February 14, 1956 — February 18, 2026
The following is a lil speech i wrote to read at my mother-in-law’s funeral.
I first met Kenette and Tim sometime around 2004 I think. My dear friend Holly from work was their daughter, and i went to visit her in the hospital when she was recovering from a surgery. Not long after that i started dating lovely Holly, and they were just so warm and welcoming and sweet to me. Their smiles were ever present and so genuine. Not the kind of smiles i was used to getting from girls’ parents – i was always just some weird, hairy, rock & roll degenerate to most people so i was always used to seeing smile-until-it’s-over type smiles. But Kenette and Tim always showed me crinkly-eye smiles, the kind where you can feel the room get just slightly warmer and infinitely more comfortable. My name was jeremy then, but Kenette always called me “J.” for short, which i always loved because, for whatever reason, nobody ever gave me any nicknames before. At least not the kind you could say in a church.
In time, my sweet Holly and i got married, and Kenette and Tim were there, and my favorite photo of them is from our after-party at a restaurant in Columbus. They just looked so sweet and happy and satisfied. It’s my favorite because you can see the kind of smiles i was lucky enough to have gotten used to seeing.
Sometime during the pandemic, like a lot of other people, i had time to examine my life and how i see myself in the world. I come from a long line of woodworkers, and through a process of whittling away whatever i wasn’t, i discovered that what was left was, among other things, a non-binary transgender person. For those who might not know, that just means that i don’t think of myself anymore as the boy i was raised as, but as someone with both masculine and feminine traits. For me, i just prefer to hang out on the women’s side of the world more often than the men’s. Anyway, at that time, Kenette was already post-cancer and was having some memory issues, and so she had moved in very close to where Holly and i lived.
So when i started dressing more appropriately for my own self-image (which is to say, way less appropriately), and wearing makeup, i would come over to her apartment to visit, and we’d always have a grand old time, watching weird movies and listening to wild rock music. Over time, it occurred to me that she never said a word about the way i was changing. No questions, no comments, nothing. I was wondering if it somehow wasn’t registering! I started to crack jokes about myself, and she’d laugh, with her eyes all squished up and her smile as big as her face. But still nothing. I simply remained her J. At some point, it dawned on me: she was always like that. She’d always had good friends from all walks of life, all skin shades of human, she always hung around gay people, and she never had anything to say about any differences. There never was anything “different” or “less than” or “unusual” about anybody she ever met. Just people. Her only interest was always just in people to fill her heart with. More people for her to hug and love and share her life with.
I believe in a sort of memetic theory about identity and what lives on after we are gone. We are all personalities. Our bodies, they can be anything – any of us could have been born into any other body, and we’d still be exactly who we are, because it’s our personalities which define us and create our identity. Everyone here has a personality made of things we’ve taken from others before us – mannerisms, turns of phrase, the ways we walk and laugh and leave behind our own bits and pieces for others to pick up. We all have some part of Kenette within us. This is how we live on in others when we are gone. Keep and remember and cherish what you have from her, and i would implore everyone to also keep her alive within you by having her open heart and a genuine love for your fellow human beings.
My name is jae, and my dear friend and mother-in-law Kenette was the very best person i’ve ever known.
Craig Edward Jarratt, aka 
