The Secret Legion
Mar. 16th, 2026 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThis is a messy post about death and love.
Our friend’s memorial was yesterday. Having missed her funeral, we were determined to make the memorial, even though everything went wrong. The bus didn’t come. The next bus got taken out of service. We started to walk and discovered the route had been blocked to pedestrians so we had to reroute using our paper maps. It was like circumstances were conspiring against us.
Our dead friend Ny often had trouble accepting kindness from others. Obviously she was not rerouting traffic to abnegate herself from beyond the grave, but we nonetheless found ourself going, “too bad, Ny, we said we were coming and we’re coming whether you like it or not!” And so we arrived, almost two hours later than planned, mad as hell at the buses, the street routes, and the universe. Not exactly the right mindset for a memorial.
We only knew Ny through Dreamwidth and offline dinners and kitchen stuff. We had no idea how big her life was and how many people were in it. People had come from all across the country, bearing Notting Pie and chocolate mousse and poems and stickers and stories. We ate. We read poems and took cards. We talked to people who’d known her twenty years. People sang and wept and introduced themselves to each other: “how do you know Ny?” As though this were a party she’d hosted, her last party.
As we calmed down and talked to people, all we could think was, we didn’t know death and mourning could be like this.
We had an adolescence steeped in death. The first time we remember Mom trying to kill us, we were eleven years old. She knocked Mori unconscious, put her in a trash bag, and dumped her five miles out of town off the side of the road. Mori revived, tore out of the black plastic bag, limped back the five miles, and hid out for days. When she finally returned home, everyone acted as though nothing had happened. It was a strong lesson: our life was Kleenex, cheap and disposable, and if we died, it’d be days before anyone noticed.
This scenario repeated over and over through the years. The “bag’n’dump,” as we called it, went from the most harrowing thing imaginable to merely a semi-regular (though severe) punishment. We went through an unfashionable stage of wearing bandannas around our throat. Headmates died sad, lonely, gruesome deaths, and we still had to get up in the morning and act as though nothing had happened. We could not speak of the deaths, or even call them deaths. (Even now, we are encouraged to euphemize: splitting, integrating, fragmenting, dormancy. Anything but dying.) There was nobody even to notice we were gone, not in this world, anyway. (Meanwhile, in another world and another life, cut off from here, Biff drank himself into a stupor in the street and fled his housing, and Bob fell into drugs, and Grey retreated into work, grieving we strange phantasms that had up-ended their lives, only to leave no body, no grave, no funeral rites.)
Corporeal death was a cold thing in the family, or so it felt. When the grandfather who’d molested at least four people (including us), we took a cold, pitiless satisfaction in refusing to weep for him. He was a child-raping old lecher, and though we could never say so, we were glad he was dead. The one upside of mortality: all kings topple, all power fades, all fists and phalluses go soft and rot in the end. It was a surreal experience, to see the heinous old man get a ten-gun salute and full military honors while everyone wept for him, when our own deaths meant nothing, but such was the family hierarchy.
Meanwhile, at Ny’s memorial, there were no gun salutes, no folded flags, only the gentle grieving of dozens of singers, writers, and fans across the world.
We told Ny once, when she was speaking ill of herself, that everyone has a secret legion of fans they don’t know about. “SECRET LEGION,” we hissed, and it made her laugh, even though I don’t think she believed us. What would she think, knowing all these people were here, the secret (and not-so-secret) legion? Would she finally see the glimmering galaxy she was?
She is buried in Mt. Auburn. We could go and visit her still... and it’d be perversely easier than it was to visit her when she was alive; more buses go there. Perhaps we will be buried there in turn, if we’re lucky, and then we can be neighbors and have arguments about Marie Kondo again.
Death was a cold affair, in the family. And yet Ny’s death is such a warm one, weighted with sadness and remembrance. Recipes, even food she herself cooked, before death scooped her up so quickly nobody saw it coming. I got to eat Ny’s pumpkin fudge at her own memorial, and all I could think was that she’d like that. She seemed determined to feed everybody always.
(She fed Mori pigeon once, after hearing her carry on about how the pigeon was the ultimate urban survivor and symbol of downward mobility and that therefore eating it would claim its powers. That dinner was full of laughter.)
(When we last moved, she fed our whole moving party, and our roommates as well, making a load of wraps according to everyone’s dietary restrictions. She seemed to make too many, we thought at first, but she proved wise: the kitchen was unusable when we arrived, and wraps can be eaten one-handed, without utensils. Our overwhelmed and exhausted roommates wolfed the remainder, blessing Ny with every bite.)
(We helped organize her kitchen and take community fridge stuff for her, not long before she died. She asked how she could pay us. We replied, “just feed us.”)
My cousin, the successful one, got into coke, and I guess he used a bad needle, because he got blood poisoning. When they said he’d die if they didn’t amputate his arm, he and his mom decided to let God decide, and God said no. We only found out about his death because our brother spilled the beans, and when we called our uncle with condolences, offering to come to the funeral, he was awkward and equivocal. It was only as I walked home from Ny’s memorial, twelve years later, that we realized we weren’t wanted at our cousin’s funeral, that we probably weren’t meant to find out. We had left the parents; we had lost rights to the family.
We were not a close friend of Ny’s. We volunteered to help with her stuff because estates are a pain to manage, because organizing and packing and moving stuff is something Miranda and Biff are very good at, and because it is a religious obligation to Rogan and Mori to serve the dead. Also, we were nearby. It was strange to only enter her room after her death, and we cursed her hobby of collecting adorable tiny (impossible to read) books, but we took comfort in knowing we were helping her and her survivors, survivors who surely needed all the help they could get. Who is in any condition to sort miniature books when their beloved is dead?
Every one of us is at the center of a web of relationships: lovers and roommates and friends and acquaintances and fellow appreciators of pigeon and tiny books. Invisible strands we may not even notice until a hole in that web opens.
In the family, our strands were cut and banished. When Ny’s strands snapped, her web rallied and worked to build a lace filigree around the absence that once was her. A last gift of the secret legion, rebuilding and strengthening the web even though Ny herself was now gone.
As I walked back, we texted a friend who didn’t know Ny, “I only can hope that when we kick it, there’ll be so much love.”
She replied, “There already is[,] friends.”
And we cried, and we marveled that for once, this was a death we could freely grieve.
Our friend’s memorial was yesterday. Having missed her funeral, we were determined to make the memorial, even though everything went wrong. The bus didn’t come. The next bus got taken out of service. We started to walk and discovered the route had been blocked to pedestrians so we had to reroute using our paper maps. It was like circumstances were conspiring against us.
Our dead friend Ny often had trouble accepting kindness from others. Obviously she was not rerouting traffic to abnegate herself from beyond the grave, but we nonetheless found ourself going, “too bad, Ny, we said we were coming and we’re coming whether you like it or not!” And so we arrived, almost two hours later than planned, mad as hell at the buses, the street routes, and the universe. Not exactly the right mindset for a memorial.
We only knew Ny through Dreamwidth and offline dinners and kitchen stuff. We had no idea how big her life was and how many people were in it. People had come from all across the country, bearing Notting Pie and chocolate mousse and poems and stickers and stories. We ate. We read poems and took cards. We talked to people who’d known her twenty years. People sang and wept and introduced themselves to each other: “how do you know Ny?” As though this were a party she’d hosted, her last party.
As we calmed down and talked to people, all we could think was, we didn’t know death and mourning could be like this.
We had an adolescence steeped in death. The first time we remember Mom trying to kill us, we were eleven years old. She knocked Mori unconscious, put her in a trash bag, and dumped her five miles out of town off the side of the road. Mori revived, tore out of the black plastic bag, limped back the five miles, and hid out for days. When she finally returned home, everyone acted as though nothing had happened. It was a strong lesson: our life was Kleenex, cheap and disposable, and if we died, it’d be days before anyone noticed.
This scenario repeated over and over through the years. The “bag’n’dump,” as we called it, went from the most harrowing thing imaginable to merely a semi-regular (though severe) punishment. We went through an unfashionable stage of wearing bandannas around our throat. Headmates died sad, lonely, gruesome deaths, and we still had to get up in the morning and act as though nothing had happened. We could not speak of the deaths, or even call them deaths. (Even now, we are encouraged to euphemize: splitting, integrating, fragmenting, dormancy. Anything but dying.) There was nobody even to notice we were gone, not in this world, anyway. (Meanwhile, in another world and another life, cut off from here, Biff drank himself into a stupor in the street and fled his housing, and Bob fell into drugs, and Grey retreated into work, grieving we strange phantasms that had up-ended their lives, only to leave no body, no grave, no funeral rites.)
Corporeal death was a cold thing in the family, or so it felt. When the grandfather who’d molested at least four people (including us), we took a cold, pitiless satisfaction in refusing to weep for him. He was a child-raping old lecher, and though we could never say so, we were glad he was dead. The one upside of mortality: all kings topple, all power fades, all fists and phalluses go soft and rot in the end. It was a surreal experience, to see the heinous old man get a ten-gun salute and full military honors while everyone wept for him, when our own deaths meant nothing, but such was the family hierarchy.
Meanwhile, at Ny’s memorial, there were no gun salutes, no folded flags, only the gentle grieving of dozens of singers, writers, and fans across the world.
We told Ny once, when she was speaking ill of herself, that everyone has a secret legion of fans they don’t know about. “SECRET LEGION,” we hissed, and it made her laugh, even though I don’t think she believed us. What would she think, knowing all these people were here, the secret (and not-so-secret) legion? Would she finally see the glimmering galaxy she was?
She is buried in Mt. Auburn. We could go and visit her still... and it’d be perversely easier than it was to visit her when she was alive; more buses go there. Perhaps we will be buried there in turn, if we’re lucky, and then we can be neighbors and have arguments about Marie Kondo again.
Death was a cold affair, in the family. And yet Ny’s death is such a warm one, weighted with sadness and remembrance. Recipes, even food she herself cooked, before death scooped her up so quickly nobody saw it coming. I got to eat Ny’s pumpkin fudge at her own memorial, and all I could think was that she’d like that. She seemed determined to feed everybody always.
(She fed Mori pigeon once, after hearing her carry on about how the pigeon was the ultimate urban survivor and symbol of downward mobility and that therefore eating it would claim its powers. That dinner was full of laughter.)
(When we last moved, she fed our whole moving party, and our roommates as well, making a load of wraps according to everyone’s dietary restrictions. She seemed to make too many, we thought at first, but she proved wise: the kitchen was unusable when we arrived, and wraps can be eaten one-handed, without utensils. Our overwhelmed and exhausted roommates wolfed the remainder, blessing Ny with every bite.)
(We helped organize her kitchen and take community fridge stuff for her, not long before she died. She asked how she could pay us. We replied, “just feed us.”)
My cousin, the successful one, got into coke, and I guess he used a bad needle, because he got blood poisoning. When they said he’d die if they didn’t amputate his arm, he and his mom decided to let God decide, and God said no. We only found out about his death because our brother spilled the beans, and when we called our uncle with condolences, offering to come to the funeral, he was awkward and equivocal. It was only as I walked home from Ny’s memorial, twelve years later, that we realized we weren’t wanted at our cousin’s funeral, that we probably weren’t meant to find out. We had left the parents; we had lost rights to the family.
We were not a close friend of Ny’s. We volunteered to help with her stuff because estates are a pain to manage, because organizing and packing and moving stuff is something Miranda and Biff are very good at, and because it is a religious obligation to Rogan and Mori to serve the dead. Also, we were nearby. It was strange to only enter her room after her death, and we cursed her hobby of collecting adorable tiny (impossible to read) books, but we took comfort in knowing we were helping her and her survivors, survivors who surely needed all the help they could get. Who is in any condition to sort miniature books when their beloved is dead?
Every one of us is at the center of a web of relationships: lovers and roommates and friends and acquaintances and fellow appreciators of pigeon and tiny books. Invisible strands we may not even notice until a hole in that web opens.
In the family, our strands were cut and banished. When Ny’s strands snapped, her web rallied and worked to build a lace filigree around the absence that once was her. A last gift of the secret legion, rebuilding and strengthening the web even though Ny herself was now gone.
As I walked back, we texted a friend who didn’t know Ny, “I only can hope that when we kick it, there’ll be so much love.”
She replied, “There already is[,] friends.”
And we cried, and we marveled that for once, this was a death we could freely grieve.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 07:11 pm (UTC)I'm glad I know all of you but I'm sad that it's for sad reasons.
And yes, if you all die at different times, I will mourn each one of you. Just let me know where to be at which times.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 09:05 pm (UTC)