Queering grief: LGBTQ+ stories about grieving the death of someone important

Photo by Steve Johnson

I want to tell you a memory I have of my grandmother. The details are fuzzy. She has just given me a present, maybe for my birthday. It is a bag, oblong shaped, with hoop handles and a zipper. I think it is blue, with a picture of a Sesame Street character on the side. I look at my grandmother and thank her. ‘You’re welcome’ she says. Then, when no one else is looking, she catches my eye. She smiles, both mischievous and loving. She whispers, “It can be your purse.”

I never told my grandmother that I was gay. She was – is – one of my favourite people to have ever lived. My keeping her in the dark about my sexuality (and as I got older, my relationships) had nothing to do with her. I blame internalized shame and fear of rejection – the prospect of enduring the intensity and stress of yet another ‘coming out’ was too exhausting to bear.

When I was a young child, I had told my grandmother that I planned to move in with her. “But not until I am 28”, I had said. She reminded me of this many years later, as we were gathered around the dinner table at her house in the country (the place where, incidentally, I continue to feel more ‘at home’ than anywhere else in this world). We laughed.

She died when I was 25.

My choice to never tell her the full truth about me has haunted my grief. But within a fog of regret, my memory of that Sesame Street “purse” pierces through. I am reminded that she knew and accepted me for who I am. And that she likely forgives me for not having come out to her, while she was alive.

Queer grief

June is Pride month. For me, this means an opportunity to celebrate, uplift, and protect the humanity of queer people.

What can we learn through stories of death-related grief, as told by LGBTQ+ people? This is what we are now asking in a narrative research study (https://palliativenursingresearch.com/queering-grief/)

Anyone grieving a death-related loss, and who identifies as LGBTQ+, is eligible to participate. To date, we have spoken with people of a variety of genders who identify as gay, lesbian, trans, and queer. They are grieving the deaths of their spouses, parents, grandparents, close friends, and children.

Much of the existing research on this topic focuses on queer grief as disenfranchised (i.e., not socially recognized). To be clear, this is important. At the same time, the stories we are hearing are as much about the normalcy and ubiquity of queer lives, relationships, and grief. Centering such stories is always important, and especially in the current political moment, as LGBTQ+ people are, once again, having to increasingly defend their rights to exist.

Here are a few examples:

A trans woman whose adult son was killed in an accident describes him coming to stand by her bed, in the middle of the night, when he was a child. She remembers holding his body, drenched in sweat, after a middle-of-the-night panic attack.

A gay man continues to live in the home he shared with his husband and finds the nights especially hard. He misses the playful routine they shared at bedtime.

A woman whose romantic partner is another woman (she does not like labels), tells us about her grandfather. He died many years ago, when she was a teenager. At home in India, his favourite fruit was mangos. Whenever she eats one, she thinks of him.

Queering grief

In a recent article about grief literacy and the Netflix show Queer Eye  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13576275.2024.2434467 , Susan Cadell and I wrote that:

“By centering the perspectives of characters who are queer, [Queer Eye] invites us to queer dominant and normative conceptualisations of grief. The word queer here is not just an adjective that describes identity, it is also a verb that describes a process of subverting norms and normativities.”

From our perspective, in addition to the value of centering queer peoples’ stories about their lives, there is also much to queer about how we understand grief itself.

A man whose husband died of cancer put it to us this way:

“People are uncomfortable being with someone who is in pain. And somebody will say, “He was 79, he had a good life.” He would have had a better life if he hadn’t died of cancer. I don't get mad or anything. But that’s something that has impacted my ability to socialize. To be in places where there is casual conversation. I used to enjoy that. I don’t, anymore. “Did you get over it yet?” No, I’m not going to get over it. It’s a wound that is going to stay. I think I’m learning to accept that. I appreciate when people say: this is shit. This is a shitty time in my life. I really appreciate that. It’s honest. And it’s exactly the way I feel.“

The passage above will be familiar to anyone, queer or not, who has felt pressure to contend with social norms around grief and grief expression. For those of us who are queer, this is a very familiar feeling. We know all too well the absurdity – and harm – of expecting that we conform to other peoples’ ideas about how to live our lives, lest we be labelled as pathological. Perhaps for this reason, and as in the passage above, participants in our study are clear in their rejection of dominant social norms about grief, that do not fit their lived experience.

In this way, LGBTQ+ stories of death-related grief are a powerful resource in challenging misguided understandings of grief, which are ultimately harming us all. Queer stories of death-related grief are a vital contribution to a social movement that casts away social and medical expectations about how anyone should grieve, toward radical acceptance for whatever someone’s grief is, for them. The collective freedom that such a movement promises will benefit us all, queer and non-queer alike.