Full Moon

T., one of our trans alums, stopped by today. She was on a mission. “Today makes two years since we lost Sasha,” she said, “and I want to make a video.” She gingerly lifted the frame with Sasha’s photo in it off the wall and held it in her lap. I handed her the office phone to record it on since she doesn’t have a phone. With the camera running, she poured out her sadness and loss and anger at the unfairness of Sasha being gone so young. She was sobbing by the end and, dabbing her eyes, she asked me for a picture of Sasha to take home. I pulled up Sasha’s facebook on my phone, and handed it to her to choose one, then printed the one she picked out. Sasha loved the camera and loved to perform, so there were plenty to choose from. Once she left I thought about the years I knew Sasha, and how I struggled to help her contain her outsize personality and extreme impulsivity enough that she could keep attending the program. I thought about the many times I had to come to the rescue of a blushing volunteer or intern because Sasha would declare them “my husband” and flirt outlandishly. Sasha could be brash, but she also had a gentle side, especially when it came to animals. Growing up in foster care, she landed at Green Chimneys’ therapeutic farm, where she learned to care for a horse, and she loved anything with fur. One day, she came across an abused Rottweiler/Pitbull mix on a heavy chain in a yard full of rubble in the North Bronx and she recruited me to help liberate the dog. We climbed over the rusty wire fence and clipped the chain, leashed him up, loaded him into my friend’s car and she named him Brooklyn. I made him a poster, printed a few copies and handed the first one to Pastor Mark at St John’s. “Can you share this with the congregation?” I asked. He took the flyer and came back fifteen minutes later – he had gone to ask his husband. “We’ll take him,” he said ,so Brooklyn the dog lived out his life as a pampered pastor’s pet. Her last animal was Smokey, who had been her boyfriend’s kitten. When the boyfriend moved out, Smokey stayed. After she died, Smokey came to Bay Ridge to join my cat crew, a living reminder of Sasha rubbing against my ankles. It was an attempt to get food for her cat that almost got her finger severed. She had agreed to meet up with a stranger for oral sex to get cat food money, but he tried to force her to do things they had not agreed on. When she fought back, he pulled a knife and cut her, leaving her finger barely hanging on. When she got to the hospital in her Bronx neighborhood, instead of taking her report the police did a warrant check on her. Sasha was a bigger woman, and as she got into her 30s she put on weight. She developed high blood pressure and diabetes and asthma. Her legs swelled alarmingly until the skin split like an overripe tomato and germs got in. She made it through one infection and then another, struggling through the chaos of an overburdened east Brooklyn hospital and the blatant transphobia of the West Indian nurses’ aides. She would call me furious or crying and I would call the ER or the unit, remind them that she was not just a poor black trans woman on her own, that she had people who were watching and would fight for her. But her last time there, that wasn’t enough. It was the holiday season, the hospital was even more understaffed and chaotic than usual. She went into the ER with another infection on 12/23 and by 1/2 they had overlooked her slide into sepsis and she died. The next client was a trans man, who wanted help renewing his security license, but as we talked about the details of that, he started telling me about losing his brother to suicide two years ago. “If God made us, why does he leave us here to be tortured and suffer?” he asked me, a question that would linger in my mind long after he left. “I feel like my heart is shattered,” he said. “I feel like I have to scream sometimes.” He told me about his family, how he was rejected for being trans. “My own mother doesn’t want me,” he said, tears running down his face. He talked about his poverty, the problems in his housing program, how someone attacked him on the street. And then he quietly said, “I’m an organ donor and a lot of people need organs,” and I started listening in a different way. He continued on for a while about having to leave school, and problems with his girlfriend. When he finally wound down, I gently said “don’t go giving away your organs just yet,” and a dam broke. “I feel it every day,” he said, crying hard. “I’m just so tired.” I know he is talking about a tiredness that transcends the physical, a tiredness of the spirit. “I was done,” he says. “I looked up a bridge and I was going to jump.” “What stopped you?” I ask, wondering if it will again. “I called 988,” he said, “it helped a little.” “Let’s do this,” I say, opening up a little gap to let a bit of light in, “let’s focus on getting your security license sorted out so you can work.” “Nobody helps me,” he says “none of the people at my building.” I don’t curse often but- “fuck them,” I say, “I will help you,” and his smile is like a rainbow breaking through heavy clouds. I take a square of scrap paper, write down my number. “If it gets too hard, call me,” I tell him. “I would rather get a call from you in the middle of the night than a call saying you’re gone.” He nods, and I remember a psychiatrist decades ago who said to me, “I’m going on vacation, but you can call me. I can talk to you from a beautiful place.” I give him a few other resources, an appointment with Doug, our psych NP, and he heads out the door. I hardly have time to take a breath when the phone rings. It’s our Very Sick Client, who has been moved out of the ICU to a regular floor. “I’m going to go home to die,” he says. “I’m leaving AMA, and I might die, so you should start preparing my funeral.” Without knowing where this is coming from, I don’t know what to say, but I find out pretty fast. “They put me in a double room even though I have AIDS and my immune system is too bad to be around other people’s germs.” He’s not wrong, they normally do put him in a single. “Do you want me to call and talk to them about it?” I offer, but just then a doctor comes in and he starts trying to get her to get him a single room. She refuses, says something vague about policy, and he snaps. “I’m going to hang myself!” he says. She is young and startled. “Why do you say that?” she asks. “Because I am,” he says, getting out of bed. I can’t tell what’s going on through the phone but I hear a nurse come in and start cajoling him to come back to bed, “you don’t need to do this,” she says. Then a security guard shows up, a young black man with admirable calmness in his voice. “Hey man,” he says, “let’s get this off your head.” Then he says, “what’s going on? What do you need?” and listens to the story. Next comes a young, impatient psychiatrist. “You can leave AMA but I have to ask you some questions first,” he says “or you can stay and you’re going to have to wear a hospital gown and have someone here at all times. I can prescribe some pills to help you calm down.” Defeated, the client agrees to stay, and lets the nurse help him undress and give him the Ativan. As he gets groggy, I say goodnight, hang up the phone and get ready to leave. Heading out, I open the church door and look up. It’s a full moon.