Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 6
July 23, 2021
July 8, 2021
Guerrilla Cenotaphs: Dignifying Life, Death, and Memory
Photography aggregator blogs – sites dedicated to curating themed, oft-uncredited photography – have breathed novel aesthetic appeal into the concept of “liminal space”: places haunted not by death but by the hazy feeling of a 2 A.M. layover, the mystique of being neither here nor there. It’s a comfortable sort of haunting. These spaces are precisely as conditioned as they need be for you to cross them. Though the hotel hallway may be anxiety-inducing in length and repetition, you don’t expect to die here, because you don’t live here. No one does.
As braving the desert unshielded is pernicious, so is Mexicali, Mexico almost liminal. There are few parks, but many roads. Some of this is the semi-accidental result of sloppy central planning. Some, the careless cruelty of capital hoarding–dusty, trashed vacant lots waiting to be sold for a profit. Another structure is the intentional imposition of liminality onto a place where people live. Mexicali ends at the American border wall, a behemoth of steel and barbed wire, an invitation rejected: here is a crossing, but you’d best not even try.
This border wall is lethal by design. On one side, one risks death by falling from its twelve-ish meter drop, while on the other side, a massive, foreboding gash of desert which comes with the tacit understanding that exposure will deal with those that avoid capture. Securing the body of a loved one that died crossing the border is a transactional nightmare, if not a honeypot: with Border Patrol itself taking missing person reports, undocumented immigrants reporting their missing loved ones face potential deportation. Corpses and the individuals behind them are reduced to statistics. More than liminal, the border is arid: it rejects life to the point of resenting death. Death is the admission that life once took root here, that “KEEP OUT” signs and the Border Patrol are not impermeable.
The USA is not the only arid side of the border. The influx of South American immigrants to Mexicali elicited an opposing wave of protests against the creation of refugee shelters. Deserts spread as we replicate America’s rejection onto our own immigrants.
There is an old Spanish joke about being so broke that you cannot afford to drop dead, that still rings true. Mexicali’s largest funeral firm offers, at cheapest, cremation funerals at around 14 thousand pesos, or three months’ worth of labor in the maquiladoras that make up the bulk of Mexicali’s economy. This basic service does not include niche maintenance, and immigrants are often homeless.
America’s statistics dehumanize the dead, while Mexico plays accomplice by not accounting for immigrant deaths on our side of the border. Both governments refuse to hold the responsibility of dignifying death, since recognizing the dead means recognizing the uncomfortable presence of struggling life. This responsibility then falls upon the grieving, who need to assert their loved ones’ crossing over, and their humanity.
For almost as long as the border wall has existed, it has featured nameless crosses: two planks of wood, usually white, as simple as a memorial can get. Forbidden from crossing the border to retrieve their relatives’ bodies, often unsure whether or not their relative has passed at all, families and anonymous mourners hang their crosses on the wall itself. It is a reclamation of a space that would be otherwise barren of life’s evidence – that would, as evidenced by the deliberately unmaintained stretch of burning desert on the American side, prefer not to enable life whatsoever.
While Tijuana’s immigrant support communities band together every few years for a striking installment of white crosses, Mexicali is poorer; with transportation in the overlong summer proving to be exhausting, and large gatherings physically difficult to sustain. As a result, our crosses are ephemeral. Without the enduring power of mass visibility, they are taken down as soon as they are put up. The biggest loss took place around 2018, when efforts to remodel the border wall according to president Trump’s mandate began. With the removal of the former wall also went a small row of white crosses, most of them bearing the label “UNIDENTIFIED”. I’ve found no surviving pictures of this era.
Memorializing the unidentified is more than a symbolic act for a city that contends so much with the physicality of anonymous death. Mexicali’s unidentified corpses – the undocumented, the homeless, and those taken by cartel violence – signify a forensic emergency: in 2019, over 150 Mexicalian bodies went unidentified.
Spirituality for so many deaths must also transcend specific faiths. Jesus’ cross carries its imperial implications, and Mexico has been majority Catholic since its colonization. But these crosses share space on the border with rows of street merchandise, statuettes of Budai popularized by the founding Chinese community, clay sculptures of Santa Muerte: all faiths shunned from funerals, homes of eucharist bread and stained glass. On the border, the cross is universal, a symbol of an international struggle for the right to die well, in the face of a colony whose impositions have somewhat done away with religion, but cling to alienation and destitution.
Not all anonymous crosses are in Mexicali itself. The Rumorosa, the sinuous mountain rising at the city’s west, has its own border wall, and its own toll of migrants, hoping to elude the city’s dense police presence. The Rumorosa’s highway is one of México’s most dangerous. Traversing the mountain path, it’s impossible to tell the crosses memorializing migrants apart from those memorializing road accidents. Perched on an outcropping is a temple full of graffiti and unnamed offerings to one of Mexico’s most popular saints: Judas Thaddeus, the saint of the impossible.
Placement of the anonymous cross is a political act. It calls attention to both the circumstances of the death itself, and to the necessity of fixing the forensic system of two nations at once. Just as saliently, though, it is a spiritual act. Regardless of who erects it, the anonymous cross is an act of mourning for a city permanently bereaved. When a death cannot settle in the body, it spreads across its community. Anonymous crosses are the only way in which to release the grief trapped in a border city: democratic by imposition, dedicated only to the mourned.
After a long four years of fearmongering accusations from the American government, the illusion of the border’s liminality has been broken. The world now knows that people are born here, arrive to stay and live here. So long as the arid machinery of immigration continues its desertification, the anonymous cross will continue to reappear. The practice of communal mourning for those who cannot be grieved by name is a denial of the dehumanization the border imposes on us. Every anonymous cross is a reminder, as much to ourselves as to the colonial system, that no death can be reduced to a statistic.
Guerrilla Cenotaphs: Dignifying Life, Death, and Memory
Photography aggregator blogs – sites dedicated to curating themed, oft-uncredited photography – have breathed novel aesthetic appeal into the concept of “liminal space”: places haunted not by death but by the hazy feeling of a 2 A.M. layover, the mystique of being neither here nor there. It’s a comfortable sort of haunting. These spaces are precisely as conditioned as they need be for you to cross them. Though the hotel hallway may be anxiety-inducing in length and repetition, you don’t expect to die here, because you don’t live here. No one does.
As braving the desert unshielded is pernicious, so is Mexicali, Mexico almost liminal. There are few parks, but many roads. Some of this is the semi-accidental result of sloppy central planning. Some, the careless cruelty of capital hoarding–dusty, trashed vacant lots waiting to be sold for a profit. Another structure is the intentional imposition of liminality onto a place where people live. Mexicali ends at the American border wall, a behemoth of steel and barbed wire, an invitation rejected: here is a crossing, but you’d best not even try.
This border wall is lethal by design. On one side, one risks death by falling from its twelve-ish meter drop, while on the other side, a massive, foreboding gash of desert which comes with the tacit understanding that exposure will deal with those that avoid capture. Securing the body of a loved one that died crossing the border is a transactional nightmare, if not a honeypot: with Border Patrol itself taking missing person reports, undocumented immigrants reporting their missing loved ones face potential deportation. Corpses and the individuals behind them are reduced to statistics. More than liminal, the border is arid: it rejects life to the point of resenting death. Death is the admission that life once took root here, that “KEEP OUT” signs and the Border Patrol are not impermeable.
The USA is not the only arid side of the border. The influx of South American immigrants to Mexicali elicited an opposing wave of protests against the creation of refugee shelters. Deserts spread as we replicate America’s rejection onto our own immigrants.
Photo by Guillermo Arias
There is an old Spanish joke about being so broke that you cannot afford to drop dead, that still rings true. Mexicali’s largest funeral firm offers, at cheapest, cremation funerals at around 14 thousand pesos, or three months’ worth of labor in the maquiladoras that make up the bulk of Mexicali’s economy. This basic service does not include niche maintenance, and immigrants are often homeless.
America’s statistics dehumanize the dead, while Mexico plays accomplice by not accounting for immigrant deaths on our side of the border. Both governments refuse to hold the responsibility of dignifying death, since recognizing the dead means recognizing the uncomfortable presence of struggling life. This responsibility then falls upon the grieving, who need to assert their loved ones’ crossing over, and their humanity.
For almost as long as the border wall has existed, it has featured nameless crosses: two planks of wood, usually white, as simple as a memorial can get. Forbidden from crossing the border to retrieve their relatives’ bodies, often unsure whether or not their relative has passed at all, families and anonymous mourners hang their crosses on the wall itself. It is a reclamation of a space that would be otherwise barren of life’s evidence – that would, as evidenced by the deliberately unmaintained stretch of burning desert on the American side, prefer not to enable life whatsoever.
While Tijuana’s immigrant support communities band together every few years for a striking installment of white crosses, Mexicali is poorer; with transportation in the overlong summer proving to be exhausting, and large gatherings physically difficult to sustain. As a result, our crosses are ephemeral. Without the enduring power of mass visibility, they are taken down as soon as they are put up. The biggest loss took place around 2018, when efforts to remodel the border wall according to president Trump’s mandate began. With the removal of the former wall also went a small row of white crosses, most of them bearing the label “UNIDENTIFIED”. I’ve found no surviving pictures of this era.
Memorializing the unidentified is more than a symbolic act for a city that contends so much with the physicality of anonymous death. Mexicali’s unidentified corpses – the undocumented, the homeless, and those taken by cartel violence – signify a forensic emergency: in 2019, over 150 Mexicalian bodies went unidentified.
Spirituality for so many deaths must also transcend specific faiths. Jesus’ cross carries its imperial implications, and Mexico has been majority Catholic since its colonization. But these crosses share space on the border with rows of street merchandise, statuettes of Budai popularized by the founding Chinese community, clay sculptures of Santa Muerte: all faiths shunned from funerals, homes of eucharist bread and stained glass. On the border, the cross is universal, a symbol of an international struggle for the right to die well, in the face of a colony whose impositions have somewhat done away with religion, but cling to alienation and destitution.
Image via altares y tributos
Not all anonymous crosses are in Mexicali itself. The Rumorosa, the sinuous mountain rising at the city’s west, has its own border wall, and its own toll of migrants, hoping to elude the city’s dense police presence. The Rumorosa’s highway is one of México’s most dangerous. Traversing the mountain path, it’s impossible to tell the crosses memorializing migrants apart from those memorializing road accidents. Perched on an outcropping is a temple full of graffiti and unnamed offerings to one of Mexico’s most popular saints: Judas Thaddeus, the saint of the impossible.
Placement of the anonymous cross is a political act. It calls attention to both the circumstances of the death itself, and to the necessity of fixing the forensic system of two nations at once. Just as saliently, though, it is a spiritual act. Regardless of who erects it, the anonymous cross is an act of mourning for a city permanently bereaved. When a death cannot settle in the body, it spreads across its community. Anonymous crosses are the only way in which to release the grief trapped in a border city: democratic by imposition, dedicated only to the mourned.
Image via altares y tributos
After a long four years of fearmongering accusations from the American government, the illusion of the border’s liminality has been broken. The world now knows that people are born here, arrive to stay and live here. So long as the arid machinery of immigration continues its desertification, the anonymous cross will continue to reappear. The practice of communal mourning for those who cannot be grieved by name is a denial of the dehumanization the border imposes on us. Every anonymous cross is a reminder, as much to ourselves as to the colonial system, that no death can be reduced to a statistic.
All photographs by author unless noted otherwise.
Julia Norza is interested in borders: between countries, genders and minds. First-hand witnesses have described her work being featured in The Order Of The Good Death, An Injustice! Magazine, and Deconreconstruction.
June 29, 2021
June 24, 2021
They’ll Think of Me Kindly When They Come For My Things: On Transness and Death
There are few truths that hold universal: death, taxes, and cisgender people asking me, “is that your real name?” As transgender people, we learn to live with these experiences as we traverse life on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes death weighs heavy on the mind. Death comes for us all, cis and trans, and we don’t get a say on when the reaper takes us. As a habitual planner, I’m terrified I’ll die before roller derby starts again. I lay awake at night, tossing and turning until I inevitably reach for my phone.
I make the common mistake of logging on to Twitter and reading the replies. Trans people are acutely aware of the dog whistles about trans death, we hear them all the time. It gets to the point where seeing “41%” and it causes you to flinch. This number is a reference to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey showing that out of 6,450 respondents, 41% had attempted suicide. What happens when trans people openly talk about death and their plans around their death?
Gender Spectrum Collection, Photo by Zackary Drucker
I decided to answer this question by interviewing my transgender peers about how they envisioned their death plans. As a casual opener, I asked if they had a death plan and if so, if would they share it with me?
One peer, who elected to stay anonymous (they/them), told me that they would be buried in the “Arab religious and cultural practice” due to their personal respect for the traditions and their family. They went on to say that thinking about death was stressful, a reminder that they may not accomplish all they want to in life. This is a commonly held belief, we live in a perpetual states of FOMO once we kick the proverbial bucket. When asked about their relationship to death and being trans, they explained, “Certainly, the relationship that many trans people have with their body influences their metaphysical and existential perspectives, how they see themselves” and how one hates or loves themselves. They believe that they do not differ greatly from the general population is this regard.
Another peer, Nadine (she/her, xe/xir), told me about how she was electing to be cremated after her death. When asked about why cremation appealed to xir, xe responded with, “I like the idea of me taking care of this body and making it what I want to be and once I’m done with it, it promptly being destroyed. It’s like this body isn’t permanent so I’ll do with it what I want.”
Gender Spectrum Collection, Photo by Zackary Drucker
Cremation is growing in popularity amongst the general public in recent years, especially combined with a memorial service. Nadine also described her memorials service as filled with as many pictures of xir as possible then having xir ashes spread in North Carolina where she went as a child. Transgender people live in an awkward in-between of being expected to change their bodies while being legislated out of it. This can be seen with the recent wave of anti-trans bills sweeping the nation preventing children from going on hormones or playing on sports teams that fit their gender, but trans people are expected to shape their bodies to cisgender ideals of beauty and functionality. Taking back that control is a final statement of rebellion against the systems that tell us we have to be what we are not.
Sophia (she/her) had a similar plan with cremation and a small family/friends memorial service afterwards. It is important to her was that there will be no church involved in her memorial or cremation. We share that in common in our death plans, as I also do not want a church involved in my burial. As a child I tried to fit in with the Greek Orthodox Church, but after coming out as queer and trans, it did not welcome me. Sophia does not believe that transgender people experience death differently. She states, “I think we’re all afraid of death to some degree. Some of us just live more than others and aren’t as afraid for it to be over.”
Some people were approaching death in a legal manner like Alexander Nature (they/he). Alexander began their death plan in middle school but now, through the website Cake, was updating it and getting it notarized so it becomes a legal document. He described his friends as not surprised at his proactive approach to his death because of who he is as a person. Death planning is a way to take control of your body posthumously and prevent further trauma and frustration. They believe that, “people approach death in a way that makes no sense to me, and I think people should talk about it more directly more frequently.”
Another person using Cake is Callie Wright (they/them). They described having their plan as “making things as easy and comfortable for my loved ones as possible.” Death plans can be viewed as a final gift to loved ones, providing answers to the hard questions with a simple form and a deeper impact. Callie believes that trans people have a different relationship to death, “all but the absolute most privileged among us has had to consider the possibility that we could be attacked, hurt, or killed because of who we are. Further, we have to consider the possibility we could be refused medical care for every day things because of being trans.” They go on to state that this threat is easily multiplied for other trans people with other marginalized identities.
Talking to my peers was eye-opening. While I strive to be death positive and an eternal student, I had not known the plans of others for their deaths. No one could agree if being transgender gave us a different perspective on death which speaks to the fact that transness is not a monolith, we do not experience the world the same. I also saw people celebrating their lives through photos, planning, and family gatherings. Being transgender is a beautiful thing, what makes it suck is how we are treated. Personally, I want my funeral to close with Mitski’s Last Words of a Shooting Star as a final goodbye. I always felt that music could best express my gender and I hope this is a final reminder of who I am, or was.
All of this turbulence wasn’t forecasted
Apologies from the intercom
And I am relieved that I’d left my room tidy
They’ll think of me kindly
When they come for my things
-Mitski, Last Words of a Shooting Star
They’ll Think of Me Kindly When They Come for My Things: On Transness and Death
There are few truths that hold universal: death, taxes, and cisgender people asking me, “is that your real name?” As transgender people, we learn to live with these experiences as we traverse life on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes death weighs heavy on the mind. Death comes for us all, cis and trans, and we don’t get a say on when the reaper takes us. As a habitual planner, I’m terrified I’ll die before roller derby starts again. I lay awake at night, tossing and turning until I inevitably reach for my phone.
I make the common mistake of logging on to Twitter and reading the replies. Trans people are acutely aware of the dog whistles about trans death, we hear them all the time. It gets to the point where seeing “41%” and it causes you to flinch. This number is a reference to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey showing that out of 6,450 respondents, 41% had attempted suicide. What happens when trans people openly talk about death and their plans around their death?
Gender Spectrum Collection, Photo by Zackary Drucker
I decided to answer this question by interviewing my transgender peers about how they envisioned their death plans. As a casual opener, I asked if they had a death plan and if so, if would they share it with me?
One peer, who elected to stay anonymous (they/them), told me that they would be buried in the “Arab religious and cultural practice” due to their personal respect for the traditions and their family. They went on to say that thinking about death was stressful, a reminder that they may not accomplish all they want to in life. This is a commonly held belief, we live in a perpetual states of FOMO once we kick the proverbial bucket. When asked about their relationship to death and being trans, they explained, “Certainly, the relationship that many trans people have with their body influences their metaphysical and existential perspectives, how they see themselves” and how one hates or loves themselves. They believe that they do not differ greatly from the general population is this regard.
Another peer, Nadine (she/her, xe/xir), told me about how she was electing to be cremated after her death. When asked about why cremation appealed to xir, xe responded with, “I like the idea of me taking care of this body and making it what I want to be and once I’m done with it, it promptly being destroyed. It’s like this body isn’t permanent so I’ll do with it what I want.”
Gender Spectrum Collection, Photo by Zackary Drucker
Cremation is growing in popularity amongst the general public in recent years, especially combined with a memorial service. Nadine also described her memorials service as filled with as many pictures of xir as possible then having xir ashes spread in North Carolina where she went as a child. Transgender people live in an awkward in-between of being expected to change their bodies while being legislated out of it. This can be seen with the recent wave of anti-trans bills sweeping the nation preventing children from going on hormones or playing on sports teams that fit their gender, but trans people are expected to shape their bodies to cisgender ideals of beauty and functionality. Taking back that control is a final statement of rebellion against the systems that tell us we have to be what we are not.
Sophia (she/her) had a similar plan with cremation and a small family/friends memorial service afterwards. It is important to her was that there will be no church involved in her memorial or cremation. We share that in common in our death plans, as I also do not want a church involved in my burial. As a child I tried to fit in with the Greek Orthodox Church, but after coming out as queer and trans, it did not welcome me. Sophia does not believe that transgender people experience death differently. She states, “I think we’re all afraid of death to some degree. Some of us just live more than others and aren’t as afraid for it to be over.”
Some people were approaching death in a legal manner like Alexander Nature (they/he). Alexander began their death plan in middle school but now, through the website Cake, was updating it and getting it notarized so it becomes a legal document. He described his friends as not surprised at his proactive approach to his death because of who he is as a person. Death planning is a way to take control of your body posthumously and prevent further trauma and frustration. They believe that, “people approach death in a way that makes no sense to me, and I think people should talk about it more directly more frequently.”
Another person using Cake is Callie Wright (they/them). They described having their plan as “making things as easy and comfortable for my loved ones as possible.” Death plans can be viewed as a final gift to loved ones, providing answers to the hard questions with a simple form and a deeper impact. Callie believes that trans people have a different relationship to death, “all but the absolute most privileged among us has had to consider the possibility that we could be attacked, hurt, or killed because of who we are. Further, we have to consider the possibility we could be refused medical care for every day things because of being trans.” They go on to state that this threat is easily multiplied for other trans people with other marginalized identities.
All of this turbulence wasn’t forecasted
Apologies from the intercom
And I am relieved that I’d left my room tidy
They’ll think of me kindly
When they come for my things
-Mitski, Last Words of a Shooting Star
Talking to my peers was eye-opening. While I strive to be death positive and an eternal student, I had not known the plans of others for their deaths. No one could agree if being transgender gave us a different perspective on death which speaks to the fact that transness is not a monolith, we do not experience the world the same. I also saw people celebrating their lives through photos, planning, and family gatherings. Being transgender is a beautiful thing, what makes it suck is how we are treated. Personally, I want my funeral to close with Mitski’s Last Words of a Shooting Star as a final goodbye. I always felt that music could best express my gender and I hope this is a final reminder fo who I am, or was.
Kitty Perentesis (they/them) is a non-binary writer entering mortuary school in the fall. When they’re not talking about death, you can find them playing roller derby or cuddling with their cats. Find them being cute on Instagram @derbybrat.
They’ll Think of Me Kindly When They Come for My Things: On Transness and Death
June 23, 2021
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