The Other Side

I’ve changed the name of this blog from What Would the Wertis Say? to The Other Side.

Illustration from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

The Wertis was the nickname for one of the cats Jim and I had after college. We had developed his personality (snobbish, neurotic, urbane, high maintenance, needy) and over the years this name became a term of endearment as well as a reproach. But so much has changed in 10 years and so, too, here.

On the other side is my old life. Going back to the expatriate theme that started this blog 10 years ago — my previous city and the only home my children had known when we moved to Alabama in 2009 was on the other side of the ocean.

The Other Side is the working title of a piece I am writing about falling in love after being widowed. I was coming back to life and on the other side was death. Grief stays with you and you experience it in stages, but at some point you can emerge from the worst of it and come out on the other side, which is also a return to the living.

Maybe because there is comfort in the rhymes and songs we sing and read with our children, a book that played in my head a lot after my husband died was Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. “You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it,” the family say at each encounter with fearsome terrain, “Oh no! We’ll have to go through it.”

Grief is scary. It was also a slog, it was exhausting, but there was this sense that I just had to keep going. And so I kept going. Some days I had to trick myself, or make deals, but I kept going. And at a certain point, I could feel the sun again, I didn’t feel numb. I met someone and just the start of our being friends lifts the heavy hopelessness of grief.

But then the twist. The person I fall in love with is transgender. The term cis, as in cisgender, means this side of; trans is the other side of.

The Other Side implies that there are two sides, this one and the other. And in order to be here, you have to leave there. You have to cross over or through or under, go through, something, whether that something is an ocean or a loss or change of status or identity.

But nothing is so clearly divided. Gender is not this binary one thing or the other, nor is sexuality, nor is my identity as a New Yorker, Londoner, Huntsvillian.

Having empathy and perspective is crucial to our humanity. The Other Side is both a fallacy and a necessity.