i just got back from my paternal grandma’s funeral. she died on 2025-06-13, friday the 13th, at the age of 76, very suddenly and unexpectedly of pancreatic cancer. fuck cancer.
she joined her husband, my grandpa, in non-existence or whatever happens to one’s consciousness once the meat suit ceases its functions as if it were a computer and not as if it housed a precious living consciousness that could at any time stop existing.
she got the diagnosis only 10 days before. my dad told me he had to drive grandma to the hospital, and then was with her as much as he could and told me about her newly discovered metastasising pancreatic cancer and how the situation rapidly worsened, so fast that there was hardly any time to grasp the reality of what was happening.
the last time she saw me was during christmas and my birthday which is shortly after christmas, during both of which i was sick and feeling horrible, and the last time i heard her voice was a few days before her death as i overheard her voice on the phone with dad, during which she sounded sick and weak and scared. but at least dad said afterwards that she wondrously wasn’t in pain as would have been expected from that apparently even more horrible type of already horrible cancer.
in addition to the death itself it was horrible to know that she’s out there suffering, both physically from the cancer and mentally from knowing that in addition to feeling horrible she is about to die, to cease to exist forever. i tried not to think about that too much because i hate suffering and death and i can’t stand it. and while i imagined a sliver of what it might feel like to be in that situation, i of course didn’t come close to what it would actually be like. i would probably go insane if something like that happened to me. it’s so horrible to think about, unimaginable. how is this possible, how is it possible that a universe exists that is so indifferent to suffering and death? how can life exist, how can consciousness exist but be as fragile as a computer program that runs on hardware that can fail and that can be permanently stopped and deleted at any moment? and this is “only” a single case of a cancer death after at least a big portion of the possible lifespan had been lived. there’s so much other suffering out there. this indifferent universe is evil because being indifferent to suffering is bad, and i do not accept it as “just the way things are”, even if the general rules of death are unchangeable. at the very least humanity should strive to create as good a world as possible within the indifferent universe. but instead we cause just as much suffering as the universe with pointless poverty and wars and torture and factory farms and planet destruction and inequalities in so many different aspects. i despise this universe and those that act in its accordance, but i love its life and wonders, and they deserve better. …anyway.
this is the closest experience of the death of a loved one i’ve had so far, previous ones i know happening as i was alive were my paternal grandpa and my paternal great-uncle, but i wasn’t there for them dand i also had almost no connection to them, so it unfortunately didn’t affect me much.
this loss is strange. it oscillates between not affecting me and everything continuing to be normal (which also makes me feel guilty because i feel like i should be more sad), and me actually feeling sad and missing her and being on the verge of crying up to crying. i’ve cried the most (and felt the worst) the evening before she died when dad texted me that she was rapidly worsening and would most likely only live until tomorrow. i cried both for her and for him. and again almost during one part of the church service today (of course i tried my best to hold it in because i can’t let anyone see me cry). and again now that i’m putting my thoughts together here, in solitude where i can be free to feel and show my emotions.
i haven’t spent that much time with her in my life, especially compared to my maternal grandparents who have been looking after my brother and me a lot, so it doesn’t hit me nearly as hard as my dad who has now lost both his parents. i can’t imagine how he must feel. i’ve almost never seen him cry in my entire life, but his parents dying makes it hard even for him to hide that from my brother and me. and i wondered what it would be like for me one day when i lose him. and i realised that my brother and i are more important to him now than ever. and the worst thought, what if something unexpected happens and i die before him and he has to lose me too.
i’ve seen grandma mostly in my childhood, especially during the multiple batches of multiple years each where we’ve lived in the same federal state or in the same area. she’s just always been there and visited sometimes, and crucially when we lived nearby we went to her place on every christmas day, until we moved away because of my parents’ divorce.
so the thing i associate my grandma with the most is wondrous jolly childhood christmas days, in her fascinating two connected living rooms in her two joined flats, one of the living rooms having a giant table (giant in my memory from when i was tiny) with giant interesting upholstered chairs on three sides and a giant old-looking sofa on the side facing the wall, and of course the christmas tree. the other half of the double room had a U-shaped arrangement of sofas, whose right side was one meter away from the wall with a cabinet on that wall, an empty space to go between the cabinet and the back of the right sofa side, and some ancient looking white bust in the back right corner space between the sofas. and the sofa arrangement had an i think glass coffee table with always the same special kind of candy in an interesting i think gold-like wrapper. i don’t think i ever ate one of those, but in my childlike wonder i found them fascinating (like everything about and inside that place) and i think i played with them.
after the divorce i haven’t seen her in 10 years. only in the last years since i’ve moved back into my paternal family’s farmhouse, i’ve seen her in family christmas dinners and maybe 1 or 2 more times per year. the last time being the aforementioned last christmas and birthday.
it felt unreal at first, as in nothing changed, nothing happened. like she’s still there in $place as always, and i could randomly run into her in $place and she could randomly show up at the farm at any time. because practically it isn’t much different for me, seeing her only 2 times per year or not is almost no difference. it is/was hard to grasp. my dad offered me to take one last look at her body to say goodbye before the funeral. i hoped that that and the funeral would make it more graspable and real. which it did, but more on that in a bit.
another thing this has made me think about is how i view and remember her, and how that could be completely different from how dad views her, and other people, and how she actually was and how she thought of herself. my view of her comes from my childhood, and so it could of course be very inaccurate, but this is how i remember her.
to me she has always felt like a cool rebellious person. she was very outgoing and assertive, not caring what others say and doing her own thing and always encouraging and inspiring me to do the same. i’ve always admired that about her. she was cool but also friendly, she laughed a lot with her signature laugh and i always enjoyed being around her. she was definitely great with us kids and i’ll cherish those memories forever. although her outgoingness could also be a little much sometimes. lwaxana troi, the mother of counselor deanna troi in star trek tng, has reminded me of grandma a lot, because of their personalities and mannerisms and even a little their appearance. both love to socialise a lot to the point of being overbearing on some people, both confidently do their own thing no matter what others say, and both are inspiring the youth to be themselves and rebellious like lwaxana with worf’s son alexander.
now to the last look at her body. i was actually very nervous beforehand because i had never seen a real dead body (outside of museums) before, and in addition at one point right before going i almost panicked because my as usually overthinking mind thought that i might not be able to handle seeing the lifeless body of my grandma and i might go into shock or something, or worse, cry in front of other people including my dad. but i still wanted to go because i most of all hoped it would help me realise that this is actually real, and i couldn’t pass by the last chance of seeing her, and i wanted to be there for my dad.
fortunately nothing bad happened. the beginning was actually a little disappointing. we went into a medium-sized room that had her body in an open coffin on a table, covered from her waist down with a blanket. there were a few candles and an about half a meter tall christian cross behind her. the window was covered, so it wasn’t that bright. somewhere were loudspeakers that played sad low-fidelity orchestral music. but i only extremely barely recognised the face of the lifeless body in front of me. dad even tried to distract himself from his grief and lighten up the mood a little by joking if they’ve mixed up the bodies. as he said even her hair looked very different, but of course that’s at least partially because the morticians (no idea if that’s the right word) put it into a style that’s different from what she wore. but the main thing was her face. it didn’t look like her at all. it looked more like some mummy-like very old (both old as in the corpse is old and as in the person was very old) body in like a museum or something. not scary or bad or anything, but very different. it was exactly one week after her death. incredible how much a body changes once its inner workings have ceased. the muscles and veins in her face no longer held it into the shape that was her shape. the eyes were closed, the mouth slightly open with the corners facing a little downward, so it was more of a slightly negative neutral face, not entirely neutral, but not really bad either. just lifeless. it wasn’t her anymore.
when it was my turn to be alone with her body, i thought about things like how she loved her beautiful blonde hair (dad brought along a pair of scissors to steal a strand of hair from her to keep, which he said she would have hated, but she would have made an exception for this), just how my dark brown (and i feel weird saying this but hopefully also beautiful) hair has been very important to me and the thing i like the most about my body, and she’s always loved my hair too, especially back right before the divorce when i had it comparatively long, and again now that it’s a handbreadth longer than shoulder length and absolutely magnificent dare i say. i’ve been so incredibly worried and ashamed about wanting to have my hair long and didn’t dare try again after the divorce until 3.25 years ago, but she always encouraged me to let it grow out. also, i already knew that my dad used to have hair long enough for a ponytail for a while in his youth, but among the photos he sent me of grandma he also sent me one of himself at my age, where he had shoulder-length hair and looked almost exactly like me. that was mind-blowing. and he also said that grandpa too cared about his hair very much. so i guess it runs in the family.
i also thought about the last christmas and birthday that turned out to be the last times we’ve seen each other. and how i regret that, a few months after finally being brave enough to use my yellow nail polish 1.5 years after buying it, i took it off on purpose the day before christmas because i was too afraid of being judged and her reacting badly. of course i also hoped that she would actually love the nail polish, and eventually maybe even accept me as trans and bi, aligning with my rebellious and encouraging childhood view of her that would 100% accept and support that kind of stuff, but of course reality could be vastly different. but now i’ll never have the chance to tell her. and i feel bad for thinking about that because it feels selfish to mourn her never knowing that part of me when it should be about her. or maybe it is ok because it does affect both of us and both of us have been robbed of future experiences that could have been.
now, i’m not at all religious or anything. my parents and maternal grandparents left the church and my brother and i were the first in our family not to get baptised. i don’t think that there is a god or paradise or hell, and most likely people just cease to exist, as unthinkable and absolutely terrifying as that is and as much as i hope that somehow the person continues to exist in a positive way. and because i know the following is impossible i don’t actually think much of it, but it’s still interesting and nice to think about. and also, while i generally don’t like religions, losing grandma has made me understand why people seek the comfort of believing in an afterlife a little more.
as i thought about stuff like hair and nails and having missed the chance, i was looking at her closed right eye (from my point of view). and it somehow looked like suddenly the eye beneath the lid turned to the side and looked directly at me. as i said i don’t think this was possible, i must have imagined it, but it really seriously did look like it. it was as if from beyond death she was looking at me one last time and saying that she does not only like my hair but also me wearing nail polish and she accepts me being trans and bi, and as i hoped and imagined she wordlessly told me that she’s 100% with me. telling me to be as rebellious as her and live true to myself no matter what others say. and so, also wordlessly as i usually am, i told her in my thoughts that i would continue and try to be as brave and rebellious as her. eventually i carefully gently touched her sleeved wrist one last time to say goodbye (it feels bad to say and think this but touching the dead body directly seemed a little weird even though it was my grandma and not just a dead body, so that like the next closest thing to holding her hand) and then went back outside the door, looking back into the room and holding the door open a tiny bit for a few seconds to catch one last glimpse of what used to be her face for one last moment.
dad had told me that before grandpa’s funeral there was a rainbow in the sky, and he hoped there would be one for grandma too. the next days were supposed to be rainy, so it could happen. then, the day before the funeral, he sent me two photos of rainbows. one from grandpa 8 years ago, and one he had just taken. god, the universe, a member of the Q continuum that has taken an interest in messing with captain dad or something else had sent us a rainbow for her too. but of course that must have been a coincidence and the moving eye just an imagined illusion.
i try to write interesting dreams down at night when i wake up from them before i forget. a few months ago i had a dream involving grandma, but i checked my dream notes and couldn’t find it, so i don’t know when exactly it was or what exactly happened. what i remember is that i was in a bathroom, and someone was with me. often in my dreams, places or people are not complete versions of real places or people, they might be very different but still somehow clearly feel like a specific place i know or a specific person, or a mix of multiple people, even if they don’t look like them. i don’t remember how the person looked that was with me in that bathroom, but i felt with complete certainty that it was a mix of my real grandma and the fictional aunt fara from rain (the supportive aunt of the trans girl called rain from the comic called rain that i’ve been reading since a few months ago). in other words, i dreamt of a scenario where my grandma knew i was trans and was completely supportive and helping me and encouraging me, exactly as i hoped it would be. specifically, what she did was help me dye my hair pink. i’ve actually never thought about doing that before. the one thing that’s definitely true is that i like pink. i think i started realising i like pink about 2 years ago. i used to think i hate it but that was actually just because i was ashamed of liking the colour that manly men are supposed to hate. yellow is still my favourite colour but pink is really great too. and my brother has been wanting to try dyeing his hair for i think years, but i don’t think it’s for me. it sounds like way too much effort and possibly mess-making. i already spend intolerable amounts of time in the bathroom. pink hair does sound and look amazing but i think i’m satisfied with my dark brown. it was still amazing in the dream though. but now it’s too late for something like this to ever come true.
the day of the funeral came 4 days later. i hate formal/business attire, by itself it’s just not my style and also i hate the uniformity and monotony of shape and colour and forced suppression of individuality i associate with it. i always thought that when i go to a funeral some day i would want to wear something different. and for my funeral one day i of course want people to wear their favourite clothes instead of everyone being a sad mass of black and grey. but i also hate standing out so i would never actually do something out of the ordinary in such situations, and i of course wanted dad to be happy, so i bowed to the powers of conformity.
in front of the altar at the church was her coffin, lots of roses and candles, and a few photos. during most of the service i looked at the big photo of her face at grandma-age, but the photos of her in younger years were also interesting to see. my brother and i were both surprised at how much religious stuff the pastor talked about, but i guess that’s to be expected, we’ve just never been at a funeral before and also the last time i’ve been inside a church was many many years ago. but it was nice, there was music and singing and pastor talk. he talked about her life and a lot of that stuff i hadn’t known before. i don’t actually know much at all about her history and life or the history of my paternal family in general, or how she was as a mother to dad. that was the first time i had heard her maiden name for example.
and then came the bombshell.
now, i’m not good at listening, especially in stressful situations. but the pastor was suddenly saying something about how when she was 10 she was living as a boy and i think he even said what male first name she used to have that i of course immediately forgot as any name.
MY GRANDMA WAS TRANS?????????????????????????:OOOOOOOOOOOWAOIDHsafdkfaslfdkaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAあああああああああああああああああああああああああ
i couldn’t believe what i had just heard and couldn’t focus on listening at all anymore. everything suddenly felt completely unreal and strange. once i felt my body again i felt my heart beating as fast and hard as it possibly could. i felt like i was about to faint. i tried to calm down and look at random things like candles and think about random things. eventually my heart went back to normal again, and everyone and everything around me was as normal as before as if nothing happened, as if the pastor had not just revealed that my rebellious cool grandma was trans like me, so it started to feel like nothing happened and i tried to just continue as before, but of course i kept thinking about it. and about how i was too afraid to even show her my painted nails and how i feared how she would react to finding out i was trans, and how i’ve been wanting to ask dad if our family has or has ever had any known lgbtq people since he said like a year ago that it’s statistically impossible that no professional german soccer player is gay but there is still no publicly out player, which is one of the two times he has ever mentioned lgbtq stuff to me in my life, the other being like two years ago when we heard on the radio that special rules for blood donations of gays, bis and specifically also transes will be removed, which he said was about time.
but this was absolutely incredible. first i’m with her body and think about how i regret that she never saw me with nail polish and she’ll never know that i’m trans and bi and as i thought that it looked like she looked at me, and then i learn during the funeral that she was trans. oh, my, $deity. now her looking at me could be interpreted as her being like “i’m trans too, i understand, go for it, be yourself and be out and proud” but it’s very unfortunate that i didn’t pay enough attention and missed basically everything about that part. but i also think that it might have been the opposite, the pastor might have said she was a trans boy but then detransitioned or something? if only i had listened.
and so it went on as normal. i kept looking at her photo most of the time and had to fight against crying more and more as time went on. but it was good. dad even managed to get an acquaintance who is a singer to sing ave maria (apparently more commonly known as hail mary in english?). eventually we all followed the coffin outside and went to the cemetery. the pastor said a few last words and then everyone said goodbye to grandma and threw dirt and petals down into her grave. the petals were pink and yellow, interestingly and coincidentally and to-my-liking-ly. and after it was over and everyone but us had gone, we each took and threw one of the remaining couple of petals, and there was one yellow one left that i threw.
then my brother and i said goodbye to dad and mum and our maternal grandpa as they went to join the others at a restaurant or something, for kaffä und kuchen und klönschnack (coffee and cake and small talk) as dad said. but we can’t stand that kind of stuff and the funeral itself was already a lot (but good), so we went home instead. that was kind of our own little version of what the others did, but walking and talking with just two people which is much better. we talked about stuff like what i’ve mentioned here, how i remember her and how he remembers her. and of course i asked him about the grandma being trans thing. he isn’t good at listening either so he isn’t sure either but he thinks it’s more like she lived as a trans boy for a while and detransitioned. which would of course also be great because people should be able to just try out being trans to see if it’s for them. and that isn’t the only possible thing that could explain it, maybe the way she felt actually just changed and both identities were right at the time, it doesn’t have to be one thing that is the permanent correct one from birth. or maybe neither one was 100% right at all or all the time but she thought she had to or was forced to choose one. or something else.
i should just ask dad to tell me the full story about that, and other stories about her too. but especially that one, and that could even be used as a segue to come out to him, and it would mean that he is actually really possibly very likely to be fine with it and not be hugely surprised by hearing something he thought was impossible. if he had a problem with family members being trans he wouldn’t have had the pastor publicly announce that grandma was trans to 50 family members and friends and other locals during the funeral. he might actually know at least some stuff, whereas i previously assumed he was clueless about lgbtq stuff. but maybe that’s just because he doesn’t talk much about stuff, just like me. but if she detransitioned it might also make him think that being trans is just a phase and i too will grow out of it like her and like how he grew out of having his hair long. too many possibilities. too much overthinking.
but that makes coming out to him much more realistic and a good outcome much more probable. but coming so close to imagining a realistic coming-out made it feel so unbearably scary and shameful and impossible again. nowadays i have no problem and i’m very comfortable being out online, and the same goes for being with my brother and my best friend (even though i thought the same things about coming out to my brother before i did it, but it turned out amazing), but for anyone else irl who already knows me it still feels impossible. the fear of them rejecting and ridiculing me and making me realise that those shameful unnatural trans and bi urges i have are disgusting and wrong after all is just too much to bear. but oh well, i guess i’ll get there one day. if only this indifferent universe didn’t have so much human hate festering in it, even making people hate themselves more than others ever could.
anyway, the funeral was definitely very helpful in making me grasp that grandma really is gone. it doesn’t feel like she’s here anymore. and writing down my thoughts about all of this right now is also really helpful and allows me to understand my thoughts and let out my feelings and cry more than before, but this time with less despair than on the day before she died, but also with a much stronger emotional connection since i’ve learnt about our shared transness. but it’s still weird, i feel like i can’t feel the feelings i want to feel and still drift away from them and towards normalcy too much. all of this vulcan suppressing emotions business might have ruined me. but the life is strange before the storm daughter soundtrack is always good to get the tears out instead of them being half-stuck like a sneeze that won’t come out. in that sense, i should try to make more use of my remaining youth, i should try to be brave enough to do all that i wanted, despite there being a hole in the earth where she used to be or now is. i shall burn it down, the uncaring universe for its death and suffering and hatred (but only those parts) that i will never accept, because i will never accept any injustice. i should have no care for what other people think of me like i imagined grandma did instead of letting that fear control me, i want to have hope that i can spend my limited fragile life being as happy as possible and spreading happiness to others, as the pastor also said.
it’s already 2:15 at night and i can barely write anymore and should really stop but also while writing this my dad asked me for the recording i did for him of the service. and only now did i realise that i have the entire service saved as an audio file and i can just listen back to what the pastor said about the trans thing!!! but also the audio quality is horrible, it’s extremely muffled with lots of echo. my cleanup attempts haven’t done much. and it’s very long and i don’t know where it was. but i’ll try to find it now.
ok so this is what he said: “until about her 10th birthday, $female_name was $male_name. $male_name $birth_last_name. $female_name dressed like a boy and her haircut was like a boy, and she wanted to be like a boy. but that eventually changed.”
that was it. incredible to hear it again. i still can’t believe it. “wanted to be like a boy” sounds more like detransitioned trans boy and not like trans girl/woman. i wonder what the story behind all of that is, what she was like in the first 10 years of her life and what made her change her mind. the answers are with my dad. and The Gays are in my family. always have been.
but also still, i have to end this on that thing. just imagine being a closeted transgendered individual and suddenly hearing the pastor at your grandma’s funeral literally actually seriously utter the words “until her 10th birthday, $female_name was $male_name”.
no, the real thing to end this on is: i’ll never get to talk about her about her transness, be it something she actually grew out of or not. i unknowingly had a trans family member this whole time, someone who understands perfectly, and now that i know about it it’s too late. i want to hear the full true story from her, not the limited things others know rightly or wrongly about her. i guess the only true thing i can do is to honor her legacy by living true to my own transness. happy pride month to everyone reading this and to you, grandma $name.