Undoing the Alphabet: A Queer Fugue on Grief and Forgiveness

This essay is written in and as a queer fugue—a series of themes and variations on grief, on loss and remembering, on the constitutive and dispossessing dance of relationality, and on the possibilities of becoming and forgiving. It is an essay about public mourning, queer relationships, being undone by death and language, and about making a case for recognizing unrecognized and unspeakable grief. It is an essay that recognizes the debts we owe to those we’ve lost, celebrates the queer selves and lives we could not do without, and how the words and voices and lives of others who are not acknowledged as fully or equally human are significant and profound.