On losing my mom
KEXP is doing their annual Music Heals program to process grief.
My mother died earlier this year. It was a difficult passing. It was a difficult relationship. We spent the latter decades of our lives fighting to love each other, fighting to understand each other, and sometimes just plain fighting. I know other people in the LGBTQIA community had it much worse, but that's where we are, or were.
My hometown is smack in the center of limestone country and the broken tree stump is a common symbol of the potential for growth cut short. We'd take steps forward and hit a wall. Dad and I suspect that mom was struggling with dementia those last years, which made the steps forward more challenging, just as I needed to change as a late-transitioning trans woman. What I mourn is not the woman who was profoundly tired at the end, but the growth together that always seemed to be just a tiny bit out of reach.
I struggled to think of a request for this show and landed on "Not." Not love, not indifference. Not a heroine and not a villain. Not a question and not an answer. Not a problem and not a solution. In our better times we shared a love of the unanswerable questions, the frustration and inexplicable comfort of religious paradox.
Don't know if they'll play it, so here it is.