It’s that time in LA when candles glow and marigolds appear at all the grocery stores, vying for their moment on the ofrendas both public and private scattered around town. One such Dia De Los Muertos altar stands along the edge of Descanso Gardens’ Carved, a fun tour through the wild world of pumpkin art. The tour itself is wacky, spooky, and echoes with cheaply-licensed music. But a warmer, more contemplative tone is struck at the stage turned sacred space where visitors have left photos of and notes to loved ones surrounded by quietly flickering candles.
Some cards bear wobbly children’s handwriting, telling grandma how much they miss her cooking and afternoons spent together after school. Some are in slanting, mature cursive addressed to beloved friends or even long-lost mothers and fathers who they wished could see this evening of simple Halloween merriment. As I moved through loving drawings of pets and notes recalling fun times and personality traits, I found myself not only misty-eyed, but suddenly fighting down a sob, tears rolling down my cheeks. I locked eyes with another woman wearing light up devil horns, similarly caught off guard, and similarly red-eyed and shaky. “Me too,” I mouthed. She smiled.
I’ve been thinking a lot about grief this Halloween season, and feeling a strange gratitude for it. Prior to my thirties, grief was unthinkable, heart-rending, unexpected, awful. But now, as I’m starting to adjust to the idea of mortality, and in fact respect it a little more, grief sits with me as the shadow of something very bright, a privilege even — as proof of love so deep someone can linger with you for years, decades, after they’ve gone.
My Uncle James was a personality larger than life. My dad’s younger brother by ten years, he projected a messiness and joie de vivre I had never seen in any of the stuffy suburban adults I knew. He was quick to laugh, always with a cutting joke at the ready for moments of familial tension. He taught me the art of the anecdote, the art of the spot-on impression culminating in a joke that had everyone cry-laughing by the end of it. He lived in a San Francisco neighborhood where parking was hard to come by, and collected notes from angered drivers that had been left on his windshield magnetized to his refrigerator. The makeshift hall of fame fluttered jauntily every time he opened the freezer door to retrieve a bottle of tequila for margaritas, which was any time anybody came over. Recalling the infuriated scrawl of his favorite, “leave a can opener next time, asshole,” still makes me laugh.
James was an airline pilot, and as such would appear at random in whatever city you were in and take you to dinner. When I was at school at UCLA, he picked me up in a rental car and spirited me off to A-Frame, a restaurant in a former IHOP by food truck mogul Roy Choi, whose Korean-Mexican fusion taco trucks bore lines the length of blocks. My uncle and I were big Bourdain people — he’d led by example my whole youth seeking out authentic multicultural food and prodding me to try spicy things far beyond my suburban palate. One year, he took me to an Indian restaurant in the Haight followed by the offer to buy me anything I wanted at Amoeba Records. He was fucking cool, and I looked up to him with my whole heart.
At A-Frame, we sat in candlelight and I felt him wanting to ask me something big. My fearless uncle had a flicker of hesitation in his face discernible even in the dim of the restaurant. I’d recently come out as bisexual to the family, and he wanted to know more about how I had come to that conclusion, how I owned it with such conviction. I rattled off some Tumblr-level queer theory truisms with the self-centered assuredness of a twenty-year-old. His demeanor was contemplative, the conversation thereafter stutter-stepping back to comfort.
About seven years prior, in his late twenties, after years terminally single, James got drunk at a friend’s wedding and announced on a hot microphone that he was gay. Moments later, as the reception got into full swing, he met the woman who would become his first serious girlfriend. He was obsessed with Kristie. She was a boss lady from Manhattan who our family met on a beach in Tahoe. He held her by the arm as she struggled across the sand in patent leather stilettos. His attraction to her and moony-eyed devotion was clear from a mile away. The whole family filed away the gay proclamation as nothing more than one of James’s classic whims.
But bi recognizes bi, and as I came into my own after college I realized that part of him had never been lost, only suppressed. After I came out, something happened between us where we were repelled like oil and water. He had many girlfriends, even a wife after that, and in retrospect I feel his maintenance of a straight persona was at odds with my outspoken queer ideals. It’s those years of quiet and remove between us that cut me painfully when I miss him, when there’s something only he would understand at the Thanksgiving table, when I make a sharp joke and it lands in a deadened WASPy silence. We were both protecting ourselves in our own ways during that time, and part of me knows that there was still love there, but a bigger part of me, more desperate, more animal, rends itself over the idea that we lost each other back in that candlelight in the restaurant, that moment an unknowing ofrenda I’d come back to time and time again to mourn what could have been.
The year I turned twenty four I was out of control. Shades of my uncle’s darker traits shone out in me —self-sabotage, brooding, driving fast. I felt like a caged animal in my monogamous relationship and forced it into non-monogamy with a crowbar. I was sleeping with an older guy with a girlfriend, and the only person I hated more than him for this arrangement was myself. He’d recently asked me for a threesome with another girl as winter came: an opportunity to double-cheat that made me seething mad. The objectification that had been key to our push-pull turned rotten. I was living in New York temporarily for a job and my boyfriend came to visit me. A blizzard forced us indoors and we fought bitterly, vociferously, incessantly, about every single minute detail of each other’s behavior. I was drinking constantly, thrashing my body against the walls of my chosen enclosure, filled with self-pity and the utter inability to simply open the door and leave.
It was into this milieu that I got the call from my father telling me James had died in an “accident.” I pressed against this stilted description of something so surreal, and only learned he’d been “found” in his home. I was standing outside of the Columbus Circle Whole Foods and gravitated towards the center of the roundabout. I tucked my fingers into the sleeves of my parka and watched the cars streak by in the gray morning. I was the center of a whirlpool, and it was only getting faster.
I spent the rest of the day with the guy I was involved with, numb and vibrating. We wandered through antique shops in Brooklyn, our conversation halting. I caught sight of myself in a gilded mirror and my skin was gray and gaunt, my hair stringy. I could break that mirror just by staring in it. Each time I thought of that distance between myself and James, the gap between us I always figured I’d have a lifetime to close, it was another paper cut to the heart. It was an hour after the mirror that I really began to see myself as the guy I was seeing told me he loved me for the first time, and hinted at leaving his girlfriend so we could be together. The creaky door to another enclosure opened, and my body revolted with a turning stomach. I stormed to the bathroom of the sticky Irish pub and sat on the toilet, head in my hands. This was all wrong, out of step like a dream whose narrative you can’t quite piece together. But I’d already been half-asleep for some time now, and knew waking up would hurt badly when my time finally came.
A few weeks later, I united with my broken parents at SFO, the very place James had once taken me as a child to eat udon soup and watch the planes take off. Once alone with my parents, it didn’t take long to wedge myself into the cracks of their grief and get the information I desperately needed about how we’d lost James. I was in the car with my dad when it came tumbling out. This was the place we were always the most honest with each other, eyes fixed on the road ahead. James had been found on the floor of his bedroom wearing a mask that restricted his breathing. It had a safety valve attached, one that when pressed cut off oxygen to the wearer. When released, in the event the user passed out, it would restore airflow. He had passed out onto the valve, crushing it beneath his body and leaving him without air. My dad, a former rock musician, knew about auto-erotic asphyxiation, but only ever as a gossiped punchline.
For whatever reason, for the first time since the one and only instance my dad and I had ever talked about sex (I was in high school and he told me to use condoms, following the command with the most 2007 comment possible — “you’re not going to turn this family into Juno.”), he began asking me about the sexual layers of James’s death. He wondered how someone could be so reckless in the pursuit of selfish pleasure. I’d very recently heard Pup Amp on an episode of the Savage Lovecast discussing safer breath play, and it fueled my vociferous defense of James. I explained that just because something dangerous is sexual that doesn’t mean it was necessarily wrong, especially if precautions are taken. My grief took a back seat to explaining kink shame to my dad, defending kinks as inextricable parts of us. He asked if this had to do with being bisexual, a question my mom later echoed when she asked, worried, if I knew so much about this because I was doing it too.
The irony was at this time I had no idea about my kinky identity. The things I was doing with that terrible guy struck me as “rough” or “edgy,” but they had nothing to do with negotiation or aftercare. The consent weaved in and out of gray. Despite this blind eye I’d turned to my own cravings, I assumed my role as James’s defender with single-minded purpose. Later, of course, I would come to sit in the paradox that within the community solo breath play is never advised due to the inherent dangers, but at the same time I believe adults have the right to engage in dangerous things at their own risk. But back then, I simply sat with my parents until our eyes burned with tears and tiredness, unflinching in my role of defending my uncle against the prying eyes of all these kinkless straight married people who wanted to tell his story.
After that night my parents settled into a new kind of understanding, their questions abating along with the bargaining stage itself. Over coffee the next morning my dad asked whether I’d be willing to speak to my grandmother about all this to put her pain in some kind of new light. I agreed without hesitation and drove that very day up to the wine country to see her.
After a glancing hug, she led me into a room away from my grandfather’s prying ears, turned on her electric fireplace, and motioned for us to sit in wicker chairs across from each other. My grandmother is the absolute embodiment of the coastal grandmother aesthetic. She’s been compared to Diane Keaton her whole adult life and adorns her classic beauty with black and white striped shirts and muted silver jewelry. She has objected with an eye roll every time I’ve ever dyed my hair or worn too much makeup, telling me she doesn’t believe in God but she knows he made me perfectly as I am. She’s generous with compliments about appearance and achievements but a lot more tightlipped on the question of personality, things like kindness and empathy are nothing compared to a well-baked pie or understated arrangement of hydrangeas.
Sitting across from her, my purpose didn’t falter the way I expected it to. Unlike at all those Thanksgivings, I knew exactly how I fit in here and what to say. I explained kinks, how they get randomly assigned to us over the course of life. Once the word entered the discussion, she stiffened.
“Are you saying he was… kinky?”
The word was hard for her even to say. And it shocked me she even knew it. I cast my gaze around the room, giving her space, eyeing the hammered silver vase beside us that bore dried flowers, the window sill decorated with watering cans and little woven baskets and a watercolored seed packet of California wildflowers. I knew with bone-deep certainty she’d received the seeds as a gift and never scattered them, not caring for the unruliness of native plants.
“Yes, but ‘kinky’ doesn’t mean anything bad. We all have preferences, and which ones are considered kinky is something society decides.”
“I just have to know —”
Her voice broke. She stared out the window at her meticulously-kept garden, its color drained for winter.
“Did he do this on purpose?”
I covered her hand with mine.
“No,” I said. “The way it happened shows he was taking every precaution he could. It was an accident.”
Her shoulders lowered the slightest bit. She fixed me with a look that had so much James in it. Some kind of gratitude coming up below the pain. I think these hard truths gave her a drop of ease in the ocean of grief she’d be wading through for the rest of her life. And through her gaze I finally saw myself. I wasn’t just somebody to whom things happened in a relentless stream. I was capable of choices. And when I showed up and stood in exactly who I was, it helped people. The whirlpool began to slow. I began to see how tired I had become of running.
Back in LA, sharing the cold and awkward bed with my boyfriend, my hands woke me nightly with intense pain. And with that pain came the grief, the loss, but also the feeling that every moment I spent in this bed was a betrayal to my uncle’s memory. It didn’t take long to realize, in the quiet wee hours of the night, that these hands were ready to open the door to my cage. To kick it open, really, and then beat it to a crumpled mass with a baseball bat. Life was death, and I didn’t want to face the next one with this person by my side, being passive-aggressively criticized for the way I washed dishes. I didn’t want to be tepidly ignored in my pain at the best of times, and told I was ‘too much’ and how ‘no one else could ever deal with me’ in the worst. I was good, god damn it. And even if nobody ever loved me again it was a small price to pay to feel like I was worth something. That pedal to the metal feeling of my self-destruction transformed into a resolve to escape. If not for myself then for James.
I dont know what happens after death, but I’m convinced when a loved one enters the astral plane there is a kind of judgement-free omniscience that connects your spirit to theirs. In a certain way, I feel a gratitude that I got to know this about my uncle at this point in my life, that we shared not only our bisexuality but kink as well. That there might have been some part of him, again, that understood me deeper than anyone else in my family ever could.
And now, with him passed into that other place where we can really hear and see each other, I can share my work with him unafraid. The work that started that day sitting with my grandmother, when I saw what understanding and shamelessness could do for people. It powered my own rescue from a dull life, from my own self-destruction, and my ultimate connection with my life’s purpose — this work: to be honest, clear eyed, and unwavering in my defense of kinky people.
I’m doing it for you, Uncle James. Retroactively to ease whatever part of yourself you kept suppressed as you tried to be good. We’ve all tried so hard to be good in all the wrong ways. I hope now there’s a little freedom in knowing you were never alone.
This is beautifully written. I'm sobbing. Thank you for sharing Lina
Beautiful...absolutely fucking beautiful.