Daughter by Her Choice
by Ryan Craver for South Summit 2022
Had Peggy Kreider’s obituary come to me in a newspaper to be unfurled in poetic morning light over earl grey, I might have read it sooner. But it came as a link in a text message, so it sat in my phone for a week. Opening a text is one more thing to do in the maddeningly unstructured profession I report on my self-employed tax form as “filmmaker.” My North Carolina family asks, “What do you do all day?” I lamely explain that my life has become my work. And life is work; it’s hard. I still imagine that one day, I will start waking up at 5am to exercise, cook three meals a day, clean the house, raise the kids I’ll never have, and somehow write a new screenplay. The reality is that I’m thirty-one; share a tiny, cluttered New York apartment; and after suffering the death of the grandma who raised me and grief that spread over two years of an isolating pandemic, I can barely delete all the fifteen-percent-off coupons from my inbox — much less respond to another “miss you” text.
“Miss you too.”
“Love you too.”
You might say these text exchanges are empty gestures: less than actually ‘catching up,’ but better than outright asking, “Are you still alive?” One of my sisters might have called them empty gestures in a conversation we had a few years ago. She’s an Appalachian woman now, and she told me how she’d astral projected to different universes, sought ancient forms of healing in crystals and herbs, and joined communities of witches who helped break generational trauma. Despite my initial whiplash, I chose to believe her. She was confident, grounded — hands tattooed in runes and mystical patterns. She changed her name from Kayla to Kira to symbolize her rebirth and explained that our family could make the effort to know her as an adult, not just assume she’d stick around because of shared blood.
At the time, I agreed. I was angry, and as the gay older brother, I felt I had the monopoly on suffering in our dad’s family (we only share a father biologically). My real life — two long-term boyfriends, an engagement, the subjects of all my writing and films — wasn’t allowed in the door. I came home only to sit at the occasional holiday dinner table, surrounded by people who increasingly looked like strangers. I began to wonder who the ‘you’ in the “miss you, love you, are you coming to Thanksgiving” texts really was, because these people didn’t know me. “Are you still alive?” I was just alive, an adult body, breathing and eating sweet potato pie, testament only to the fact that there was once a child named Ryan.
When I got around to reading Peggy Kreider’s obituary, I was surprised to find my name: Ryan. Did I ever tell you about Peggy? I doubt it. My step-mom Lisa used to take us to go swim in her pool and eat deformed Mickey Mouse ice cream pops. I want to say she had a thing about not peeing in her pool, which was probably directed at my younger sisters, but I took it personally. When I went inside to pee, I remember thinking, this must be what it’s like to live inside a cigarette. She liked to smoke, so much that her deep, peppery aura still burns my nose ten years since I last saw her. I only saw her once after she retired to a single-wide outside Holden Beach, but she was the same. She had an impossibly raspy laugh, two skeleton arms that poked out of her tank tops, and leather-tan skin. In the South, we love these women; they are everyone’s grandma. They will call a stranger “baby” even if he’s a grown man. They alone hold the secret to a pound cake that is good.
Peggy’s obituary reads that she was survived by “Daughter by her choice, Lisa H. Dancy of Concord, NC, as well as her children Ryan, Kayla, and Kyndal.” The phrase “daughter by her choice” to describe my step-mom moved me. I felt strangely proud that Lisa had earned that spot in someone else’s life — her legacy. It took me a long time when I was a child to piece together their story: Lisa had once dated Peggy’s son, who died young. Out of their shared loss, each gained a second family. I remember Lisa and Peggy’s phone conversations, going on for hours into the night, spanning decades. I remember Lisa’s lullaby Southern accent — ye-es, no-o — her cigarette smoke trailing up through the lampshade and spinning out the top in wild tendrils.
When I was little, I’d watch Lisa from the floor. I slept on a pallet of blankets in the living room when I stayed at my dad’s. Now, I wonder what they talked about. Family. Church gossip. Keeping marriages together. I think about Kira and her coven of witches, and I realize she is just like her mother, despite that they are always at each other’s throats. But whether they are astral projecting or praying, they are women who want the best for their family. The depth of knowledge of the human condition that exists in these pockets of Southern women — congregating on front porches, in Walmart parking lots — rivals the ancient Greeks. A coleslaw chorus.
Theirs is a philosophy founded on kindness, forgiveness, and above all, hospitality. A stranger took in Mary and baby Jesus, Peggy took in strangers, and Lisa took in strangers. Growing up, there was a period when she housed girls who needed a place to stay. I remember a quiet girl who had to take care of a baby doll for health class. A girl with a metal rod in her spine. A German foreign exchange student.
When Lisa’s daughters would fall asleep on the pallet beside me, she and I would talk into the night too, about life, death, government UFO cover-up conspiracies, and if Barney the Dinosaur was getting too liberal. She was my step-mom since before birth (a story for a different time), and she never made me feel less than her “bonus son.” When her husband, my father, didn’t want to give me a Christmas present out of homophobic bitterness, she slipped me a hundred. She made an effort to come out to the car to meet my boyfriends, and later, to come stay with us in New York. She and my father have been divorced for a few years now, but I’m still listed in Peggy’s obituary as Lisa’s child. And I am. By choice, hers and mine. The kind of uniquely Southern (some may say white-trash, sprawling) lineage based not around shared blood, marriage, location, or even interests, but simply love. In this way, I see the “empty gestures” differently now. The ‘you’ in “miss you, love you” — in Lisa’s at least — isn’t empty, it’s unconditional.
Lisa became Peggy’s caretaker in her battle with cancer. She’d pack up her car and drive down to the beach. She was with Peggy in her final moments. She told me this a few months ago, right after Peggy died.
It has been three years since my grandma died. I packed up my life too, and I moved back in my childhood home to take care of her. I witnessed how quickly most people clear out when you’re near the end. The Lisas of the world are vital. They carry us from one generation to the next. I hope to carry a part of her legacy.
I’ve been down on myself — in grief, in isolation. I forgot who I was telling stories to. I felt that after I lost my grandma, I lost my audience.
Telling this story, I remember: I’ve never felt I was telling stories to. I felt I was telling stories for.
So Lisa, this one was for you.
ABOUT RYAN CRAVER
Ryan Craver is a filmmaker originally from Mooresville, North Carolina, whose work centers on queerness’s place in the Southern family. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via partnerships with Columbia University (MFA ’20), the Tribeca Film Institute, and SFFILM. Truck Slut, his first short film, premiered at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival and was a special mention at the Palm Springs International Shortfest for ‘Best Emerging Filmmaker.’ He’s currently developing Truck Slut as a TV series with S/B Films.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2022. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
