Chapter Thirty-Six: I Fucking Hate Westerville

Apparently almost everyone who was in the glee club at Kurt's old high school the year that they won Nationals makes it a tradition to meet up in Lima every Christmas Eve to go caroling around the town, and I go with them today for a lack of anything better to do.

We meet everyone in a coffee shop down the street from McKinley High School, and Kurt introduces me as his roommate, Blaine. I don't recognise many of the faces despite competing against them constantly in high school, but they all seem to remember me.

"Wow. Blaine Warbler." A blonde guy says. "You kicked our asses at Regionals senior year. I don't know if I can speak to you."

Kurt says, "Since they won Nationals the year after us, I figured it would be safe to invite him caroling too."

"But I thought we'd agreed that this was our sacred time. Just us. Like old times." A blonde girl gives me an apologetic look as she says it.

I look out the window, uncomfortable.

"Well," says Rachel fairly, "I mean, he was a part of the show choir experience, right? The competition. So it must count."

There's a cemetery across the street from the coffee shop, paths twisting through the snow to gravestones here and there.

"I mean, we're not gunna send him away. I'm just saying. This is our time. To remember us."

I look at Kurt, who whispers, "Don't listen to Quinn. You're welcome here."

Still looking out at the cemetery, I say, "You know what? Maybe I should go. You should catch up with your friends. I'll… find something else to do."

He raises his eyebrows. "Like what?"

I shrug. "I'll think of something."

Giving me a shrewd look, he asks, "Do you want to borrow my car?"

My stomach drops a little. "Would you trust me with it alone?"

Shrugging, Kurt says, "Not really. But I think you know where you want to go, and I don't think that it's in Lima."

I give him a guilty look and almost change my mind. But he presses his keys into my hand, and says, "Just be careful."

And so the next thing I know, I'm halfway to Westerville, clutching Kurt's steering wheel and wondering if I've lost my mind.

I couldn't have gone caroling anyway. Christmas music depresses me, and I'm not sure I have it in me to perform even in a large group like that just yet.

When my father forbid me from attending my mother's funeral, he robbed me of a very important part of the grieving process. There's a reason that centuries of human societies have built ritual and ceremony around putting a body to rest. Funerals funnel the shock, denial and confusion of bereavement into a structured and a formal goodbye in the company of other grievers, facilitating acceptance and laying any doubts about the reality of the loss to rest along with the body.

I never got to do that. I was alone in another city, left with only the obituary on the church website as proof that what I was going through was real. I don't know if I'd have gotten closure if I had been at that funeral, but I know that having not gone, I've never felt like closure was possible. Life just sort of stopped happening, and I had nobody around me to make any of it seem real.

I don't even know where my mother was buried.

But I know where my grandparents were buried, and I park Kurt's car in the parking lot beside that cemetery.

It's strange being in Westerville again. Strange, uncomfortable, and surreal. The buildings are the same, the roads are the same, and everything is attached to some stupid memory, but the people and the lives occurring inside this town no longer mean anything to me. I just don't care about any of it.

I didn't have a terrible childhood. My mother had very wealthy parents who she inherited a lot of money from. We were always affluent, and I was raised to be grateful for that blessing. My parents were strict and religious, but they were never malicious or abusive. I resented being pushed into church activities and put on a display as a living, breathing, musical prayer machine, but I always had food to eat and a roof over my head. My parents were engaged in my life, and made an effort to be excellent parents. I know that there are a lot of people who can't say that they were that lucky.

Still, I knew from a very young age that I was gay, and I knew from that same very young age that being gay was something that my parents could never find out about. They loved me and I loved them, but being gay just wasn't something that was every going to be okay in our family. I endured so much bullying at school that having to pretend to be what I wasn't once I got home made me miserable.

So I hated Westerville with a burning passion from the time I was about eleven years old. I always figured that if I could just get out of that town, I could finally become the person I was really supposed to be. And then, after I ended up at Dalton and I was independent and popular and theoretically able to be whatever I wanted to be anyway, leaving town become less about escaping the things I hated as chasing the things I was addicted to: fame, performance, narcotics…

Basically, leaving Westerville was always supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to me, but now that I'm back here, I'm finding it hard to tell if my life ever really got any better since I've been gone.

I think it probably has, but not before it got significantly worse.

But that might be more about growing up than leaving here.

At any rate, it feels a little gross to be back. I fucking hate Westerville, but I think that this is something I have to do.

There are already footsteps in the snow leading down the row of graves where I know my grandparents are buried, and I follow them to avoid getting snow in my shoes.

I see my mom's dad's name on a headstone and I stare at it for a long time, too afraid to look at the headstone beside it, where the footsteps I'm following in end.

I remember my grandpa's funeral, but I'm not going to think about that right now. I have to concentrate on the task at hand.

I have a weird and almost disgusted feeling that the footprints I've been mirroring might have been my father's. But if he couldn't forgive me for the sin of homosexuality, could he really forgive her for suicide?

But then again, do you have to forgive someone to visit their grave?

I take two more steps and turn toward the headstone that I know will be my mom's.

And by the time I've stopped crying, the snow on the ground where I'm sitting has half-melted and then refrozen into a hard and uncomfortable disk of freezing cold ice.

Christine Anderson. 1963 to 2015. The Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent, one from the other. Genesis 31:49

I wonder where my father and my brother are right now. Do they still speak to each other? Do they ever talk about me? Do they ever think about me? How have they coped with losing Mom? Does Dad still really think that punishing me for my sins is worth sacrificing so much for? Does Cooper blame me for the loss of Mom? Do either of them ever wonder if we can ever be a family again? Or is way too late for that already.

I've used to wonder a lot about my mother's reasons for doing what she did, and sometimes I think I understand, and other times I'm just angry and confused. Lately, I've given up even thinking about it. I can't think too much about it without feeling extremely guilty.

My mom lost everything when the whole town found out I was gay. And by everything I don't just mean her job and her relationship with her husband. I don't just mean the respect of her friends, and the welcome in her community. The belief system that defined everything about her life was stolen from her. In my mother's world, homosexuality was an unforgivable sin, and when she had to forgive me for it, that world of black and white religious law that she'd grown up with and built her life around started to crumble. She lost her sense of conviction and her sense of self. Her faith in God never wavered, but the way she approached faith and religion had to change, and for someone who once lived by such rigid beliefs, that isn't easy. It broke her.

And since her congregation fired her, her friends shunned her, her husband hated her, her volunteer projects closed their doors to her help, and the whole world just shut her out, she didn't have a lot of options for healing. My mom had lived her life inside a tiny community of very religious people, and once they cut her out and she was forced to confront the real world, she couldn't handle it.

I have no way of knowing what would have happened to my mother if I hadn't been gay, but I do know that my sexuality and everything that resulted from it was at the root of my mother's depression and suicide. I can't find a way to make that not true. What happened to her was my fault. I didn't choose to be gay, and I didn't choose to be beaten up and ruin my mother's life, but that's the way life happened, and no matter how rational I try to be, I can't stop blaming myself for everything.

Still, being right here, in Westerville, sobbing over her grave, somehow erases this feeling of unfinished business that I have about my mom. It's all very very real. It's all very painful and very confusing, but it feels complete for the first time. I might never find peace with my mother's loss, but sitting here in the freezing cold in the snow makes me feel like maybe I can compartmentalize it a little better. I can accept it a little better. Maybe I can understand it a little better.

Or maybe pop culture has just taught me to expect closure from graveside visits, and so I'm forcing myself to find some. Maybe fulfilling a cliché is comforting even if it is meaningless. Maybe I just needed to give myself permission to really and truly feel my loss, and being here in Westerville at her grave is what it took to let that happen.

The only thing that I know for sure is that I miss my mother. Twenty-two is still young enough to be allowed to think that losing a parent isn't fair, right?