The Different Layers of Mourning

Republished with permission from ML’s Substack.

I was talking to a parent the other day. They were trying to explain what goes through their mind when they think of their trans-identified child. Lately, I have been trying to understand very similar themes — trying to unpack what I mean when I say that I am mourning for my son. There are different levels:

1. There’s the abstract, macro level — I mourn that our son (to paraphrase Brando in On the Waterfront) could’ve been somebody. But that mourning fades quickly. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of us are going to die in obscurity. Only the (very) rare get “touched by God,” and even that act seems like a random toss of the dice. (Salieri’s famous oath comes to mind). You can’t meaningfully grieve the cosmic irrelevance of thwarted greatness — not when that greatness was always an illusion.

2. Then there’s the practical level of mourning — I mourn that he is not a functional adult, and that my wife and I may have to carry his weight for the rest of our lives. Unless, by some miracle—or more likely, through the sheer blunt force of life—he chooses to face the world as it is, not as he wishes it were. As Dostoevsky said, taking umbrage at others is easy. It takes true spiritual growth and moral development to confront one’s own flaws and truths.

3. But what I mourn the most is at the micro level — I mourn the loss of the relationship. How he and I used to sit in the car in a parking spot by a shrub and carry on an elaborate, surreal, and silly conversation with the shrub as the third participant. Or how we decided that a llama in Peru should be spelled with three L's, because it was, you know, a lazy llama. (Lazy Llama - -> L. Llama - - > Lllama. Yeah very silly.) Or when one day, when coming back from school (this was in eleventh grade), he explained that concept of the integral did not make sense to him from the formulas, but did when he looked it up online and understood the Riemann sum.

That’s the part I can’t stop grieving: the magic of our connection. Talking to that other parent made me remember when and how it all crumbled. Gone was that whimsy. Gone was that sense of mischief and play when he was around me. In its place came distance, snarls, accusations and confusion. A regression into adolescence—without the innocence.

Usually, mourning has a finality to it: the person is gone. Dead. And so, after a period of grief, there is a funeral, a ritual. You remember the person at their best. You don’t dwell on the pain of their final days. Over time, those sharp edges dull, and warm memory fills the space where agony once lived.

But here, we are denied that mercy. The relationship doesn’t die. Not physically. He is still here and so hope lingers — that maybe, one day, things might return. And so, you endure the drip, drip, drip of fresh disappointment, new ruptures, unexpected cruelty. You watch him wither — not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually. You cannot begin to heal, because the wounds are never left alone long enough to scar. Like bedsores that multiply across your body, you can’t even shift positions for a moment of solace.