My Aunt Rachel

I had two aunts when I was a kid: Edie and Rachel. Edie was my father’s older sister; she was, among other things, a playwright. Rachel was a writer too — of novels, short stories, and (coolest of all) comic books. I don’t remember how I understood their relationship, or if I even understood what marriage was for most of the time I knew them. I just knew they were always together: Edie and Rachel. Rachel and Edie. Like cream cheese and jelly on matzo.

Once, in my grandparents’ living room on Long Island, I fished a cream-colored photo album out of an end table. It was a wedding album, of Edie and a man I’d never heard of. “Who’s that guy? Whatever happened to him?” I asked my parents. As I remember, they looked at each other and said something along the lines of: “It’s a long story.” But I got the story soon enough, and it didn’t turn out to be long at all. The person in the photos was my Aunt Rachel. She had transitioned sometime before I was born.

I don’t know how I processed that information at first. It was the ’80s. The only use of “trans” I’d heard was in relation to Optimus Prime. But whatever I thought about it, that detail of Rachel’s past changed nothing about our relationship. We kept hanging out, celebrating holidays, and going to Jones Beach. I named one of my teddy bears after her. When I began showing interest in writing, Rachel started coming to me with little prompts. She seemed particularly interested in tarot cards: she’d lay out a few and encourage me to come up with a story about the characters. By the time I was a teenager, Edie and Rachel’s marriage had ended, and my father and his sister grew apart for unrelated reasons. I haven’t seen either of my aunts since.

It was not until decades later that I learned other people knew who my Aunt Rachel was. A lot of other people, in fact. The first hint I got of this was when I moved in with my then-girlfriend (now wife) and saw she had one of Rachel’s books on her shelf — The Haindl Tarot, I think it was. In the years since, as I saw Rachel’s name pop up in more and more spaces, I always intended to try to get in touch with her, see how she was doing, and tell her I had indeed become a writer too. But I didn’t do it in time. Late last week — the day before my birthday, in fact — Rachel Pollack died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was 77.

Reading Rachel’s obituaries was another eye-opening experience. I had not realized how incredibly prolific she was. She wrote twenty-two works of nonfiction, seven novels, a bunch of short stories, and several D.C. Comics titles including New Gods and Doom Patrol. (She also invented a new Vertigo comics-inspired tarot deck.) I didn’t know she created the first openly trans superhero in mainstream comics: Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, of Doom Patrol. I didn’t know that she, and my other aunt, had been involved in the short-lived U.K. Gay Liberation Front. Or that Rachel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for one of her science fiction novels in 1989 or the World Fantasy Award for another novel in 1997.

And I didn’t know that Rachel had been close friends with Neil Gaiman, the renowned graphic novelist and screenwriter, who provided the Guardian with hands-down the best anecdote of any of the obits I saw:

Looking back, there are at least two ways to tell the story of my, and my family’s, relationship with my Aunt Rachel. One is as a story of pride: That, as trans people have found themselves forced into the center of Anglo-American politics over the last few years, and as right-wing rhetoric about them becomes more overtly genocidal, it is worth noting that a middle-class, politically liberal but not at all radical family simply accepted a family member’s outward change in gender identity over four decades — using her preferred pronouns, or introducing her as an aunt, wife, or daughter-in-law, depending on who was talking.

And to that point, it’s also worth noting that this level of acceptance was shown by her in-laws — my grandparents — a pair of dyed-in-the-wool Roosevelt Democrats, the son and daughter of Eastern European immigrants, born in 1919 and 1920 respectively. I could also add that the fact that I grew up with an openly trans aunt and the applied knowledge that gender is neither binary nor a fixed category had no ill effects on my mental health, nor any sort of crippling contact-confusion about my own gender identity — or whatever transphobes think happens when a child learns that trans people exist.

But at the same time, I have to admit that there was an undeniable apprehension for decades about sharing with others the fact that a member of our family was trans. I could blame the societal stigma. Or say that our reticence was out of a justifiable fear of transphobes or bigotry in general. But that would be hiding an important part of the truth. Because the truth was that we shared, to some extent, the view that there was something weird — or at least uncomfortable — in my aunt’s backstory. And that for far too long we acted as if it was dirty laundry not to be aired in public.

And so, even as transness began to take on more general societal acceptance, and the fact that one of my aunts had been raised as if she were male ceased to be even a potential source of social shame, I just never bothered talking about my aunt much. Which is probably why I did not realize until it was too late that one of my aunts was a world-class writer whom I’d have been honored to learn from and talk shop with, not to mention a simply fascinating human being whom I should have gotten to know as an adult. That is what gets lost when we withhold from someone our full, unconditional love — and our fullest appreciation of their humanity — in the short time we have together.