Here’s an astonishing little piece about death, queerness, and re-reading Butler‘s Gender Trouble:
“Tell her you forgive her,” she says, “I promise you she will die.”
I hang up and go back into the bedroom. Back to the borscht-feeding. My mother, all 89 pounds of her, is swathed in diapers and is sickly white, her eyes following each spoonful of borscht as it approaches her mouth.
“Mom, I forgive you.” Her eyes track up to my face. “I forgive you, Mom, I forgive you. ” Either I am saying this repeatedly to make sure she hears me and thus dies swiftly or because it feels good to say. I touch her skeletal leg through the pilly blanket.
She kind of whisper-struggle-intonates, “This must be very hard for you,” and I lose it, raining tears into the borscht. “You are a better person than I am,” she says, then falls back into unconsciousness for another week, and dies.
Maybe I am rereading Gender Trouble as an escape from this, from the memory of this. I could be thinking about Gender Trouble so I don’t have to think about how thin her arms were at the end, how our arms have always resembled each other’s. And about how much I want to stick a needle full of testosterone in my ass and balloon into fleshliness to escape any lingering resemblance to this wraith.
But this is not why I reread Gender Trouble.
Really, really beautiful. Do read the whole of it, if not today, then eventually.
A sculptor has created a sculpture of her and her wife, in bed naked and embracing, as their headstone in Woodlawn cemetary. She said: