Content warning: transphobia unto death.

Note: This is the first post where the self-pronoun is “we”; which is to say, this is the first time we’re openly acknowledging our plurality.1 Feel free to leave and block us if you feel this means you can’t respect our words or our thinking as a result; but we would be lying if we didn’t say that kind of choice would cause us to respect you a bit less.

Every year I remember a friend who passed, loosely following the tradition of giỗ2; and this year I thought, a celebration of the passing spark of a life surely could involve a game.

I promise this is not blasphemous; or at least, no more blasphemous than a toast to the deceased.

Our friend passed during what we will always call the Plague. He was a trans man, and he was one of the most compassionate people we ever met. He, too, had been through trauma; he understood so much about it, and much of our ability to seek tools and treatment – professionally and through self-help and improvement – was because of him.

He was Jewish, and his family did not accept him for who he was. It’s a sad tale told and retold the world over, yet also one that is proven more and more often to not be how people want to act as time passes. Unfortunately, he died before they would ever accept him.

When he died, they refused to come for his body. He lay in the morgue all alone and they never, ever came. After the first call, they never returned any others.

They wanted him forgotten. Expunged from the family tree. To them, his life was nothing but an abomination, a darkness they were ashamed of – not because of his spirit but because he didn’t conform to their idea of what a man is.

We don’t have to wonder very much about where his trauma came from.

A bunch of us – his online friends – we had a funeral for him, in the Jewish tradition. Those who could afford to make the trip, did so, and arranged for everything necessary in person. Those of us would couldn’t make it – including myself – we Zoomed in, of course.

There was a rabbi there, and we sang the songs and recited the proper passages, and we remembered his light, and we said goodbye to his ashes – which is not traditionally Jewish but at this point in the Plague, we didn’t have the money for a proper burial, and we needed to bury him ASAP under Jewish tradition because his family refused.

One day we hope to visit him in person. We never got that opportunity in life.

We are not ourselves Jewish – we indeed all three of us believe in different things3, though together we want to reclaim the Vietnamese heritage that was taken from us, which includes ancestor worship. But one thing Vietnamese ancestor worship and Jewish traditions share is the concept of a death anniversary.

This is part of what is meant by: “May their memory be a blessing.”

There is, so often in American society, this tendency to want to move past death and to forget it, because sorrow is anathema to Puritan work ethic. We feel this is unhealthy, despite that we have ancestors who nobody should remember – not because of their identities but because of their spirits, and their spirits were formed around being selfish manipulators and mass murderers.

But going back to our friend, and the blessing that is his memory; we want to never forget the spark he added to our lives, never forget his legacy of love and compassion, never forget his memory – to not think of him as only someone who was cut down too young in a life that should have been better, but to remember what he blessed us with.

And for Jewish folks and Vietnamese folks, that’s what the death anniversary is about.

This year was the first year aj didn’t log into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. During the Plague, it became a social hub to enjoy a common space with friends, somewhere to accomplish stuff we could no longer do, and also it’s so cute.

Aj also built a shrine at the top of the little village, and every year’s cuộc giỗ của bạn thân mến chúng mình 4 we would walk there at sunrise and put a little plate of food and light incense for our friend, and remember his light.

We were late to that this year by a week partly because summer this year was very difficult and we were still recovering.

So we remembered him today. And we realized we had kind of played a game among ourselves to do so, along the lines of:

  • Draw a topic card. It could be anything; picture cards are useful but you could also just use word cards.
  • Talk about things he said, or stories about him, relating to said topic or inspired by the picture.
  • Funny things, light things, deep things, wise things preferred.
  • Rounds while eating food and drinking drinks, because food and drink is life – something every culture, tradition, religion agrees upon.
  • Finish off by lighting the incense, or the candle (electric candles to not cause fires are fine), and saying goodbye.

It works no matter what you believe in, including not really believing in anything mystical or spiritual at all.

We guess that this is where we will leave it.

Bạn thân mến, chúng tôi nhờ anh lấm.5

  1. Some call it Disassociative Identity Disorder, although we prefer Disassociative Identity Order. Yes, it’s hard for some to believe that DIO, in our case of mutual cooperation, has been a healthy coping mechanism for us; but we dare you to go through what we went through and come out the other side as someone who could work in the tech industry as a software developer, write with this much deep analysis and erudition, and somehow generally have a little respect from people for what we think about and what we write about all manner of topics, including board games. ↩

  2. “Giỗ” is a Vietnamese tradition and can be translated as “death anniversary.” I suppose you could also translate it as “death day”. This is part of the deep cultural tradition of ancestor worship, but I understand something similar also occurs in Jewish culture. ↩

  3. Aj follows Shinto, Chị is a general animist due to some Experiences, and Anh is fully agnostic despite knowing the Experiences are real. 6 ↩

  4. Death anniversary of our dear friend. ↩

  5. Dear friend, we miss/remember you so much. ↩

  6. Aj is simply aj all around, Chị means often “sister” but also is part of the Vietnamese pronoun system, and Anh means often “brother” but also is part of the Vietnamese pronoun system. ↩