Remembering Ilyana
My thoughts on the recent loss of a friend of my friends. (CW: death, transmisogyny)
Content warning: Death, possible suicide, transmisogyny
On Sunday I attended a memorial for a friend of my friends, a young woman named Ilyana. She died suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. Her family did not notify her friends and they held an official funeral without them. The family have not shared any of the details of her death, and so her friends have been left out in the cold in almost every aspect. We do know that she was found in her room, and that her death certificate used a name that she did not go by.
The memorial, a small community-organised event, was one of the most beautiful, affecting moments that I’ve been privileged to be a part of. People spoke nakedly about their grief, their regret, their honest reactions, in a way I’ve rarely been witness to. I was lucky to be present.
Her friends are heartbroken. To them, Ilyana was bright, impractical, loving, generous, frustrating, funny, scared, full of life and potential. She was special. Many of them feel deep regret, self-blame, a traumatic pain both from their loss and from its aftermath. They are not okay. They might never be okay.
I didn’t know Ilyana, myself. I felt that my role was to support my friends and bear witness to their love and their loss.
As someone one step removed, I have the luxury of distance. I can be angry on her friends’ behalf and my anger is unmixed with complex feelings of regret or self-recrimination. And I am angry. I feel like a crime has been committed.
Ilyana was 24, she was a young trans woman. She was loved and appreciated by her friends, loved deeply, in all her complexities. She deserved better from this world.
Her friends deserve better. They have been forced to scratch together their own independent tribute, as if their love was less important than her family’s, as if Ilyana’s community should be hidden away. They have been left with awful questions and unknowns about what happened to Ilyana, and no way to find out.
I am angry that her friends have been forced to shoulder the overwhelming burden of blame and recrimination. They are themselves young, vulnerable, marginalised. If they were not able to be the friends that they wish they had been, then our society must take the lion’s share of the blame for this. We fail them in every way: we make housing precarious and isolating, we bleed and compromise our social support systems till they are worse than useless, we do nearly nothing to protect any of them, and we accept the unforgiving consequences of our neglect as inevitable and necessary. We make it so hard to get by, and hurt people so much, that there is no grace to spare. I see them hurting, and I wish I could ease their burden.
I want to be specific, and not general, but this is the second dead young trans person that I personally know of this year. I am barely connected to the wider trans community and I know two. The ongoing cost of a trans-exclusionary society to trans people is devastating, and hidden. It shows up in statistics, but it is so real.
Ilyana lived, and lived intensely, and was loved. Now you know. May her memory be a blessing.
I’ll wrap this up with an excerpt from the dedication from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. Like all words, this too is inadequate.
This has been a story about people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. I loved them all. [...] In memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. [...] Let them play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.