EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Cover Up The Ashes With Flowers

July 9, 2026—Los Angeles, California

I’m still in Los Angeles today with my best friend Maddie, and Sylvester, our mutual friend. There is something almost theatrical about being here, in a city large enough to swallow every old version of me, while Dad’s entire extended family lives nearby. They are close enough to exist as geography, but not as family. I have no contact with any of them because they dismissed me from their lives decades ago, and after a while, absence stops being a wound and becomes a fact. It still says something, though. It says something about them, and it says something about the strange mercy of distance.

My father was the only person I truly despised. Despising someone is specific. It is colder, older, and more complete. He ruined my life through his own egoism and selfishness, then seemed to expect the world to call it character. I spent years living in the aftermath of his choices, as if his failures had been handed to me as inheritance.

Late October of last year, I put my parents’ ashes in the ground. That was the day my life began. I walked away and in that exact moment, the entire trajectory of my life changed. Not because the grief was gone, but because the obligation was. For the first time, I understood that I was not required to keep arranging my life around the damage someone else had done. The ashes were in the ground. I was still here.

Cover up the ashes with flowers. Do it in the name of god—you can justify it in the end.

I keep thinking about that. Flowers do not deny the ashes. They do not make death beautiful, and they do not redeem what was cruel. They simply insist that the final visible thing does not have to be ruin. There is a difference between covering something and pretending it was never there at all. I have no interest in pretending.

Mom died without getting to see me thrive. Mothers feel like forever people in our lives until the years add up and tell us a different story. Then time gathered itself quietly, became years, which turned into illness, then the absence became a grave.

I am eternally grateful for the life I now lead, even though I created it myself. I took what little remained, and made a life from it. There is a private satisfaction in that, though it is not the kind one announces. It is quieter than pride.

When I first realized I was queer, I was afraid, but not because I believed there was anything wrong with being queer. I knew better than that, even then. I was afraid because I understood, with terrible accuracy, that other people would make my life more difficult. I was right. That is the part people often miss. The fear was not self-hatred. The fear was prediction.

Mom accepted it. I suspect she likely knew the entire time. There was something in the way she did not require me to become more legible before she loved me. Dad denied it. Then, in the later decades of his life, he became oppressive, as if refusal could alter reality, as if his discomfort related to my birth had moral authority, as if my existence were a problem he could solve by disapproving of it.

He could not.

I am finally loved by people who chose me, and I am untouched by the people who abandoned me. Both facts sit beside each other without canceling each other out.

Now I’m here, and I don’t know why.

Maybe that is not despair. Maybe it is simply the mind arriving at the edge of the old story and not yet having language for the new one. I spent so long surviving that thriving can feel, at times, almost suspect. Freedom is not always ecstatic. Sometimes freedom is standing in a city where your father’s family lives nearby, knowing you owe them nothing. Sometimes it is having dinner with your best friend. Sometimes it is realizing that no one is coming to punish you for being happy.

Forgiveness is frequently misunderstood.

People talk about forgiveness as if it were a social obligation, a performance, or a receipt for spiritual maturity. They make it sound clean. They make it sound generous. They make it sound like the harmed person is only whole once they have excused the harm and let go of the grievance. I do not believe that. I do not believe forgiveness requires reconciliation, access, silence, revision, or surrender. I do not believe it asks me to soften the truth so others can feel less implicated by it.

Maybe forgiveness, if it comes at all, is not something I owe the dead. Maybe it is something I return to myself.

The flowers are not for him. They are for what survived.