The first person I loved who died was someone no one remembers. Nettie was my adopted godmother, a neighbor who claimed me as her spirit child when I was still in diapers. Nettie taught me how to see dandelions as food, how to see ants as helpers, and how to speak gently to the land to help the plants grow. When she died, I was twelve.

If you search for her carefully in genealogy records, you can find two marriage licenses and her name, but little else. There is no birth certificate, no descendants, not even a published obituary made it into the local paper. Her story now exists mostly in my own memory, shared in a small way with one of my cousins. She is buried next to her second husband, using a name she traded in before I was born when she was married to her third. It feels strange to realize how easily a whole life can fade from record, how quickly a lifetime of memories can disappear.

I think about Nettie often in this season, when memories seem to rise with the scent of woodsmoke and burning leaves. Maybe it is natural that fall has always been a season of remembrance, as we watch the seasons change, the leaves fall, and things planted in the spring die and slowly turn back into the dust. That same rhythm of change echoes through our UU faith tradition.

More specifically, within Unitarian Universalist LGBTQ+ circles this time of year carries our collective memory. Each November begins with All Souls Day, then comes Intersex Day of Remembrance, followed by Transgender Day of Remembrance, and then World AIDS Day in early December. Each is a day when we remember those we have lost to the long legacies of transphobia and homophobia, but also the resilience, art, and activism that shaped generations of lesbian, bisexual, gay, intersex, and transgender lives through seasons of profound transformation.

Each observance invites us to pause but I still wonder if we are remembering deeply enough. Too often our rituals to remember have become lists of names or brief glimpses into the violence that took too many lives. But remembrance must hold more than death. It must hold the wholeness of living, including the love, the laughter, and the ordinariness of being alive.

So, this year, I want to invite you to remember at least one person in a deeper way. Choose a name of someone whose story you’ve carried quietly in your heart since you learned of their loss. Learn something about their life, their passions, their joys. Speak their name aloud, not as a tragedy, but as a blessing. Let them live again for a moment through your memory, your prayers, and in each breath.

Remembering Sam Nordquist

Right now, the name that I carry most tenderly from this past year is Sam Nordquist. Sam was a Black transgender man from Minnesota, the same state where I lived for twenty-two years, raising my own trans son in the same county where Sam lived. They were the same age.

Sam Nordquist was more than how he died. He was a 24-year-old man from Oakdale, Minnesota, who worked in a group home caring for vulnerable adults. His coworkers and family remember him as patient and compassionate, someone who made others feel safe. His family shares that Sam loved animals and Halloween, celebrating each year with his nieces and nephew, delighting in the simple joy of being an uncle. He was close to his mother, Linda, and carried her love with him wherever he went. Those who knew him described him as joyful and extroverted, with a heart of gold and a smile that lifted a room.

Sam was also a storyteller, a dreamer who shared his life online through humor, honesty, and a longing to connect. He wanted to build a life rooted in love and authenticity.

Both my son and Sam left Minnesota to go to New York state, carrying the same hope that the world might be kind beyond home. When I learned of Sam’s death, I stopped breathing for a moment. My son came home, and it is cruelly unfair that Sam Nordquist did not. The echo between them feels unbearable. And it feels far too familiar as a person who has been living with Matt Shepard’s memory walking next to me all these years since I left Wyoming.

More Than Ritual Repetition

Remembrance must be more than ritual repetition of a name and the date when they died. These were people taken too soon who dreamed, created, studied, and laughed. They had favorite foods and songs, and people who loved them. When we speak their names and grieve their loss, we must remember the fullness of their living.

Sam Nordquist was taken from us by cruelty and violence in February of 2025. But the truth of Sam’s life cannot be held by that violence. His life was radiant, creative, and filled with care for those around him. To remember Sam rightly is to speak his name as blessing, to hold his light close, and to promise again that we will keep building toward a world that will learn to love better than it did for him.

Over my lifetime, I have learned that grief is a teacher that never leaves once it enters our lives. It waits for us to slow down long enough to listen again and to hear the echoes of the past and those we have lost. It is not an interruption of life; it is the pulse beneath it, the heartbeat of loves that no longer have a body we can hold close. Grief reminds us that those connections do not end; they only change form.

When we gather in this season, especially in spaces with other trans and gender-expansive people grieving together, we find proof that we are still alive, still loving, and still creating kinship despite grief and loss. When hatred searches for a scapegoat, it often seeks those of us who are visible and unashamed, but when we gather in love, it cannot destroy us.

The Sacredness of Trans-Only Space

This year, more than others, I need space to be in trans-only spaces. My body needs to breathe, and to release all the stages that come with grief without translation for allies or even my cisgender spouse. These spaces are not about exclusion. They are about survival. They are sanctuaries where we remember that even in our sorrow, we are whole.

Grief is holy. It lingers in the silence that becomes prayer. When I say Sam’s name this year, I will think of all our beloveds who deserve to grow old. I will think of every person whose light was taken too soon.

Grief has taught me that remembering is resistance, but also renewal. It is how love keeps finding us. It is how we keep one another alive.

As you remember those lost too soon over the coming weeks, I leave you with words from the Audre Lorde Project:

Sam Nordquist’s life is precious. 
Lorena Xtravaganza’s life is precious. 
Honee Daniels’ life is precious. 
Islan Nettles’ life is precious. 
Layleen Cubilette Polanco’s life is precious. 
Alexandria Winchester’s life is precious. 
Tiffany Harris’s life is precious. 
Deshauna Smith’s life is precious. 

We honor the life of Sam Nordquist and every trans life taken. 

We are responsible for each other’s precious lives.

Beyond Ritual: An Invitation to Allies and Congregations on Transgender Day of Remembrance

Each November, Unitarian Universalist communities are invited to honor Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), a day born from trans communities themselves, created to mourn and remember those whose lives were taken by anti-trans violence.

This year, what trans people need most from allies is not another memorial service, but sustained action, listening, and commitment. Rituals without relationship can unintentionally recenter grief around cisgender emotions rather than trans survival. We need your courage, your willingness to build relationships, and your readiness to repair the harm facing our communities.

If your congregation includes trans, intersex, and gender-expansive people, we encourage you to hold a trans-centered service designed and led by those voices, with their full consent and safety prioritized. Let trans people define how and whether they want to gather, grieve, and celebrate, and support their wishes.

However, if your congregation does not currently include trans members, consider a different but equally sacred response: to pause, listen, and act in solidarity as our allies. Rather than hosting a TDOR service that centers cisgender voices, use this time to deepen and expand your congregation’s capacity to embody love in action.

Ways to Honor TDOR with Integrity as Allies

• Hold an Allies Vigil.
  Create space for reflection and recommitment to trans justice. Read the names of those lost (or use this video, or the one from UUA Communications) but then ground your time in the call to make your congregation or local community more welcoming and life-affirming.
• Learn and share trans-led stories.
  Feature trans and intersex voices in your newsletters, small groups, or worship throughout the year – not just the third week in November or the last week in March. Draw from the UUA’s UPLIFT blog, TRUUsT (Transgender Religious professional Unitarian Universalists Together), or the Transforming Hearts Collective to help your community learn directly from trans leaders through small group offerings.
• Act and give generously. 
  Offer a special collection or fundraising event to support trans spiritual leadership and education. Below are two of our national UUA organizations or support a local group or effort.

  • TRUUsT (Transgender Religious Professional Unitarian Universalist Transgender)

    TRUUsT is a network of transgender religious professionals within the Unitarian Universalist (UU) tradition, offering spiritual care, advocacy, and resources to support the well-being and inclusion of transgender individuals in faith communities. TRUUsT holds a spring virtual gathering and a fall in-person retreat.

  • Transforming Hearts Collective

    We are queer, transgender, and nonbinary faith leaders of many races, classes, abilities, spiritualities, and ages. Transforming Hearts Collective supports spaces where LGBTQ+ people can access resilience, healing, and spirituality, and provides guidance and resources to faith communities and other groups committed to radical inclusion and culture shift.

A TDOR Reflection: Let the Living Be Witness

Today, we remember our sacred kin.
Each one was beloved. Each one mattered.

But memory alone is no longer enough.
Our candles do more than flicker in sorrow.
They are beacons that light a path for the living to find sanctuary.
They lead us toward a world where every trans, nonbinary, intersex, gender-beautiful person can safely live in their truth.

To honor the dead is not just to say names,
But to commit to protect the living.
To mourn is to move, to build, to act,
To center love in a way that keeps people alive.

May we commit to love the living well enough that we keep fighting,
No matter how long it takes,
Until there are no more names to be mourned,
No more lives taken by violence too soon.