Victoria woke with a start. One of those fully-asleep to fully-awake immediately kinds of things. She laid there for a moment, fully restrained, fully compressed by all the medical equipment, the machines and wires and tubes surrounding her, clicking and humming, attached to her body, keeping her alive. It was daytime. She could tell no more than that, but the room was bright and just seemed…active. There was an animated conversation going on in the hall, or perhaps the next hospital room. Hospital staff and others walked briskly past her door.
Glancing around the room, she spotted her daughter Alex sitting in a chair, fingers flying over her cell phone, deeply involved in something or other. Alex had not yet realized that Victoria was awake. She studied her for a minute. Alex was thirty-three, average height, and average weight. Her brown hair was cut in a sensible style, and her glasses were simple and professorial. A minimal amount of makeup on her clean, attractive face. Sensibly dressed in jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Alex was one of those daughters who was the polar opposite of her parent. She had a Master’s degree in some kind of high-level finance that Victoria barely understood. She had a great job and a beautiful home. Alex lived a quiet life with a husband who loved her and a beautiful daughter. Victoria adored her precocious little granddaughter. Alex was smarter than Victoria. She was more mature, wiser and kinder. Victoria admitted that somehow Alex was older than her. As sometimes happens, the daughter had become the mother.
“Hi honey,” Victoria croaked.
“Hi momma,” Alex responded. She put up her phone, crossed to the bed and took Victoria’s hand. Victoria could see the furrows of concern in her daughter’s face.
“Can I get you anything? Some water?”
“Coffee.”
“Momma, you know you can’t have coffee,” Alex chided. “And don’t you dare terrorize the nurse. She’s very nice.”
“Hmmmph,” groused Victoria. Alex handed her the ever-present cup of ice water with the bendy straw and Victoria took a swallow. “I just don’t understand why I can’t have one cup of coffee. I mean, I’m dying anyway.”
“Now momma,” Alex said sympathetically, “You’re not dying. You had another heart attack. We’re going to get you better and get you out of here. You’re going to live to be a hundred!”
“Oh god,” Victoria quipped. “Don’t do that to me! But I love to hear you call me momma!”
The truth of the matter is that for the first fifteen years of Alex’s life, Victoria had been her poppa. Victoria disliked the term ‘coming out’. Rather, she likes to say, “When I learned of my gender identity and came to embrace and love my femininity.” This was followed by around ten years where Alex couldn’t be around Victoria at all, couldn’t understand or accept Victoria’s transition. But Alex is an intelligent, compassionate young woman, and she slowly came around. She was always very liberal. A born-and-bred, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive. But perhaps, Victoria mused, it’s tougher when it’s personal. When it actually touches you. I suppose, Victoria thought, Alex had to go through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grieving– denial, anger, bargaining through to acceptance. However things transpired, Victoria was grateful and happy to have her daughter with her in the hospital.
“Oh hell, honey,” Victoria looked deeply into Alex’s eyes. “You know I have no interest in living to be 100.” This was not about wanting to die at all. Not a hint of morbidity. It was just that her time on Earth, her heart and her body were coming to the end. Just an acceptance of the natural occurrence of things, the inevitability that death is just as normal and as natural as birth.
Yes, there was a time when she did want to die. She had been miserable all her life, and slowly spiraled into a deep chronic depression that culminated twenty-five years ago with a botched suicide attempt. She was Jim then. Jim had a decent job. He had a lovely wife and daughter. Jim mowed his lawn, paid his taxes and voted. But somehow he had always felt disconnected. Incomplete. Depressed. Behind closed doors, and without a thought about it, Jim had learned to sew. He learned that he loved sewing, and Sundays would often find them, his wife watching NFL on TV and Jim sewing at the dining room table.
Jim found himself, those twenty five long years ago, laying in a different hospital bed recovering from the suicide attempt. He was loaded with serious psych meds and wishing he was dead. People pressed around him, family and doctors and social workers with clipboards, asking him this and telling him that. “Shit stitched on pillows,” he sarcastically thought. He would respond, often sounding like Eeyore from Winnie-The-Pooh, often feeling like Eeyore, “It doesn’t matter.”
Jim laid in bed, wondering why he didn’t die. How he didn’t die. And what was next for him. Why was he so god-damned depressed? He had a very nice life. Comfortable and pleasant. A wonderful family. So, as Jim laid in the hospital bed he asked himself some hard questions. What the hell? Why was he so depressed? Why did he want to quit so bad?
He thought about lots of things. Another attempt at suicide? That’s a shitty thing to do to your wife and daughter. He thought about his childhood. His inability to truly connect with those around him. And for some reason, some seemingly disjointed and random reason, he thought of Ru Paul. At the end of every episode of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Ru asks the same question. And suddenly it seemed as though Ru was there, in that hospital room, speaking directly to Jim. Asking him, “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?”
Jim’s eyes welled with tears. He thought, I don’t love myself. I never have. He paused a moment, blinking back the tears. I HATE myself! Oh my god, where did that come from? Jim lay there a moment, letting the thoughts and feelings just wash across his body. Perhaps the physical trauma, the isolation of the hospital room and the psych meds had put him in an altered state. A heightened sense of honest self-analysis. For whatever reason, whatever the fundamental cause, Jim suddenly realized this. He was a woman. Born into a man’s body. Jim had always known it in his innermost thoughts and feelings. He had always known it. From his earliest thoughts of self-awareness, perhaps three or four years old, through crushes on high-school classmates that he had never recognized or admitted even to himself, Jim had been lying to himself. And therefore, he had lied to absolutely everyone he had ever met. So then and there, Jim embraced this epiphany. He had embraced and accepted a lifetime of depression. It didn’t work. Suddenly, immediately, Jim did die in that bed. And Victoria was born.
For the past twenty-five years, Victoria has been honest with herself. She has been honest with everyone around her, and she has built herself a new life. Thanks in large part to that fateful day those many years ago in that other hospital when Saint Ru Paul appeared before her, today she does love herself. So today, when Victoria told her daughter “It doesn’t matter” it wasn’t as Eeyore, in a slow dolorous voice, but more like a Disney princess who sees the good in everything. “It doesn’t matter!” Indeed, she greeted the world every day with a big cheery smile and a warm, happy hello.
Today Victoria is dying. It’s whispered between the doctors and nurses. It’s quietly discussed with her family in somber, hushed tones. It’s all good. First, she had a full and rewarding life as Jim. A nice home and a beautiful family. A granddaughter she adored. Then, a couple of decades as a woman, with many fond memories of friendships and loves. A girl could do a lot worse! Suddenly, and without any advanced warning, right there with Alex warmly holding her hand, Victoria let out a long, slow gasp and was still. All the medical equipment started going haywire.
“Momma? MOMMA!” Alex started to wail. A team of doctors and nurses scurried in and began to minister to Victoria. But she was gone.
“Victoria. Victoria.” Someone was speaking to her through a dense fog. She opened her eyes and peered at the person speaking to her. Ru Paul was standing in front of her. Beautiful Ru Paul, her big blonde hair, her long cream-colored gown wafting and slowly waving as if in an unseen, impossible breeze. Reaching her arms forward, she spoke to Victoria in a rich, glorious voice. “It’s time, momma.”
“Yes, Ru, I’m ready,” said Victoria, extending her arms to meet Ru’s.
~ Jaelle Terrell
copyright©2022 Jaelle Terrell – all rights reserved