Personal Narrative: A Mother's Death?

It was just a few days before the start of sophomore year and everything seemed splendid. I was enthusiastic to be one year closer to graduation and seeing all my friends that I hadn’t seen all summer. But little did I know, that life was about to become weird, confusing, and awkward. That day is not a day that I will forget anytime soon. My mom sat us down, said she had to tell us something. I thought she was going to tell us that someone had died. Turns out someone did die, in a sense. Uncle Roger had decided that he was a woman stuck in a man’s body and he was finally, at the age of sixty-five, going to do something about it. My uncle had died and in his place was a woman named Antarie.
At first I couldn’t comprehend what my mom was telling me, she was crying so much. She read us the e-mail that he had sent out to the whole family. He expressed how he had felt this way since he was a child, but growing up in the fifties, his parents frowned upon him wanting to dress like a woman. He joined the Navy to try to prove to them that he was a man and when he got out of the military he became a firefighter. He talked about how he tried to prove to himself that he was a man, but he couldn’t battle with himself anymore. When I finally processed what she was saying, all I could think about was my aunt and how difficult this must be for her. She claims that she still loves him, but we can’t help but think she is miserable. Before he made this decision to change himself, I admired him. I was interested in talking to him and hearing all his amazing stories from Utah. He always had the best tales. Now I never talk to him. It’s bizarre to me, why he did this. I don’t understand why someone could think that God would put him or her in the wrong body. He wanted to legally change his sex to female, but doing that would void his marriage to my aunt (at that time gay marriage was illegal), which is kind of what we all wanted. My family would rather disown him and move on with our lives. None of my family can fathom why he did this or why he waited so long. At the beginning of the school year, I told my friends what had happened. They sympathized with me and understood that it was a difficult and delicate subject. We talked about it for the first couple days of school and I cried a lot. It was like my uncle had died and this thing had replaced him. I was kind of alright with it at first because I thought I would never have to see him since they lived in Utah, but a few months later we found out that they were moving back to Nebraska. I was going to have to see him at every family gathering instead of a couple times a year when they would visit. The …show more content…
This was just all of a sudden thrown at us and we had no time to prepare for it. My sister and I had a hard time with it and I don’t think my brother truly understood what was going on until we met him as a woman for the first time. It is especially difficult for my dad and grandpa. My whole family has pretty conservative views, but they are taking it the hardest. Maybe it’s because they are kind of the men of the family or just the fact that they don’t accept what he did. My dad doesn’t like going to family functions anymore because he doesn’t want to see him and have to talk to him. I still refer to him as a man because he is. He is just a guy with breast implants. Simply put, he’s just a drag queen.
He’s been a woman now for a couple years. I’m still never fully prepared to see him. I don’t think my family will ever get used to him or forgive him for what he did. I like to think that we have accepted that this is the way things are going to be and that we can’t do anything about it and moved on, but we won’t ever forget what he did to our