Burial and Liberation

Today’s my eighth “anniversary of liberation”, i.e. eight years since I moved from Europe to California. 

And yesterday, for the first time, I used a big spade and dug in the ground. Fortunately, it wasn’t frozen as the temperatures & snowfalls of the past week could have made it — or I was able to find a spot that wasn’t frozen like the rest. 

It was a very precise spot, the very spot I wanted: the spot between two trees near a stream where last summer my European queer ex-lover & I had our important conversation about “the future”, i.e. the future of our relationship. That future that never came to be — I buried it under the trees next to the stream yesterday afternoon. 

For the past couple weeks I’d been feeling a strong need, an urge almost, to do a physical ritual like some kind of funeral for my European queer ex-lover, or for the relationship we had, as they feel dead to me. And last weekend the details of what I wanted & needed to do in this ritual became crystal clear to me as did the fact that I was ready to do it, despite the extremely cold weather and heavy snowfalls that could freeze the ground: I was ready to risk having to dig into frozen ground because I was ready to dig & bury. To physically bury the physical remains of that relationship — two books (one of which with a lovely dedication), a mug painted especially for me, the map of the park where we went for so many lovely walks and even difficult conversations together, and the paper wraps of two particular chocolate bars bought for me to celebrate the 6-month “anniversary” of my gender-affirming top-surgery together. All inside a cardboard box, buried into the ground, covered with the soil and dry leaves and fallen branches. May the love that nourished the summer romance between me & my European queer ex-partner nourish the earth and whatever might grow there next spring. 

Now, maybe for the first time in my life, I really understand why burials & graves can be so important to people. Both the action of digging this grave & burying those objects and the fact of having that grave feel profoundly therapeutic and healing to me. On the one hand, it feels empowering, because I actually did something practical and concrete — I was the empowered “actor” instead of being the powerless “spectator” waiting for an email that will never come. On the other hand, it felt final to me and expressing it through bodily action made it feel more “real” to me. And last but not least, it felt compassionate towards myself, because I will always have that grave, that spot, to go back to and mourn or pay homage or say “Hi” or “talk to”, if I want/need to. And in this sense, also, I finally think I understand why humans want or need tombstones, regardless of what may be underneath them. I had contemplated throwing those objects off a cliff, at least the mug, imagining it smashing into hundreds of pieces. I had also contemplated putting them all in a vessel and letting them float away on the creek. But in either case, I would have lost them forever. In this way, I can go back to them, if I ever need/want to, but they’re also out of the way, removed from me now — now that I feel the need for that remoteness as an additional, more concrete & external expression of my inner emotional state, i.e. of the fact that I now feel ready to look ahead, instead of back, and I really feel like that was a phase of my life that is now over, that now belongs only to the past. To a lovely but limited phase of my past that now belongs in a box in the ground.

And to come full circle, maybe having that burial ritual precisely yesterday was serendipitous for my eighth “anniversary of liberation” today… Maybe yet another (form of) liberation, another (form of) renewal, another (form of) looking towards & moving into the future.