Broken (but not beaten)

“FUCK HER! FUCK YOU! FUCK HER” I hear my sister shriek in the most skin crawlingly, ear piercingly agonizing voice. “What the heck is she so mad about?” I am tired and curled up in bed, reading in the bedroom of the cottage she and my brother-in-law have rented. They have kindly invited us and my parents to stay for a few days, just as they did last year, for Charlie’s 16th, and, as it would turn out, final birthday.

When she screams out “FUCK HER!” the third or fourth time, I give in and pull myself up out of my cozy bed. I quietly walk down the short hallway, not wishing to interrupt the passionate argument she was having with I had no clue whom.

We are not an argumentative family. If anything, as I recall from our family therapy several decades ago, we don’t share our frustrations with each other enough. Apparently, shutting one’s emotions inside is bad for your health but it’s just how we are made. So it’s out of character for my sister to be like this - except perhaps when she has had a bit more wine than usual.

What I found as I turned the corner was my husband in the kitchen hugging my sister tightly, trying to restrain her out-of-control anger, to help her calm down. “Fuck her. She broke my sister.” That’s when I realize that the “her” in “fuck her” was Charlie.

It’s true that every morning I wake up and Charlie doesn’t leaves me feeling empty. I am broken and I can’t be fixed. My baby. My shining light. My reason (one of two) is gone. I am here for all that still matters to me but I am not the same and I never will be. So my sister is quite understandably angry at Charlie.

But I am not angry at Charlie. Perhaps a wee bit (how dare she ignore my pleas to stay with us), but not really. I am just desperately sad. And I am angry at a world that made Charlie feel broken. A world that so idealizes “binaryness” and “cisgenderness” that she knew she would never be fully accepted. Her whole life was going to be a fight against the body she despised and a world that increasingly demonizes and delegitimizes trans individuals, especially south of the border.

We tried. Our family affirmed her in every way we could. Our community at large was accepting. We found our local LGTBQ2S+ support organization. She had trans friends and mentors. Her name and pronouns were questioned by nobody within our circle or at school. Mama bear would come out if that weren’t the case, believe me.

I had hoped that living her truth with a 110% affirming family would help to heal Charlie’s pain. Instead, it magnified it. Even in the psych ward that was supposed to help her (and somewhat did, for the two weeks she was allowed to stay) she was constantly misgendered by staff who didn’t see anything but her dead name on every form for bloodwork or the like. She was expected to walk into the common space of her own volition. She wouldn’t. She was put in a private room because they didn’t know what to do with a girl like her. Charlie was only about six months in to her hormones so she was neither masculine nor completely feminine in her presentation at that point.

If you were petrified of being misunderstood, misgendered, possibly even bullied because of how you looked, wouldn’t you need extra support? The mental health workers there simply didn’t have the expertise to understand the trans experience. THAT makes me angry.

They weren’t helped by the fact that Charlie was a brilliant actor, mind you. She could hide her pain well when she wanted to and, like most people, especially in our family, talking about her pain was not something she chose to do if she could help it.

Still, I am angry at the mental health system that failed her. Surely they should have, could have, looked beyond the middle class, supportive family she was blessed with to see that her demons ran much deeper than that. As her mother, I felt as though I were screaming for help but no sound was coming out of my mouth. Nobody believed me when I said, “She is going to kill herself one day.” It was a truth I knew and shared. Yet I suppose I can’t blame others for not hearing me since all the while I was wishing they were right and I was wrong. Perhaps I didn’t yell loudly enough. Clearly I must not have yelled loudly enough.

So here we find ourselves, an extended family left at least a bit broken by the loss of our Charlie. The agony that my sister was expressing resides in each of us. It has visibly aged our parents and my parents-in-law. My father has suffered through three significant health issues in the past nine months, the first of which was four days after Charlie’s death.

Charlie just had no clue of the impact she had on all of us and the web that our family’s lives form. We all affect each other deeply so her pain has simply been multiplied many times over. My sister needed to release some of that pain, just as I had done through tears and misplaced anger earlier in the evening. We are doing our best but it’s not easy. Times together just seem to magnify what’s missing. But what’s still here is our reason to keep going even when we feel like we can’t.