Coming Out to the Dead

So, the entire family is up in arms over one remark, by a much older woman, about a 12 year olds clothes and that 12 year olds subsequent hurt feelings, that the whole visit goes poorly? And then tossing out a relationship with a mother and grandmother over that? And at no point, during the following 20 years, during which your grandmother repeatedly told you that she loves you and thinks about you, did you or anyone else in your family rethink this? How incredibly cold, immature, and sadly wasteful of a relationship.

I have no patience for anyone asking why the writer or her family didn't mend this breach. It's clear from the article that this visit was just the last in series of incidents in which the grandmother was awful to the whole family. I would choose to protect myself and my children from that. And if that grandmother never changed, whether it was wouldn't or couldn't, I'd have no obligation to let her continue hurting my family. Age is no excuse -- "What are *those* clothes?" has never been a kind or even polite thing to say. Mean, hurtful people of any age earn their isolation.

Did you ever consider that your Grandma might have been gay too?

I am truly confused by the recount of the interaction between the grandma and the author at the airport, when grandma is first picked up for the visit. The author writes: "After a curt hug, she said, “What are these clothes?” She pointed to my long black-and-blue floral skirt and light blue button-up. ... I hoped my attempt to look traditionally feminine .. would elicit a kinder response. ... That’s all she had to say. What are these clothes? ... Something about her tone, her way of pointing at me, told me I couldn’t trust her, that she had already judged me, that if she knew my secret, she would hurt me. Before she settled into my room, where she’d be staying, I sneaked in and hid my diary, fearing she would read the only proof of my closeted gayness." My question is this: How does a black-and-blue floral skirt with a light blue button-up on a 12 year old imply that she is gay? I've definitely dealt with my share of relatives (a beloved grandma included) who judged my style of dress, especially during my most masculine of presentation, which implied to them that I was gay. (I'm AFAB and struggled with my gender identity for years.) But this ... it sounds like different fashion preferences articulated by a curt, blunt, not-so-diplomatic, and probably depressed person of another generation. I am simply not able to connect the dots with between the commentary on the author's femme clothing and her grandma's homophobia.

Now I've heard everything.

And, really, you don’t think your grandmother knew you were gay? After you came out to your parents and the world. If your aunt knew,your grandmother probably also knew.

Enough of this "coming out as gay", as if there's something wrong with it. Would you feel compelled to come out as left handed?

When will the Times realize that we are tired of the coming out stories. I thought being gay is normal and accepted, so please stop with the heart rending stories and get on with your life.

Sometimes we underestimate what close relatives can understand and tolerate, and what they may already know about us. Your grandmother sounds like a special woman, underneath her barbs and jabs she likely had a heart of gold. She might not have been pleased to hear of your choices, may even have given you hell, but am guessing she still would have loved you.

No matter what you are, gay or straight, it doesn't do to break off relations with your parents. And grandparents are, of course, even older and more set in their ways. A shrink once told me to stop speaking to my parents. I dumped her pronto. I have never regretted persevering and achieving an understanding with my parents. They loved me and I loved them. After they die, all that other stuff falls away. It is better to be a grown-up at that point and not still a resentful child.

Find your famiy. Find your comfort level. Pretty sure Grandma’s generation couldn’t cope with folks coming out to them in the same way coming out to others in the mid 80’s was equally as hard.

I’m a grandmother, of two brilliant young women. I’m waiting for one to “ come out “. This will be my response : “ I’m so happy, and thank you for trusting me “. Seriously.

Please remember in the end that grandma did express she loved you and thought about you all the time. Despite the baggage and generational differences, the love and words longing for connection remain. All else falls away.

You don't have to be gay to have a mother or grandmother who makes barbed and cruel remarks that hurt a lot. I used to work with a woman who spoke plaintively about how her mother made mean little statements to her daughter (my co-worker) when she was growing up, and later did the same thing to her granddaughter. I found her angst to be rather surprising, since my co-worker regularly made such cutting comments to us, her fellow employees. Which makes me wonder if the cruel comment people could possibly be unaware of what they are doing.

My son chose not to come out to my father (who died at 94 5 years ago) because he knew that his grandpa had not overcome a long-installed homosexual offput despite very liberal politics and humanitarianism. My son knew that compartmentalizing his sexuality was a way to preserve peace and good will between them, if it left their relationship somewhat circumscribed. I think my son is very wise. And I respect his judgment. I suspect his choice might have been different if he had had a partner to introduce. But as it was, he seemed to me to accept my father's limitations with grace and largesse, imitating his grandpa's generosity, wisdom and courage (however imperfect), and creating a larger space for tenderness. God bless 'em both!

I, too, kept secrets about my identity from my grandma. In the end, I searched for a quiet moment to come clean but it never came. I focused on being a calming and compassionate presence. Today I know she would have ultimately been ok with who I am.

We often wish things—people—in life could be other than they are. That’s why you couldn’t be open with her, for if you had, she, too, would’ve wished that things—people—could be other than they are. Being an adult means internalizing and suppressing your pain to spare another’s pain.

Dear Ms. Spataro, thank you. "What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?" Hayden Regards, Wolf

You should always visit your Grandparents no matter how much they drive you crazy. There are no second chances.

I did not achieve a feeling of being satisfied with myself until I stopped being a speedbag for a couple of jerks (who happened to be parents). It took many years to achieve that peace. I’ll never fully recover.

THE CONVERSATION The writer wished to have had with her grandmother occurred in the context of a dynamic of family interaction that lasted many years. If the grandmother had insulted the mother to such an extent as not to be invited back, that seems like a good enough reason for anyone to be intimidated about pretty much of any communication. Leave alone one as challenging as coming out about sexual orientation. Still, it's good to have wishes to have been able to include grandmother, Sometimes we must comfort ourselves by imagining what if? Even if what if? never could or did happen.

At age 44, new to alcohol recovery, I decided to "make amends" to my parents by coming out to them-- front burner stuff. I wrote a long letter from the heart with some expectation of a reply. When I did receive the anticipated reply two weeks later, it was my dad who called me. What I remember most was his characterization of my mother's reaction as inconsolable and in bed. Not ONE WORD from either of them about how I was doing with this revelation. For my mother it was all about HER. Lo these 33 years later I never once regretted telling them primarily for my sake, not theirs. It was not selfish, it was the truth setting ME free. Over time we spoke less frequently and our relationship became forever changed, cooled. But then I was no longer who I pretended to be with them. Ironically, they had known and apparently loved my long term male friend for over ten years. At about that same time I dumped this Cleveland, Ohio friend who preferred the closet where I could no longer breathe (living in San Francisco). This friend tried getting married, got cold feet at the last moment and, finally, in desperation, became a "Witness." It's an all too familiar story.

Who can account for the emotional failures of our loved ones? What made them that way? How much of it was a lack of skill versus a real pathos towards the world? We shall never know. I do know this. All that is good and right in the world is seen in YOU. Your essay more than conveys it. You are a person of inherent and wonderful worth--and I would be proud to call you a friend, a daughter, a grand-daughter. I would like to think that were your grandmother afforded an opportunity bereft of baggage, she would feel the same.

This story broke my heart, and not just because of the way homophobia can tear families apart. It seems that grandma left that last visit knowing something went wrong and feeling badly about it. The author writes: "When we dropped her off at the airport after several days, Grandma started to weep. She knew she’d behaved poorly, not just to me, but with numerous other little barbs aimed at my mom, dad and sister." So why didn't the family (meaning the author's parents, especially her father) try to work through it. Instead, they hold a 20 year grudge: "It was clear, even to me, that she was no longer welcome in our house, that she wouldn’t visit us again, and that my dad was unlikely to take us to the South Bronx to see her." Clearly, the grandma wanted to find her way back into relationship with the family but was cut out: "We had short phone conversations on holidays and birthdays. “I just want you to know how much I love you and think about you all the time,” she’d say before handing the phone back to my aunt." I know dealing with the biases of older family can be hard. They have been socialized into these biases since they were very young. But are we really not able to work through these things as a family when love is still present? I've been at the other end of this with bigoted family members. Most of them just cut my out of their lives, 20 years and counting. But this grandma, for all her flaws, didn't *want* to cut ties. She wanted connection and was denied it.

I've often thought that the saga of pending death played out more for the witnesses than the victim. It's an opportunity to bury any personal, pent up baggage we may have with the decedent and enjoy catharsis without guilt or rebuke. Realizing, of course, that many who lie in that pre-death, catatonic state have full cognitive function but find it too laborious or painful to summon their voice. How terrible it must be for those who are a step away from lying in state to endure the dark stories, regrets and trespasses their loved ones feel compelled to burden them with before being hustled off into the great beyond.

Joanne, I am so very proud of you. Thanks for sharing this painful part of your life; I know others will be inspired by this.

How very sad - for the author, but even more so for her grandmother - that a person's hardened attitudes can deprive them and those around them of natural familial love! It's as if she said, "I love you and think of you all the time," but 'I can't bear to know anything about your real life.' So much sadness people bring themselves and others because of their biases and fears!

When my mother died (after not seeing her for 20 years) I needed to shift my perspective. Grief needed its due. But I could choose my perspective in amidst a mess of familial dysfunction. My mother: illiterate, functioning at a low social & economic level, forever anxious, utterly shamed into living in an emotional corner. Result of abuse from her violent drunk father. My "job," (one I didn't apply for), was to take on the role of my mother's caretaker. Problem was that with supporting that role, and still being a son, my emotional ability to love my mother was pummeled into the ground (my mother hid in an emotional corner except for when it came to raging at me for any reason). Where my mother and I lived she was subjected to sexual abuse by a boarder. Abuse that my relatives did not see because they chose to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable and inconvenient reality. Change of perspective: Choosing to be grateful to my hypocritical aunt who eyes were earlier "blind" to my mother's reality. She eventually did what I couldn't: take care of my emotionally battered and lonely mother (by my 30s any love for my mother was so deep it was inaccessible). I can still hate my aunt (other relatives for their hypocrisy) and yet be grateful that she took care of my mother to her death. The mail delivered my mother's ashes. Accompanying the box were pictures from my aunt of my mother smiling. Those pictures allowed me to cry with tears both pained and glad.

This is a hard story. When you grew into your 20s and 30s, why didn't you chart your own course and reach out to your grandmother? You had the wisdom and she had indicated her love over the years. You both lost and you have to live with that emptiness.

Why can't we just tell our children that no one chooses their sexuality and that all forms of it are fine and normal? I wouldn't be surprised if your grandmother had a lifetime of hiding (and being ashamed of) the same secret.

Not judging here, just trying to understand. Maybe it's my extreme introversion, hindering me here, but why can't you just BE gay, and give your grandmother, et. al. credit for figuring it out and dealing with it on their own terms? After all, I've heard many stories in which someone "came out" only to find the person already knew...

As we lay Bush 41 to rest, I wish we could take to heart his very essence - to love and try to accept each other. The author and her father both spent their lives estranged from a mother/ grandmother simply because they could not live up to her rigid rules of what and who they should be. Why can't we just love each other, especially our own flesh and blood?

As another comment noted, some grandparents are difficult people, always were, and just can't be pleased. However, there is another sort. My kids had a difficult time with my mother for a period. But then they stayed with her in relays for the last year of her life, helping with 24/7 care she needed to stay home. She spent long hours talking with them, that they never really had before. They learned to understand her, and she them. Modern American life too often keeps us apart from grandparents. It takes time together to understand one another in a loving way. There is no substitute for it. She told me she was glad to get that chance to know them, and they've said the same about her. While that is nice, it also implies that without those exceptional circumstances, it just would not have happened, to the loss of all of them.

I believe that very often people fail to understand that folks from an older generation, out of total ignorance on the issue of homosexuality, simply lack the knowledge to challenge themselves and realize that their own family might be holding back on sharing a vital part of their lives because there doesn't exist the atmosphere which would allow for an open exchange between themselves and their gay relative. As a middle aged gay man, I never really heard any racist or anti-anything talk in my home other than the hope that I would one day "marry a Jewish girl". My grandparents had no understanding of homosexuality and neither did I! I had no gay friends growing up and didn't know any adults that were gay. So as I myself took a long time to come to terms with UNDERSTANDING what it meant to be gay and how my feelings were at least equal to those of heterosexuals, I think it would have simply required talking to my grandparents about my life and feelings to allow them to understand and accept me and other gay people for what we are - the same as anyone else. To expect them to have innately understood and accepted homosexuals would be to ask them for more than I myself was able to do, initially. So while the author of this piece wasn't able to share her life with her grandmother during the latter's lifetime, speaking about it today hopefully will give her peace of mind and allow her to mourn without regret the passing of her grandmother as I did my own when she died.

I am very sorry you could not get closure with your grandmother. My father passed away nearly three years ago. We'd had ups and downs in our relationship, and there were some areas where I did not feel safe talking with him, but I never doubted that he cared about me, no matter how frustrating I was for him--or he for me. A couple of days before he passed I had my final conversation with him. It was the final time he and I would converse, though I didn't know that for certain. I knew time was short, though, and I knew that I wouldn't have much time left to clear the air. I asked him the question every Jewish man worries about: "Dad, am I a mensch?" The one thing we can hope for with our forebears is that we get the better parts of the essence of our parents and grandparents and are able to make those truly our own. I hope you put your own stamp on your shared smile.

Your story reminds me that, a few years before my parents died, I was given some of the best advice of my life: "Bury the hatchet with your parents while they're still alive." I proceeded to do just that, and today I am forever grateful for the advice. It was advice that my three siblings did not take as seriously, and today I (privately) think they suffered for it. This was especially pronounced with my Dad. One of our major stumbling blocks was our opposing beliefs and opinions about religion. During the process of 'burying the hatchet' I came to realize that this meant I would actually have to defend his right to exercise his religious beliefs in the way that he chose. I never found a way to do that until the last few weeks of his life, after he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and subjected to the indignity of hospice care in a nursing home. The final action became a healing balm for both of us, and a fitting farewell between father and son.

I suspect that your grandmother knew that somehow you were different long before you came out to your parents. She just could not accept it nor accept the life decisions that your parents made without her approval. I also suspect that she loved all of you but just didn't know how to deal with it. I wish you well.

Now that I am old, I have found myself turning into my maternal grandmother in unexpected ways. I am not her, but I understand her, and my parents towards the end of their lives, much better. In the end, we are all just fallible human beings. Parents and grandparents aren't the god-like all-powerful figures they seem to be to children. Even when they try their best, they're going to have times when they're tired, or selfish, or just plain wrong about something. If you want to reconcile with their memory, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt -- for your own sake, not theirs. Your grandmother might well have reacted badly at first to learning that you were gay. It would not be surprising, given what she had been told all her life. Accept that about her, and then think about what she would have done next. She kept saying that she loved you and thought about you all the time. Was that her way of asking, timidly, expecting rejection, to be let back into your life? And can you find it in yourself now to acknowledge that maybe she did love you enough that she might have responded to a confidence from you by gradually unlearning old attitudes? Nothing is certain. It would be a waste to regret that it didn't happen that way, because it might not have. But it will ease your mind if you can acknowledge to yourself that she just might have risen to the occasion... and can honor that potential in her.

Loss makes us realize life really is short. In the moment it always seems like keeping the tentative peace is the most important thing, all eyes are glued to that goal. I seemed to get a lot of flak in my family for being the truth teller, but now I wear that badge proudly. Still, all of my regrets are that I didn't brave that sitting protocol often enough to say the most important things to loved ones (loose term), to stand up for myself or my siblings. Now, at 65, I realize family is the place we are supposed to test the waters, where pushing those boundaries, braving that 'do no cross' line is both terrifying and defining. It's painful, it can be so lonely, but in the end you have made that human connection, you braved the intimacy and that in and of itself is the gift. Coming out is still something I still brave daily. People say things have changed, but revealing myself is still a risk.

I can really relate. My maternal grandmother was an incredibly shrewish woman, full of constant recrimination. I only remember her as a bully, and I'll never forget the look of lightbulb-recognition on my mother's face the day that I told her I didn't know why she tried so hard to please someone that she never could. Not everyone saw this side of Grandma Marjie, but it was the only one she ever showed to me. I do find a small measure of comfort in knowing that others don't have picture perfect families, especially this time of year when we are bombarded with non-stop home for the holidays propaganda. TY for having the courage to tell the truth about your people.

I'm saddened by the lose of a Grandmother you hardly knew. I was blessed to have known three of my four, the fourth died when I was young and all I have is indistinct memories of him, although they seem more clear than those of my older brother. I am also gay, so I understand how that can hamper warm loving family relationships, I have little or no contact with most of the relatives, for various reasons. Instead I have filled my life with rich loving relationships with wonderful people who are not tied to me by blood, but wouldn't be any closer if they were. My advice........savor what you have, accept what you do not and forward march. Loving thoughts go with this.

Without our collective flawed humanity, we could never learn to connect to any life energy. It is all worth it. Thanks for your beautiful thoughts and words.

Powerful thoughts on talking to the dead, and timely in that this would have been the 102nd birthday of a minister friend who died three years ago. Farley loved the counseling part of his career and said I was wise in burying a tin with relics of my grandfather under a rose bush (he loved his roses). I wasn't through speaking with Granddad and could go to that spot to do so as necessary.

It is so important to tell everyone in your family about the key emotions and issues in your life, Joanne. And you captured that so wonderfully in your column today. I have written 'letters' to my mother and grandmother, years after they had died. Letters in which I made amends for my part in our conflicts and unresolved issues. Letters in which I expressed my love and appreciation for how they tried their best to love and support me. No one is perfect. It is too bad that the 'cracks' in your family's relationship with your grandmother caused a breach that lasted for 20 years, and that was never mended in her life time. But you have described her so perfectly, and your love for her shines through, even as you describe how much pain she caused you. You are true to your self and you honor both yourself and your grandmother, by including her in your emotional life.

Your words convey emotion so real I can immediately identify with it. Thank you for a wonderfully told true story.

Thank you for the beautiful writing. I was reminded of my late grandma who passed away last summer. She suffered from demantia toward the end of her time, and whenever I met her I kept thinking that I should have had a long conversation about her life. It feels so bad to find myself knowing so little about the person I care only after she or he passed away. I hope I can reunite with her in an alternate life, in which we joke about ourselves and enjoy good food that she always loved. Of course with the people we all love.