople and hating everything about it because I couldn’t do anything about the fact that someone I love immensely, fiercely, doesn’t get to have days anymore, never mind good ones, with Good Company and Silliness and Fun. And there’s not a thing I can do about it.

But then I got here, and the house is full of people. Me and J and my aunt M and D&M and my cousin A. And M, for an hour or two in the evenings. And constant streams of visitors.

My family are being so good to each other. I was so scared that this would make everything blow up, all the tensions that have been simmering for the past few years, but everyone is being so kind to each other. We’re letting each other be, and deal in our own ways.

And people keep cooking. The house is now full of stew and ham and pie and really good cake, and really good wine.

So that is good. There is good food, and my family are being so good to each other, and there’s a lot of us here, and that is not only comforting, but a whole lot of fun. We’re not being awkward about it. We’re making horrendous puns and talking about things and being silly and serious and it’s all very genuine.

And then there’s my granny.
She’s so tiny. You can see her bones under her skin, stretched tight. Her breathing is shallow and it’s loud, the sound fills the room. Her skin is cool, and it feels so, so thin.

I don’t know what else to say about it.

So, yes. Some of you know this already but I’m PSAing it, just for informationey purposes. I didn’t want to tell many people before now- it felt too personal, too intimate at the time. Too bare.

Last Sunday I got a phonecall from Jacqui saying that I should get to Killarney the next day, that my granny had lost the ability to swallow and that it would only be another few days.
This, by the way, is my mother’s mother, a.k.a. Mary Casey (officially O’Riordan, but she was always known by her original, not her married, name). She’s the one who’s had Alzheimer’s for the past decade or so.

So I got here on Monday evening. I was here, and my parents, and my cousin A and his parents, and my aunt M. My granny was in the front room of her house, on a water drip and on morphine, and she was so, so peaceful. We spent the next day with her. It was beautiful.

She died at 2.20am on Tuesday night. J was with her when she died. She didn’t suffer, she just.. stopped breathing. J called us all in, and we stayed with her all night. We called the rest of her kids who weren’t here- except for my aunt A, but I’ll get to that. We called my second cousin G, the undertaker, who granny had soundly briefed years ago on precisely what was to happen when she died. we made tea and we sat on the bed with her and we hugged each other and we hugged her and it was quiet and unhurried and sad and so, so peaceful.

At about half five or six, Ger took her away to his funeral home to do whatever it is that he does. Me and A went to bed, got a few hours of rest, everyone else stayed up.

Ger brought her back at 7.30 on Wednesday.

She was waked last night and the night before. Yesterday, there was a steady stream of people through the house to see her for over four solid hours. Hundreds of people, and so many of them were so moved, so many. She knew everyone, did Mary Casey.

Late the night before last, I got a chance to go into her when it was quiet and everyone had left, to sit with her for a half hour or so and to say my goodbyes. I’m so grateful for that.

Today she went to the funeral home in Tralee. We drove her around Killarney first, before heading out the Tralee road. J talking about the time when she lived in Tralee and worked as a nurse in the mental hospital in Killarney, when her sister was sick with TB in Tralee and she cycled from home to work, then back to Tralee, then back to work, then back to Tralee, all in one day. And we’re driving through that road, framed with mountains topped with snow and rivers of clouds between them, cold winter sun shining on us.
It’s a good day for her to go home.

And I love her, and I miss her. She was one hell of a lady, was my granny, was Mary Casey from the Top of the Rock in Tralee.

I still miss her, and I still love her. And along with everything else, love is a reflection of how much of her is a part of me, how much of her uniqueness lives on in my mind and my memories and all the little ways in which I would not be who I am were it not for her. And my granny? She was, and is, loved by an awful lot of people.

One more thing before I go. Over the summer I wrote a post about something very similar to what was talked about in the quote from I Am A Strange Loop above. I want to post it again here- I hope you’ll forgive me this indulgence.

I have a scar on my chest. It’s about an inch tall by two inches across. I’ve had it since I was around two years old, when I got under my granny’s feet as she was picking up a pot of potatoes in boiling water. I’ve always loved that scar, but I could never quite work out why- when I was younger it just felt like a thing that was mine and mine alone. More recently, it’s become something a bit more. Even though she is dead, that scar is a visible, tangible reminder that there are ways that she was, there are patterns of hers which exist in me, and in the many others who knew her. Her actions continue to exist. While most of them are less visible than scars on my chest, they are no less physical, tangible, and real.

I miss you.

mary073

Anniversary rekindling