EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.

The Birth Certificate, The Contractor, And The Silence She Left Behind

December 1, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
The days after Mom died still feel like a dream I entered too quickly and left too slowly. Sometimes I look back on that stretch of days and I'm not sure if I lived them or watched them through glass. There are moments from that time that don't feel real yet, not because they were dramatic, but because they were boringly ordinary in the middle of something that usually breaks people temporarily. Grief is strange like that. It leaves the sky intact. It keeps the mail coming. It lets the phone ring with numbers you really don't want to see, given the circumstances. And somehow you're expected to answer every one of them as if the center of your life didn't just shift.

A part of me still hasn't caught up. I keep thinking I should call her and tell her what happened after she died—the way she'd laugh at the chaos of it, the way she'd lift her eyebrows and say, "Oh them again… now what?… are you serious…? what the fuck…?" like the universe had once again tried something absurd and miscalculated. I haven't been able to delete her number. I'm not sure I ever will. It still sits in my phone like a door I could open if I tried hard enough.

In the days after she passed, a therapist Mom knew stopped by the house—the one who thought she understood everything before she'd even crossed the threshold. I was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by that afternoon's paperwork, frozen meals, half-empty water glasses, and the silence that kept rearranging the air.

She showed up and I moved into the living room, the one room I'd been putting off sorting through. She asked me if I knew what day Mom died — asked it like I was a confused child, like it was a detail I might have misplaced in my grief.

I just stared at her for a moment, the way you look at someone who has no idea who they're talking to.
I was a Paramedic Lieutenant Specialist.
I've pronounced more deaths than she's ever witnessed.
I knew the minute my mother left this world.
I knew it in the marrow.

But she kept going. She tried to tell me I was struggling because I had "decided to become a woman," as if my whole life was a costume change, as if my mother's death had opened some imaginary wound in my gender that she'd always been waiting to diagnose. I told her, "Can I show you something real quick? Mom said this might come up…" and headed upstairs to my bedroom.

I still see the way the light slanted across the drafting table where I'd laid everything out. My birth certificate. Mom's will. Mom's healthcare instructions. The final refusal-of-care form with my signature as the witness. Every document my mother had touched still smelled faintly like her lotion—lavender and something older. It felt like gathering an army of ghosts who spoke better than I ever could.

I went back downstairs and handed the stack of documents to the therapist and asked if she wanted anything to drink while she looked through them. She didn't even make it past the birth certificate. She saw FEMALE, the word printed by doctors when the world first met me. She set the stack down like it was a personal attack. She offered some pleasantries—thin, polite, embarrassed—and left. I never saw her again. I didn't need to. That was the whole story.

The days blurred after that. The phone rang anytime I wasn't on hold waiting on the world to update things. Contractors came and went—men with paint and drywall on their trousers and half-finished sentences—each one convinced I needed guidance, as if grief had turned me into a child who needed to be spoken to slowly. One of them said, "Well you're a woman, so you probably don't know—" and then, nodding toward the living room, "and as for your wife, well… we aren't sure about her."

I felt that old firehouse muscle memory kick in—the quiet command that doesn't ask for permission. I reached into my pocket, peeled off enough cash to make the message unmistakable, and said, "I'm sure that I won't be calling you ever again. Here's some money to get lost." He blinked twice, tried to recover his footing, and failed. Moments like that don't need yelling. They collapse on their own.

I replaced him with someone younger, kinder, and less threatened by the idea of a woman knowing her own house—the same house where she had lived since early childhood—better than a stranger. The kind of person who doesn't flinch at the word wife or stumble over pronouns like loose gravel.

But even with all of that—the therapist folding under a single piece of paper, the contractors showing their hand before they'd even taken off their boots, the endless parade of people trying to rewrite me afterward—the only thing I kept thinking was:

I should tell Mom.
I should call her.
She'd understand this kind of absurdity.
She'd laugh with me about it.

But I can't. And that's the part of grief no one prepares you for—the moments when something ridiculous happens and the first instinct is to reach for the person who would find it funny too.

Instead I stood in Mom's house—the one that raised me and bruised me and tried to break me and yet somehow still loved me—with papers on the table and strangers at the door, trying to make adult decisions I never imagined I'd have to make alone.

There are still mornings I wake up and half-expect her voice in the next room—the soft rustle of her slippers shuffling on the old hardwood, the kettle warming on the stove, the faint sound of her clearing her throat before saying something she knows I need to hear. Grief hasn't caught up with me yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe a part of me is still in that house, setting papers in a neat row across the drafting table, doing what my mother raised me to do—tell the truth, calmly, as best I can, and without flinching.

I think she'd be proud of how I handled all of it. But god, I wish I could've heard her say it one more time.

It's been long enough now that the world expects me to be "better," whatever that means. Time has its own ideas about healing—people act like it's a medication you take once a day and wait for results. But grief doesn't work that way. It's more like weather. It shifts. It lingers. It returns when the air pressure changes. You don't control it; you adapt to it. And eventually, you forget what the old climate felt like.

I look back at those first few weeks after Mom died—the therapist, the contractors, the parade of well-meaning strangers—and it feels like watching a different version of myself move through a house that was half memory, half ghost. I don't feel anger when I think about it. The sharpness has dulled. What's left is more like a quiet observation of how lost people get when faced with a woman who doesn't fit any of their limited categories.

I know Mom knew that. Of course she did.

She saw it my whole life: the way people misread me, underestimate me, talk past me, shrink me down to the edges of their own imagination. Maybe that's why she left the documents where she did—birth certificate, will, medical forms, all in a file folder—like breadcrumbs on the trail back to myself. I used to think she was sentimental. Now I think she was preparing me for a world she knew would try to rewrite me once she was no longer here to correct it.

The therapist's question—"Are you sure you know the day she died?"—doesn't sting anymore. I realize what it was—nothing more than bias dressed in a cardigan. Now it just hangs in my mind like an odd artifact from a life I've already archived. It's almost funny in the way absurd things become funny when enough time passes. Of course I knew. I knew the minute her breathing changed in the hours prior. I knew before the machines did. I knew before the chart did. That's the part the therapist never understood. You don't forget the moment your mother leaves the world. You feel it like a floorboard suddenly giving way.

I think what bothers me now, in hindsight, isn't what she asked. It's what she assumed. That I was someone who needed to be walked through my own life. That I wouldn't know the shape of my own loss. That my autism made me vulnerable instead of perceptive. That my intersex history made my gender socially negotiable instead of factual.

I didn't need to prove anything to her.

As for the contractors—that whole era feels like background noise now, a chorus of men who didn't know who they were dealing with. I don't feel the sting of those comments anymore. I barely feel anything when I think of them. They were bit parts in a story that never belonged to them.

But sometimes I think about the version of myself standing in that house, holding it together while everything was falling apart. I didn't see her clearly at the time. I was too inside the moment to understand the shape of it. Now I do. She was steadier than I gave her credit for. She was already becoming the woman I am now—quieter, more certain, less willing to bend herself into shapes that made other people comfortable.

Grief has a way of showing you who you were meant to become, but only after it strips away the old versions of ourselves.

And maybe that's why, even now, I still catch myself reaching for my phone. Some days I want to call Mom, not because I'm falling apart, but because I'm finally understanding things I didn't have words for while she was alive. The way she shielded me without making a show of it. The way she prepared for conversations she never wanted me to have, but knew I'd face them anyway.

Sometimes I think she'd laugh if she saw how it all played out—her therapist friend folding at the sight of the birth certificate, the contractor tripping over his own ignorance, the way I stood there handing out boundaries like spare nails in a toolbox.

I like to think she'd say, "Good girl. Keep going."

I like to think she still says it, somewhere in the room I can't quite see.

Maybe that's what grief becomes after enough time passes. Not a storm. Not a collapse. Just a second voice from within—quieter, wiser—that reminds you who you are when the world forgets.