Today we recycled the new telephone book. We didn’t even open it. This version was a beleaguered stepchild of the gargantuan books of my childhood: small in both weight and dimension, containing both white and yellow pages.

An everyday facet of my childhood and college years sunk down into our recycle bin, too. I remember reading the telephone book back then, looking up last names that began with Q or finding other people with my same name and middle initial, getting my index and thumb fingers smudged with black ink. Back then white and yellow pages were separated. Back then we let our fingers do the walking, as the slogan went.

Today I google the name of someone I want to find, and in that googling, I find the concentration of so many people into one book has become lost to the expansiveness of the internet. The phone book provided me with a sense of the density of a place. I always knew how populated an area was by the size of the telephone book. The internet provides no such revelation, at least for me. The population of area code 312 – my area code in college – means nothing to me as a number. But as a four-inch thick, heavy (four pounds, five pounds, at least heavy enough to function as a door stop after wrapped in duck tape) set of white and yellow pages, well, area code 312 was dense and condensed.

What I find odd is the sensation of saying goodbye to an everyday practice that was so much a part of my younger days. I am not sad nor nostalgic. The sense of oddness arises from acknowledging the impermanence of all things.

Ubiquity becomes uniquity. I become dust. Everything changes.

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.       Steve Jobs

I am writing this  and my hands are cold. My feet are touching the ground and my left thumb is sore from so much fingering on the iphone.

A little more than 15 years ago I started hormones. When I first began searching for people like me in magazines and books, I found few transsexuals who had been living long term. They were out there, to be sure. I just couldn’t find them.

Thinking about my future, older self in 1996, I’m not sure if, in retrospect, I could really see myself as I am today. My imagination could not encompass how I have come to feel about my body, how I come to look as I have aged, how I have come to think of myself as an aging transsexual.

I am reminded today by the passing of Steve Jobs that I did not then, nor have I done so up to this point in my life, imagined my transsexual death.

Will I simply die like everyone else? Or will I experience a transsexual death?

Asking the question in that way underscores some of the absurdities I’ve lived with over the last fifteen years. What, exactly, is transsexual art? A transsexual sensibility? Transsexual privilege? Yet the same people that have asked these and other questions have never thought to ask me if I will experience a transsexual death.

I don’t know, really, if I will experience a transsexual death. I have some fears about dying as a transsexual – that doctors will deny me care; that Ms. H. will be denied the dignity of burying me as I have asked; that people will express shock that they didn’t know that I was a transsexual –but these fears occur while I am still alive. These are fears of a transsexual dying.

These fears are not a transsexual death. When it is my time, I will be dying and then I will dead. My death – whether ordinary or transsexual – will be for the living to experience.