we never heard each other's screams

During the four separate times in my past when one of my grandparents (and my great aunt) took ill and died I was nothing short of a complete and utter coward. I never really felt a connection to these ancient strange people, despite living close to them all, and often sleeping over their houses and eating their food and accepting their gifts. I knew in my heart, even then, that they loved me in their own unspoken ways, but they always seemed completely alien to me. They scared me sometimes even, my larger-than-life grandfathers with their gruff, spartan way of life and sparse, curt, rural conversation styles.

I was an undergraduate, I think, when all these deaths took place and in all but one case, I was too scared to even return home for the funerals. Did I feel ashamed? Did I fear that their closeness to death might somehow allow them to see into my soul, see my anguish and my terrible gender secret? To say the least, I regret this cowardice every day - a regret at least on a par (and perhaps intermixed) with not having the courage to face my transsexuality earlier in my life. I guess I've always had an overwhelming fear of death, far beyond even the fear we all instinctively carry of that great unknown. I have always felt completely out of place when dealing with even the hint of death in real life. Afraid to get too near it else I contract it's foul odor myself, I suppose. When our family cat died, when I was I think in junior high, and I discovered her stiff, motionless body in the basement, felled in the prime of her life by some toxin or chemical that perhaps I had lazily left out, I couldn't deal with it and I stayed as far away from that body as I could until my parents arrived home from work hours later.

I witnessed both my once stout, ex-military, working class grandfathers sucked dry by cancer and lengthy hospital stays; reduced to still-proud, but bent-over stick figures engulfed by the smell of decay. But in the end, I fled them and their obvious need for love, back to the illusory safety of college and constant drinking, unable to give either of them or their grieving wives or my parents and relatives even the barest of support. To this day, I still have little clue as to my selfish reasoning or thoughts then. I was a self-absorbed brat struggling with my blossoming realization that I was "different" back then and I acted instinctually to escape an uncomfortable situation I suppose. And the worst part is I showed so little regard for how this must have affected my grandparents; to see one of their beloved grandchildren flee from them in their greatest time of need.

These days (and for at least the last decade) my deceased grandparents often drift in and out of my dreams and nightmares. Like in life, they say little and walk around with stern faces, like noiseless, shuffling demons, as I flail about in shame and self-disgust and fear inside the memory-faded facsimiles of their once familiar spartan homes. I wander their labyrithine rooms in hazy dawning horror at the complete emptiness and silence around me. I am completely lost and in need of their forgiveness perhaps, but still, after all these years, unable to really talk to them; to truly embrace them. I still fear them, fear their judgement. I was a coward, confused, selfish, alone; the silences, mostly my doing, but not always, always seemed to take a little of our lives away when we were together. So I fled like the mangy dog I often felt I was.

I'm sorry for everything, please forgive me...