Settling into a wingback lounge chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I allow myself to rest in the sweeping view overlooking the East River. The river’s vast currents flow in unending textured patterns, like water streaming over a huge old tapestry rug. It occurs to me that this beautiful, quiet, room with a view, with its engaging works of art was thoughtfully designed to sooth the psyche of people dealing with the assault of cancer. I’m lulled into the repetitive rhythm of the river’s flow in the quiet of this space. Momentarily soothed I become transfixed in the repetition. In the stillness my unprocessed grief floats by.
I’m not only sitting with anxiety for Sage, my ex-partner who is a long-term survivor of AIDS making it through this latest bout of cancer, I’m also grieving the death of my dear cousin Henry at the beginning of the year and underneath all this is the complicated disconnection from my sister Nellie.
In this quiet space surfaces yet another undercurrent of grief. The country’s growing fascist slide and the scapegoating of people who have been targeted throughout history. I’m counting on the goodness of people. I’ve been protesting for civil rights most of my life. Now in my early sixties, I admit it all feels too heavy to hold. I transitioned ten years ago, so I’m finally the man I know myself to be. I can put my sword down, most days. Although, the broader fight for gender civil rights is far from over, as the fight for democracy is still raging. We’re in a struggle for the soul of this country that will only be won collectively.
The sound of an Arabic male voice singing accompanied by an oud suddenly fills the space. There is a halting lamenting sadness in his voice that transcends the language barrier. The world is still reeling with horror and grief as the war between Israel and HAMAS in Gaza continues, spilling into a war with Lebanon. I imagine somewhere in our collective unconscious we are all swayed by the grief in his voice. I hope.
Arabic is familiar to me, even though I don’t speak it. It’s in my blood, floating around like the cells in that old estrogen-based body, unactualized and in wait for decades. Waiting for me to finally listen deeply to the weeping of my body. Graciously waiting for me to allow the alchemy of body and spirit together with the elixir of testosterone to transform and free me. Today some view this new form of alchemy as a threat, as alchemy was once viewed centuries ago. I knew deep in my cells, as I listened to my body that everything was exactly as it was meant to be, not a minute too early or a minute too late and I had finally arrived.
My early years were spent listening to my Lebanese relatives speaking Arabic in my maternal sittu’s (grandmother’s) house in West Roxbury, Boston. I listened as I nibbled on too many of her colorful diabetic candies that I found in a fancy cut glass bowl in her small living room while I drew in a sketch pad on the floor. There were great aunts, female cousins and elderly women from the neighborhood speaking Arabic and laughing in their aprons as they cooked in my sittu’s kitchen. Turning a red painted wooden handle on the long arm of the meat grinder, sittu methodically used the fingers of her other hand keeping the lamb inside the top of the grinder, as it moved her hand up and down with each turn. The women were making fatayer, small triangle spinach and meat pies, that sittu called George Washington hats. The lingering smell of roasted lamb and pignoli nuts with cinnamon filled the air. On the porch, off from the kitchen the men spoke in deep voices together. They always felt mysterious and authoritative, so I kept my distance. Jidu (grandfather) was different. He was a gentle, easygoing man who frequently joked that when he was little, he was a girl, who went under a rainbow and became a little boy. I never forgot that story. At five years old I felt he could see me.
Unlike my sister, I was in the woods building forts in the trees, digging in the dirt, and making racetracks for snail races on the driveway outside sittu’s house. I was always being told, “go wash your hands.” I would do anything to avoid washing my hands, including turning on the faucets at the bathroom sink, letting the water run and then turning it off. I thought it would do the trick, but I was invariably told, “show me your hands, turn them over, go wash your hands again.”
Sage and I fell head over heels in love. We shared a cabbie, and then shared a lifetime together. Sage is family. Being with her is like being alongside a beautiful still lake where I can breathe deeply and just be myself. We met in 1990 when the AIDS pandemic was raging in New York. Sage was diagnosed with GRID, gay related immunodeficiency in 1983, before the medical terms HIV or AIDS were used. She took the only medication available at the time, AZT. In 1983, GRID was considered a death sentence. Only a small fraction of the population diagnosed with GRID are still alive. Today she is “undetectable,” once an unimaginable miracle. Sage has an intuitive tenacity for survival. She knows how to live and thrive, despite having a life-threatening condition. In 1993, the CDC changed the definition of what constituted an AIDS diagnosis. Overnight thousands of people diagnosed with HIV were suddenly seen as having AIDS. Sage firmly told me never to refer to her as having AIDS, to anyone. She understood the power of the mind/body connection and how crucial a positive mental attitude was for keeping herself alive.
For eleven years I loved and lived more fully with her, until a year after 9/11, when I knew I needed to change my life. A phenomenon experienced by many people after 9/11. I needed to end our relationship, but I just could not do it. I had been taught well by my mother who told us, “You stay loyal, no matter what” and “always trust your gut.” Deciphering when to trust my gut and when to let go, that was the challenge. I took the regrettable route of having an affair, forcing my relationship with Sage into an end. A decision that left me with devastating guilt and grief that took years to repair with all parties involved. Despite all that, I knew I had to let go to live a different life. Years later Sage told me I had freed her to explore the world, something she never thought she could do alone.
In the waiting room, I’m pulled out of my memories by the movement of a pivoting lounge chair revealing an elderly man with curly salt and pepper hair hunched over his cell phone. He is playing the Arabic music. Hearing Arabic music feels odd and somehow right. Even though the Lebanese side of my family were Christian and not Muslim, lighter skinned and not darker, I have felt the penetrating sting of bias against me even in the idea of being Arabic in America. It is an identity that comes with an odd feeling of dissociation for me; a cultural dissociation.
My mother’s family were Lebanese, while my father’s mother was British and his father was Norwegian-American. My maternal great sittu arrived at Ellis Island on a boat from Beirut, Lebanon in 1910 with her five children. One of those children was my jidu, my mother’s father, who was 10 years old. Although I was never given the exact reason for why my great sittu left Lebanon and her husband to journey to America with all her children, it may have been due to the political upheaval in Lebanon around that time.
Alice, my mother, grew up in the 1930s and 40s in Boston, when assimilation equated survival. The assimilation into whiteness, a white-washing of identity. An experience that was not possible for all her relatives. My mother’s parents spoke English and Arabic to each other, yet their kids were encouraged to speak English and never became fluent in Arabic. Their last name, Kadin, could sound Irish if pronounced in English. When I was a young adult, my mother shared with me the anger and shame she felt when her brother Bill, as a kid, would allow people to think he was “black-Irish,” a term used at the time to connote people of Irish descent with dark features.
Sage and I shared the experience of dissociation from our family heritage. There is a long history of Arabs, Jews, and other ethnicities being categorized as non-white or white at different times in history. We each had one parent with a non-European ethnic background. Her father was Mexican-American, born in America and her mother was Irish-American also born here. Both her father and my mother identified as being “white.” That’s just how it was, there was no question of it being any other way. They were from the era of assimilation for survival to the point of dissociation. Dissociating from the pain of the whitewashing of a cultural heritage is a common trauma response. We both witnessed our parents filling out the US census forms by checking the box for “white.” When I questioned my mother about it, she had no real understanding that she should check any other box. My mother had olive skin, and did appear white.
At the Haddad’s funeral home where my cousin Henry’s service was held, I noticed the wife and daughter of my uncle Bill’s closest friend, Tommy O’Neil. They were both short, sweet, talkative women who had been staring at me. I hadn’t seen them in at least thirty years, way before my gender transition. Henry had sold sittu’s house to a son of the Haddads’, cousins of ours who lived across the street from sittu. Henry wanted to keep the house in the family. Jidu built their home and most of the houses in that area of West Roxbury, an area that was predominantly Lebanese for generations. Jidu was an artisan oud maker and master carpenter. The men in his family had been carpenters and builders for generations in Bikfaya, a suburb of Beirut.
At one point during the wake, the O’Neil’s approached me saying how stunned they were at the family resemblance. Confirming what I saw in the mirror during my early years of transition, the male genetics from the Lebanese side of my family. “Oh my god, I look like a Kadin!” I smiled and thanked them for coming. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Did they think I was a distant cisgender cousin? Or were they aware that I was the cousin who, “did the change,” as my eighty-year-old cousin Ronny Haddad had said? Tommy O’Neil was intensely homophobic, a classic bigot, yet, his wife and daughter marveled at how handsome I looked. “You’re just the spitting image of Henry.”
I remember being at sittu’s house on a summer visit with my sister when I was thirteen. At her kitchen counter, she wore a navy-blue dungaree apron she made from leftover fabric from the dungaree factory where she worked since she was fourteen. She was fixing us tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwiches on large, round, thin Syrian bread. It was 1973, and another Arab-Israeli war was raging. Turning around on her one inch heeled, black leather tie up shoes she began yelling in Arabic at the horrific images of war on the porch TV. The intensity of her yelling stunned me, anchoring me to my chair. This was the same year other confusing, sad events were unfolding in my life. My parents divorced because of my father’s crippling manic-depression and my mother married Richard, a Jewish man who was a practicing Quaker. Richard was a close friend of the family and a philosophy professor. When my father was hospitalized, he began spending more time with us. Richard engaged me in unusual conversations like, “where is away?” when I threw my popsicle wrapper away in the garbage. He taught me new ways of thinking and to question authority. Needless to say, my mother marrying a Jewish man was an adjustment for the Lebanese side of my family. In an attempt at levity, my parents would joke that they knew the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, “it’s all about love.”
That year I was in seventh grade. We moved to a predominantly Jewish area on Long Island because Richard, my step-father, wanted me and my sister to be in “a good progressive school system.” A social studies class was being offered at my school on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I wanted to take that class to learn more about what was happening in the Middle East. The teacher, Mrs. Green, a rosy-cheeked, squat woman, seemed kind. Then she began telling crude Arab jokes as she sat on her desk before the start of each class. I froze, drowning in their laughter.
One day, early in the school year, I brought some food my mother made me for lunch. My friends sitting at the table said, “Ewwww, what’s that!?” “This is baba ghanoush and this is hummus. It’s really good. My mom made it. Want to try some?” My friends scrunched up faces made it clear they were not willing to venture outside their American food comfort zone. I understood, I was different from them. I hoped on some level they were not rejecting me, just the food, but I never risked bringing Lebanese food to school again.
Despite my mother’s anger at my uncle Bill passing himself off as black-Irish as a child, her attempts at protecting us from anti-Arab racism betrayed her own feelings of shame. I will never forget her telling me, the same year I was in that class, not to share with anyone that I was Arabic. “It’s just for the best, it’s not necessary to share, it’s your private information.” I couldn’t believe my ears! I took her direction a step further in my thirteen-year-old mind, unaware of what my uncle had done in his youth. Did she want me to let others assume I was Jewish, because of my Jewish sounding Norwegian last name? After all, my step-father was Jewish. Although he was a non-practicing anti-Zionist, something I learned years later.
My mother had a complicated relationship with being an Arabic woman. The misogyny in my grandparents’ home was damaging and ironically came mainly from her mother, not her father. Jidu championed my mother, especially her artist’s spirit. Sittu served the men first, they received bigger helpings, and the men’s’ topics of discussion were always the focus at the table. Sittu would jab me in the ribs with her elbow if I tried to join the conversation while the men were speaking. My mother fought against the attempts to diminish her by the only means she had in the 1950’s. She married my father and moved to New York, out of provincial Boston and away from the limited Arabic views of womens’ potential. My mother was an artist. She was also a fierce woman and being in New York in the 1950’s, a mecca for artists, was a dream come true.
I translated my mother’s fierceness into my own language. I rejected my sittu’s rigid attempts to put me into a heterosexual, cisgender box and stepped over her shaming. Sittu’s archaic attitudes did not have the same potency for me as they did for my mother. When I was eighteen in the late 70’s, I openly told anyone that I was Arabic and a dyke and that my father was manic-depressive. “You don’t look Arabic.” was the refrain I often heard, as if it was a compliment. I have gotten a similar response from people in the past ten years of my transition, again as if it’s a compliment, “you don’t look transgender!”
Look closer, can’t you see Mount Lebanon in my eyes, where the heavens and the earth meet? Or the calligraphy Free Your Mind, inked across my new nippled chest, with its pink scar stretching from one lifetime to another?
In the late 90’s many people living with HIV were developing Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Sage was diagnosed with it in 1997. It was the first time she had cancer. We were terrified that it was the beginning of the end. Thankfully it was the beginning of realizing that Sage was an outlier who would become the long-term survivor she is today. After her radiation and chemo treatments were over, I took her on a silent Buddhist retreat with Roshi Enkyo O’Hara for a long weekend. Somehow, Sage didn’t realize we would be silent for the whole weekend, even during meals. She had a mini freak out about it in the bathroom when we first arrived that luckily became hysterically comical to both of us. Over the weekend, her one-on-one talks (dokusan) with Roshi Enkyo, felt illuminating for her during that difficult time. The silence increased the depth of being present and going deeper inside the heart of our fear and joy.
The second afternoon we went on a walking meditation (kinhin) led by Enkyo. We incrementally walked in a single line behind Enkyo breathing in the fresh air, each step a breath in and the next step a breath out, as the sun shone through the lush forest around us. As we slowly walked around the building, hands in (mudra) at our waists, we passed by my step-father’s blue Honda, which my mother gave me when he died. Suddenly, in the silence I thought I heard Richard jokingly say, “make way for ducklings!” I thought, jeez, I’m really starting to trip out on this silence. As we slowly went around the building walking by my step-father’s car again, I heard more playful chiding from him, “are you enlightened yet?” This time I felt startled, but I still thought it was just my imagination. Then I heard, “where else can I live, if not in your imagination?” That was exactly something Richard would have said! His question has been a personal koan that I have reflected on for years. It’s true. Those we love, who have died, do live in our imaginations.
There was a river of grief I waded through in my youth. Sage taught me the necessary balance between grieving and the joy of living. She has developed the ability to rest within the depth of her grief, without going under, without drowning in it. She is a still, deep, beautiful lake. I have not known anyone with this quality before. I came to understand that she developed these survival skills because she was given a death sentence at twenty-four years old and navigated that reality collectively with other young HIV+ people. Now at sixty-seven, she has outlived that death sentence over and over again. We used to joke, “save me a seat in the front row!” depending on who would die first. Gallows humor comes in very handy when you need it. The idea of losing Sage feels unbearable at times like these. Will I go under, drowning in my grief or have I finally learned how to swim in these waters?
Sage’s treatments take us up and down the floors of Memorial Sloan Kettering, and on this day each floor surprisingly has a variety of loud annoying sounds. I contemplate telling the man who is shouting into his phone in a language I don’t recognize, to please lower his voice. His voice is becoming increasingly shrill and way too loud for this space of healing that normally sounds more like a library. I imagine he is dealing with a nightmare of an insurance problem or cannot get pain medication filled and is being pushed past his limit. I rest in this thought, so I say nothing. He is saturated with grief. I am too. We are both on the river, exhausted from all the rowing and the vastness of the river’s reality before us. The man who was sitting next to him is called in for his radiation session. As he gets up, he turns to the loud talker who is still arguing on the phone and firmly tells him, “You’re talking too loud for in here.” The man seems not to hear this remark or maybe he just doesn’t understand English. Shortly after this, his call ends. I’m waiting for Sage to come out of her radiation session. I look in his direction, past a handful of lounge chairs between us. He looks tense as he looks out the window at the East River below. I watch him as he slowly settles his body into his lounge chair, as the stillness of silence surrounds us once again.
Jake Zuppa is a writer from Brooklyn.
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