Ugh, My Memorial
I’m going to go ahead and say it; my memorial is tacky.
Tacky to me. Ill-considered to those who knew me. Forgettable to passersby.
And that’s who it’s really for, the ambling fools strolling around who never had the chance to meet my fine, smooth hand (the constant lotion, thank you); I’m nothing now but energetic air, yet I still apply my nightly La Mer—rub, rub, rub!
But the plaque leaves out my soft hands and the catch who had ‘em. Yes, the thesis statement of my entire goddamn life says: “Mitchell Trear 1954-1986 – A passionate soul who lived proud and walked tall” – I sound like one of those lifted trucks, used.
I blame my brother. Not the ginger dyslexic, but the one I hate. Ezekiel never could stomach that I was the more handsome version of him, softer nose and shoulders, a more self-assured ease about me, with a gentler-on-the-ears kind of name. It’s not my fault mother and father were in a Seventh-Day Adventist mood when he came scuttling out into the world; those sharp shoulders of his must’ve scarred my mother something fierce…
Thank god when I received my name, they were early adopters of the hippie movement—getting kicked out of stores for stomping in barefoot. Who knows, maybe my parents were just too lazy to peruse the bible for another vowel-loaded name when I came out waltzing, and I mean that sincerely, baby me was a stepper(!), a kicker—so graceful the turning, so learned the moves—I should have been a dancer, you know.
Now as glorified mist, I have trouble remembering why dear old mother and father stuck us with Grandma and never came back to deliver an annual set of rigid hugs to the children they abandoned, but I do remember when it was clear that Grandma had, by force, become the next great thing in parenting. It was my seventh birthday; the theme was Gunsmoke. I donned Chester B. Goode’s exact stiff hat, shirt, and suspenders and everyone was there to revel in it, in me, except, of course, my parents; their bumper scraping against the driveway on the night before, car weighed down by their packed belongings, including Grandma’s prized Hoover vacuum, was all the “unable to attend” they could provide their son and his tidy guest list.
“Oh boy, am I gonna need a bigger house,” Grandma kept joking to any of the party guests, parent or child. Stuck with three young children, Grandma looked like yesterday’s balloon amid the fresher ones taped along the ceiling line and littered across the floor, but not too many that someone might trip—it wasn’t my first time decorating.
What Grandma wanted to say was, “How am I, a working woman in her 50s, supposed to raise three more kids?!”
Though a question answered by her previous decades of proven maternal sacrifice, there was the occasional pleading call to my parents at their new address, her hot breath fogging the receiver: “Please, I beg you, come take your children…The smells oozing off these boys…It’s like rusted tuna on a hot curb!”
But the way Ezekiel tells it, Grandma was a hard woman who often forgot to feed us.
I say, imagine peeling yourself off the factory floor, eyes about to fall out from dragging them up and down a conveyor belt for eight hours, and then going home, always remembering to feed your children—it isn’t easy! Which is why I got good at slapping together PB&Js for myself and for Richard, my ginger brother who couldn’t read a one-item menu in size 72 font—Ezekiel could make his own sandwich at four years older, but he never did (the prick). Instead, he’d lumber over to his friend Burt’s and, with clasped, shaking hands, grovel for food like an infected peasant—my brother the dog!
And that’s how that rat bastard came to oversee my memorial: whining.
“I was his brother—I AM his brother,” Ezekiel had yelled during a tender meeting that my friends, who I consider my actual family, next to Grandma and Richard, held in a Unitarian Church basement, the walls wood-paneled, the sticky, purple Kool-Aid provided.
I know for a fact Ezekiel wasn’t clued in about these meetings but I also know my brother, a painfully heterosexual diva in pleated pants, and his innate ability to sniff out something important with the sole goal of making that something all about him: he didn’t go to school for a month after JFK’s assassination and cried to everyone about the Kent State shootings (“Poor, Kent! The poor guy didn’t have a chance—he was somebody’s son!”)
I find the pairing of idiocy and narcissism a more terrible combination than good cheese with cheap wine or falling bombs and hard surfaces.
Now, it’s not that my friends gave up on my memorial though I will say they didn’t stand on the firmest of legs, those flitting pansies. But. Later. They did hold more-secret meetings in different church basements with organic Tang and doors that locked.
In the end, they decided to let Ezekiel concoct his own hollow tribute while choosing to package their brand of grief into an annual experience—the Mitchell Trear Toast—their bubbly way of saying, “Our poor, dead friend…Tequila or vodka?”
My friends still throw that party, but it’s also now in honor of Michael M., Teacup, George, and Elaine—there are nearly more “watchers,” like myself, these days than there are partiers but isn’t that how this particular cake slices?
Except, of course, there was no cake or ceremony at my “official” memorial. There was no one there at all except for the plaque installer; Ezekiel managed to run off everyone I actually love while he scheduled himself a dental cleaning that morning; to my benefit, it blossomed into a surprise root canal; his darling dentist was not gentle.
I guess when my remaining nearest and dearest join us dead, all that will be left is the tree and the meaningless words on it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine redwood, the sapling Ezekiel bitchily chose now towers as tall as the others. The trunk really filled out—a compliment never bestowed upon my physical form.
The superficial problem that remains is that my plaque and my tree feel hidden away in the park, an incorrect metaphor for Mitchell Trear, as I never lived my life in the back row. I was out and about—a star in the throng—part of a scene with my own decipherable shine.
And when I think of the living taking my falsified summary to mean I was some wallflower who never blossomed or stepped to the beat, I start to feel sad, less cheered up by the annual bash.
Until I see two young men, who look like I used to look, okay, sure, they’ve got better thighs, expansive, which certainly get to work as they strain and brace themselves against my tree.
It is in their twisting, wet expression that I feel honored, that I understand it all lives on, day-to-day, as I once did.
As I do.
Grey Traynor (they/she/he) is a nonbinary, transfemme writer who has been published in XRAY, BULL, and DarkWinter. They attended the 2025 Tin House Summer Workshop and they read at the 2025 Portland Book Festival and are currently querying manuscripts. Find them on Instagram @greytraynor & at greytraynor.gay—Also, check out their gay romance podcast, Baby, Don’t Shoot (featuring a Luigi Mangione type), on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to pods!