I keep coming back to this.
Nero is gone.
We trans folks are a broken people. It starts with the schism between our bodies and our minds. And the inability of society, friends, and family to accept us. Indeed, for us to even accept ourselves. We spend our lives in darkness and depression. Drugs, alcohol and other various addictions are our only way of dealing with the pain.
This is not news to you. You others on this list trying to cope in some way with your own darkness. You feel trapped and, in many cases, without hope. How many times have you been to the edge? How many times have you thought seriously, incessantly, of oblivion being the better alternative to a life of torture? Our suicidal ideations and actions are not cries for help, but serious, deliberate need to be gone.
We have all gone to the edge of the abyss and looked over, feeling that taking that one step would cure all our woes.
And even those of us, who through supreme effort, triumph over seemingly insurmountable obstacles, still can faintly hear the Siren's call. To say "->-bleeped-<- you!" to the world. To take the most selfish step of all. To deprive the world of their presence.
Nero succumbed to that call. Because at the very bottom of it all, the schism is never really healed.
We will never be given the life we should have had. The experiences, the opportunities, the absolute and ->-bleeped-<-ing NORMAL life we have been deprived of by a precocious and uncaring universe. We can never father or birth children. Or have any of the experiences growing up as we should have been. We can only, at best, make do. Change our lives as much as we can and try to convince ourselves that that is good enough. For that is all it will ever be.
And, even though times are changing and it is immensely easier and better for us to be accepted by society and to change our bodies and our lives, it is still a cruelly humiliating process. We have to prove what is unprovable but we know to be true to our very core. We are because we say we are.
I have known Nero from my earliest days here. To me he was a core facet of the magic that is Susan's. That magic is lessened with his passing.
I know no better eulogy for this man, than to say, he enriched us all.
