Remember Us As We Were

For Kasey Payette, queer heartbreak leads to an investigation of burial practices, historical erasure, and what details of our lives will outlast us.

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I guess we’re not starting that commune. We’ll never build a yurt or even sleep in one. We’ll never make it to that palmistry session, so I’ll never know why your palms are crosshatched like raccoon paws. I’ll never know what those paws were trying to tell me. We’ll never see Pink live in Vegas or Show Justin Timberlake our tits. We can’t take the train to Chicago with our friends now. Our idea for an indie film—about Saint Therese de Liseux’s obsession with Saint Joan of Arc set to a Tegan and Sara soundtrack—will have to go unrealized. I’ll never be friends with your mother. All the surplus tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant from your garden will be given to somebody else. We’ll never get arrested together. We’ll never doorknock for mayoral candidates. We won’t have a canning party, or a flower-pressing party, or a writing-postcards-to-elected-officials party, or a congrats-on-getting-your-tubes-tied party, or a wedding party, though that never would have happened.

We’ll never turkey baste each other in the back of my Subaru and raise twins named River and Vetiver, one from each of our wombs. We’ll never live together in a cabin in the woods and we’ll never take to the water to become mer-people, devolved, de-evolutionized, slick and scaled and gilled, everything that went wrong with our love defanged and smoothed over, rewound into the burbling current. We’ll never go swimming again. I’ll never hold you in another river. The shores of Lake Superior will never have us both at once, or if they do, we won’t know it. The water will never tell. We’re not going to live out our golden years in some fancy gay retirement home, though that never would have happened. You won’t make love to me when I’m 85. I won’t even know when your hair goes gray. You won’t know the day I die.

We’ll never know what would have happened if we would have met when we were younger, before life got so complicated. We could have met at summer camp or at a birthday party or in that college town in California I visited when you lived there, before I knew you. When I visited that town, I went to a bar you later told me you’d frequented. It was the kind of bar with red plastic baskets lined with wax paper and piled with fries. We must have come within fifty feet of each other. Everything could have been different. But this is this timeline, and I’m sitting in my cubicle Googling “How to get over someone you truly loved” and Googling it again the next day. In this timeline, we’ll never even go on vacation together, I’ll never even befriend your cats, but still I swear you have known me in every lifetime. I have loved you in every timeline.

We’ll never turkey baste each other in the back of my Subaru and raise twins named River and Vetiver, one from each of our wombs. We’ll never live together in a cabin in the woods and we’ll never take to the water to become mer-people, devolved, de-evolutionized, slick and scaled and gilled, everything that went wrong with our love defanged and smoothed over, rewound into the burbling current.

Now I’m deleting pictures of us from my phone. Another big lesbian love lost to history, but not for the old-fashioned reasons. We’re not closeted. We were never a pair of tragic nuns yearning across convent halls, brushing hands while planting beans. It’s 2023 and we live in Minneapolis. We could have been together however we wanted. This garden-variety cowardice and betrayal just happens to be gay.

These days I walk through the city cemetery, clearing grass from grown-over graves.  I uncover names and read them aloud, parsing life stories from family burial plots. I find evidence of untimely deaths, widowed spouses, parents who outlived their children. Time overlaps itself here among the dead. Centuries wash over the present moment like tidal waves. And this is why I’ve come—to place my personal pain in a garden of grief, to feel my own short life pressed against forever.

I kneel by the grave of one Charlotte, who lived from 1895 to 1990. She’s buried with her husband (1893-1930) and only son (1928-1932), both dead too young while Charlotte lived to the age of 95.

Charlotte had a bad run, I think to myself, but she kept on living.

If she can do it, so can I.

Now I’m deleting pictures of us from my phone. Another big lesbian love lost to history, but not for the old-fashioned reasons. We’re not closeted. We were never a pair of tragic nuns yearning across convent halls, brushing hands while planting beans. It’s 2023 and we live in Minneapolis.

But I want to find the departed queers in this ground to keep me company in my particular sadness. They’re here, I know that much, but there’s no way to tell absent faces and bodies, absent legal bonds.

How many of these corpses, centuries in the ground, once trembled with the shock of desire so surprising, once sobbed into the neck of one they loved but could not be with? How many of these Pauls and Samuels were not exactly men? How many of these marriages, carved in stone, were property arrangements only?

You can see, in this graveyard, who was whose son, who was whose mother, who was whose wife, but these silent stones say nothing of neighbors, housemates, lovers, coworkers, frenemies—the kinds of connections around which my daily life is built. I can’t help but wonder, when I die, who will the living think I was? Who will they think I belonged to?

After hours wandering among the graves, I come upon a small headstone made of pink granite, engraved with the pair of names Jeannette and Gloria. “Jean and Glo,” I say aloud, wishing there was someone around to high-five. Out of thousands of people buried in this graveyard, here are my only obvious kin. They both died before gay marriage was legal. Glo died twenty years before Jean. But here they are, united in life and in death, memorialized for everyone to see.

But there is no record of you and me. You left me, and our love will never be remembered. Gay marriage is legal now, as is gay divorce. Maybe, in any circumstance, you’d always end up leaving. Still, when I see all these people, decades dead and buried but laid to rest beside their beloveds, it is you I miss and you I wish I could call family in a way that’s recognized by history.

You can see, in this graveyard, who was whose son, who was whose mother, who was whose wife, but these silent stones say nothing of neighbors, housemates, lovers, coworkers, frenemies—the kinds of connections around which my daily life is built. I can’t help but wonder, when I die, who will the living think I was? Who will they think I belonged to?

Under my feet, toxic embalming fluids seep into the earth. In this cemetery, anyone can see a deceased person’s family wealth by the size of their gravestone. I’m surrounded on all sides by monuments built to the city’s colonizers and railroad barons. Maybe, a friend suggests, tending to these graves is not the best use of my energy. In the United States, millions of acres of forest per year are sacrificed to make coffins, and cremation releases thousands of tons of carbon monoxide into the air. Why do we toil to preserve that which must decay? Why can’t we just let ourselves return to the earth?

I wonder how my peers and I will be memorialized when we die. These days, we have options. We could be buried in pajamas filled with mushroom spores that will eventually consume our flesh. Our bodies could go into composting pods to fertilize the roots of new trees. We could donate our corpses to science, get shipped to body farms where our organs would be cataloged and analyzed.

Maybe, in the next fifty years, this cemetery will fill with new gravestones commemorating dead gay couples. Now that we generally have the right to marry, now that many of us carry on our lives and partnerships less secretly, we could go for family plots just like straight people. It would be a relief to see our lives and families legitimized in this cemetery, but I’m not sure spousal gravestones would really do the work of representing our lives.

One the one hand, I’ve spent hours phone banking in fluorescent campaign offices to convince strangers that love is love: Gay people are not so different from straight people. We all want the same things.

On the other hand, it will never be enough to assimilate into institutions that were built to deny us.

You always said marriage is for straight people, and you had a point. As someone who’s walked both sides of the street, I can say that our love didn’t feel anything like hetero love. It was a totally different animal—an ecstatic new religion, baptism by fire. None of the old ways applied.          

But there is no record of you and me. You left me, and our love will never be remembered. Gay marriage is legal now, as is gay divorce. Maybe, in any circumstance, you’d always end up leaving. Still, when I see all these people, decades dead and buried but laid to rest beside their beloveds, it is you I miss and you I wish I could call family in a way that’s recognized by history.

You always said queerness is a critique—of gender, patriarchy, society as we know it—and queerness is a choice—not just sexual orientation, but worldview. And when you were mad at me, you reminded me that queerness is a responsibility.

I wonder if, to some extent, what our opponents fear is true: Us gays are a mystery cult, a deviant religion, bound to upend society.

When you left me, it felt like you had defected from something holy.

Once I’m dead and decomposing, I assume I won’t know and won’t care where I’m buried, what people remember of me, and how much of the truth they know. But I care right now. Right now, I’m starved for context. You knew me, and you don’t anymore. You saw me, and you don’t anymore. You were the best audience for my personality, and now what is all of this for?

I want to be known the way you knew me when things were good. Shameless, oracular, insatiable, tender, exacting, and queer as the day is long.

Maybe, when I die, it will be enough for me to turn to soil, for my remains to nourish insects and trees. Maybe it’s always enough to belong to the earth. But I don’t want to be forgotten. I want the story of my life to be meaningfully bound with the stories of others. I want to say that I was here, too. 

Later, I Google Jeannette and Gloria to try to find out who they were. They were not, as it turns out, lovers, but sisters. I laugh at myself for superimposing queerness on everything, for naively clinging to these two sisters for the representation I craved.

The next time I visit the cemetery, I walk a different route. I study standalone graves, strangers buried beside presumed strangers, small headstones marked only with names and dates of birth and death. I wonder who all these people were, who they called family, how their stories were bound with others. I come upon a large monument labeled Showmen’s Rest—a group burial plot for members of the Showmen’s League. These are circus people. Lion tamers, acrobats, fire eaters—performers who made a living through constant travel, exuberant showmanship, and enormous risk. Their headstones surround the central monument. Here, colleagues are buried beside colleagues, memorialized as members of a community, members of a chosen family. Here, they are remembered for what they loved, what brought them joy, and how they brought joy to others.

Once I’m dead and decomposing, I assume I won’t know and won’t care where I’m buried, what people remember of me, and how much of the truth they know. But I care right now. Right now, I’m starved for context. You knew me, and you don’t anymore. You saw me, and you don’t anymore. You were the best audience for my personality, and now what is all of this for?

It’s possible, Showmen’s Rest reminds me, to belong, with or without legal bonds and lineages.

I find more community burial sites: soldier’s memorials, with veterans from various wars laid side by side around copper sculptures of military gear; Elk’s Rest, a group burial for members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, with graves surrounding a life-size bronze Elk statue; and the Chinese Community Memorial, marked with a granite pagoda.

In Congressional Cemetery, located near Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., there’s a section of graveyard called “Gay Corner,” which was started by Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam veteran who was dismissed from the airforce for being gay. He purchased two adjacent burial plots in the cemetery, one for himself and one for a future partner. These burial plots were intentionally located near the grave of J. Edgar Hoover, who, as director of the FBI in the 1950s and 1960s, notoriously surveilled and harassed government employees who were suspected of being gay.

Matlovich’s headstone, designed with black granite and pink triangles, bears the title “A Gay Vietnam Veteran” and the epitaph, “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

Matlovich died in 1988 from complications from AIDS, and though he was not, in the end, buried with a partner, many other LGBTQ veterans and activists who were inspired by his bravery and resistance chose to be buried beside him. Today, about 35 people and counting are memorialized in Gay Corner, including Barbara Gittings, who led the fight to force the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973.

I imagine being buried beside friends and chosen family in something like Gay Corner. We could be laid to rest in our mushroom suits or tree pods with grave markers bearing favorite poems or the names of our pets or carvings of tattoos we had. Everyone would be remembered by their true genders and names, their true loves and pleasures. And, whether or not we had blood descendents, there would be those who outlived us and wanted to remember us, and they’d come to visit our graves.

Here, we’d be remembered as we were, not just as victims of discrimination or violence or of a disease the government would rather scapegoat us for than protect us from. We’d be remembered for our vibrant, gender-expansive, intense, passionate lives, and how that was everything to us.