The music of Ethel Cain gave me permission to sit with my own queer grief

Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.

In December of 2022, I was preparing for a long day of air travel when I stumbled upon the debut album from trans singer-songwriter Ethel Cain, Preacher's Daughter. And for the rest of the day — from the train to the airport to the flight itself — it was all I could listen to. I hadn't heard anything quite like it before. The entire album managed to capture a feeling I haven't been able to name until recently: queer grief. 

During my time as a support coordinator at the University of Alberta, I came to understand the traditional stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These were derived from psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's observations of terminally ill people, and we tend to think of them as chronological. But, as anyone dealing with loss will know, they happen in no true order and do not necessarily end. We ebb and flow through different spaces.

Queer grief is a similarly vast net of emotions, only the types of loss, change and metamorphosis being processed are unique to queer life. To me, it's almost a natural component of queerness. And I first encountered it when I accepted I was transgender in November of 2020. 

My mom was — and continues to be — a very proud TERF, and that year marked its intensification. So as I sifted through a range of complex feelings, I also had to think about what I was willing to lose by coming out. Eventually, through my transition, my relationship with my parents shifted … which is very polite phrasing for the fact that it is currently non-existent. Yet my grief about this has often felt somehow illegitimate. They are both alive, even if they remain just out of reach. 

So much of this experience is reflected in the music of Preacher's Daughter. On the opening track, Family Tree (Intro), Cain sings: "Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother's blood / He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But he'll never escape what he's made up of." I know that no matter how hard I try, and no matter how much I learn to cope with my grief, I cannot escape what I am made of. I can reject everything my family believes, but they will always be in the back of my mind and the blood in my veins.  

The song A House in Nebraska contains the lines: "And it hurts to miss you, but it's worse to know / That I'm the reason you won't come home." These words capture this larger orphan-like feeling for me, while the heaving organ in the back of the song reflects the depth of this grief. When Cain sings, "These dirt roads are empty / The ones we paved ourselves," I think of the work I put into suppressing who I was for others. All the work I put in to prevent that loss, just to lose it anyways.

Since coming out, my definition of family has expanded to include my community, who see me as I am. Still, I think often of Brandon Teena, whose death was one of the first trans murders to garner publicity. Since being laid to rest, Brandon's headstone reads, "Daughter, Sister & Friend." One of my biggest fears is "Rowan" being erased, that a stone with the wrong name might outlive me. 

This fear of being lost in death is reflected in Strangers, the final song on Cain's concept album that sees the titular preacher's daughter character speak from the afterlife after her untimely death. "I tried to be good / Am I no good? / Am I no good? / Am I no good? / With my memory restricted to a Polaroid in evidence," she sings.

I find some peace knowing that even if I am mis-memorialized, the queer family I have built will still hold me with so much love. But I also think about every trans person who has been laid to rest as someone they are not, as well as the people who were closest to them, having to mourn the loss of their friend, the loss of their family and the loss of their identity.

Every song on Preacher's Daughter feels a side of the experience of queer grief that I can turn over in my hands. Ptolemaea sounds like full-fledged anger to me, as far as grief stages go, and features the buzzing of flies laid over spoken word. I think about the friends I have been supporting through their queer grief experience. When I watch my friends grieve, I feel like I can see it swarming them.

Sun Bleached Flies is a song I turn to when I feel like I'm in the throes of loss. "We all know how it goes / The more it hurts, the less it shows / But I still feel like they all know / And that's why I can never go back home / And I spend my life watching it go by from the sidelines / And God, I've tried, but I think it's about time I put up a fight," Cain sings. This verse, to me, is about refusing to be inert — about the bravery to deviate from the path.

The song ends with Cain singing: "I'm still praying for that house in Nebraska / By the highway, out on the edge of town / Dancing with the windows open / I can't let go when something's broken / It's all I know and it's all I want now." To me, "dancing with the windows open" is a beautiful interpretation of letting in the new, of the fresh spring of personal growth. I find my moment of "dancing with the windows open" is taking a deep breath in a room full of queers. "I can't let go when something's broken," meanwhile, holds the persistence of queer kinship. It may not always be perfect, but sometimes it is "all [we] know and it's all [we] want now." 

By reflecting the ever-changing nature and even beauty of queer grief, Preacher's Daughter makes the entire phenomenon seem three-dimensional. I urge you to sit down and listen, and see if the album resonates with you and your own journey of loss and healing — but particularly if you're part of the LGBTQ community. 

Right now, we are at a nexus point for queer and trans rights. And I find that, every single day, people around me are feeling the need to just push through, to act like the grief they are living through from today's climate is somehow illegitimate. But to every queer and trans person feeling the grief of this sudden 180: I encourage you to give yourself the permission to.