This Too Shall Pass: Remembering Sam Edelman, Who Inspired My Tattoo
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I can’t articulate all of the reasons that Sam’s story haunted and has stayed with me since reading and the one big thing sounds superficial, I saw myself in him, not spiritually, but physically.
My one and only tattoo on my inner left forearm is tangentially pride related and was inspired by Sam. It reads “this too shall pass” in Hebrew. The phrase is not in the Bible but rather from an apocryphal Jewish story about King Solomon made famous by Abraham Lincoln of all people.
Sam stays with me —a transgender teenager who killed himself in 2017 — and in him I see all the myriad aspects of being queer.
His childhood was what most parents would hope for their kids. He made friends easily at Irving Elementary School, excelled as a student and developed a sharp whit still fondly recalled by many. He attended “family karate” with his mom and earned a black belt in taekwondo by the time he was 15. He hunted with his dad, snowboarded with friends and dedicated himself to playing a mean jazz saxophone. He grew muscular and tall, a shade over 6 feet, and most would have considered him a handsome young man. He never wanted to wear a dress; he never asked to play with dolls.
Despite the pride they felt for their son, Vickie and Adam were aware of his flaws. He could at times be short – harsh even – with members of his family and overly hard on himself, especially when it came to his grades. He spent hours playing video games alone in his bedroom and often became angry and frustrated afterwards. Small conflicts could lead to outbursts, and the behavior confused his parents. Was this teenage angst? Was it something more?
About that time, Sam started wearing – exclusively – long-sleeve T-shirts and sweatshirts, even on hot days. Odd, but innocent enough, his parents thought, certainly not worthy of another argument. It wasn’t until a routine physical after his freshman year in high school that a doctor revealed what Sam had been hiding: long, parallel cuts – self-inflicted cuts – along his forearms. Counseling for Sam started soon after. For his parents, incessant despair was just beginning
Parents worry about their kids. But this wasn’t, “Will my daughter make varsity or will my son make decent grades?” This was, “Are we failing our child? Will he survive whatever he is going through?”
“We were just a normal family, and then suddenly we weren’t,” Adam said.
The counseling seemed to help, Vickie and Adam recalled, but – in hindsight – they believe Sam just got better at hiding the secret he apparently found too horrible to share. And he got busy with school and the track team and with band and with taekwondo. After a while, seeing the counselor seemed unnecessary, at least to Sam, and he wanted to stop the sessions. The request prompted an uneasy discussion.
“That’s OK,” Vickie remembered telling her son. But, “We need to be able to ask, ‘Show me your arms.’”
Before his senior year, Vickie and Adam said, Sam withdrew from the things he’d always enjoyed. He quit band, gave up the sports and stopped seeing his sax instructor. And then one afternoon, while Sam and Vickie were alone, driving in the car, he confided: “I do think I am depressed,” Vickie remembered. They stopped the car, hugged and cried, and decided Sam should again talk to a counselor.
“We thought we knew a lot,” Vickie said, “but we had no idea how bad he was hurting.”
Sam’s bedroom in the family home remains how it was the day he last left for college. His snowboard leans against the wall. His many books remain on a desk. The bed is made. Nowadays, his parents mostly enter only to feed Sam’s pet tortoise kept in an aquarium or to vacuum the carpet. Sometimes, they go there to feel Sam.
Vickie remembers her son, standing in this room, sobbing, not long after he’d gone back to counseling. Today, the memory – in her words – breaks her heart. He asked his mother: “If I had something to tell you, would you still love me?”
“All you want is your kid to be able to find their way to peace and happiness,” Adam said. “Period. That’s all. Peace and happiness.”
So, of course, they would love their son, although it still pains both parents that Sam felt the question required asking. They all went to see Sam’s counselor, Adam and Vickie still unaware what could be so difficult for their son to confide.
Sam had talked about wanting to serve his country, about joining the military. Maybe that was it. Did he not want to go to college? Was he gay? All of these things the parents considered. They had no idea their son saw himself as a woman in a man’s body.
The parents admit they initially panicked. They didn’t understand and wondered how “it” had happened. They worried what their son’s life might look like.
What they soon came to realize, however, was that while this was new to them, Sam had been struggling with this realization about himself since grade school. As much as Sam didn’t want it to be true, as much as he just wanted to be anything other than transgender, he had held his secret as long as he could. There was nothing to fix. This was who he was.
So the parents started doing as much research as they could. They found some relief in knowing what had been troubling Sam, and they pledged to find the best doctors, the best therapists, whatever it took to help their son find his way.
“We wanted to do everything possible for Sam,” Adam said. “So, we asked, how do we support him? How do we support each other?”
Later, though, Adam couldn’t help asking: The poster in Sam’s bedroom, the one of a curvy, scantily clad young woman, was that a farce, part of a disguise? “No,” Sam replied. “This is what I want to look like.”
Vickie and Adam now believe that Sam’s quest for perfection – becoming what he viewed as the perfect woman – was really the beginning of a long road to his own personal purgatory.
“The last thing you doubt is your fundamental identity,” Adam said. “This is no choice. This is no lifestyle. This was Sam. This just kicked his ass. Essentially, it’s what killed him.”
There isn’t a list somewhere on all the transgender adults living in the United States, but a national study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law places the number at 1.4 million, an estimated 2,700 of whom live in Montana.
As a middle-school student in Bozeman, Sam was teased for being Jewish. A couple of other students commented that he “should have died in the ovens.” The abuse stuck with him, and he wrote about it in a research project his senior year of high school. He also lamented that he didn’t know much about his mother’s family, which had mostly cut off contact when Vickie married Adam, a man from outside of her religion. Sam wondered why people couldn’t just get along.
“If you read the newspaper, and you see all of these terrible things, you can just turn the page and go on,” Adam said. “Sam had a hard time doing that.”
In May of 2015, just before his graduation from high school, Sam wrote a letter to the editor published in the Bozeman Chronicle. It read, in part, “… It’s not enough for us to just tolerate others. Just tolerating suggests that you merely can stand to be around someone. We have to go one step higher: We need to coexist.”
At this point, that Sam identified himself as a woman was still mostly a secret. He’d told neither his friends nor his siblings; it wasn’t mentioned in his school project or in his letter to the newspaper. Understandable. He’d been persecuted for being Jewish. How in the world would people react to this? Unfortunately, Sam had an idea.
“He was concerned he wouldn’t be able to just live his life,” Vickie said. “He had that question, ‘If I just want to live my life, can I do that?’”
The morning after his graduation from Bozeman High, Sam and his parents drove to a clinic in Missoula that could help Sam make the change from man to woman. A doctor in Bozeman had previously refused to treat him, citing his age, and the wait throughout the school year had been agonizing for Sam.
The doctor in Missoula prescribed drugs for Sam – the hormone estrogen as well as one that blocked his natural production of testosterone. For Sam, getting the prescriptions filled was a festive occasion. He took the first doses in the pharmacy parking lot.
“It was a concrete step, a huge positive step,” Adam recalled.
Back in Bozeman for the summer, Sam got a job at a local restaurant. He’d enrolled at the University of Montana for the fall and started saving money not just for school but also for his ongoing transition. He’d done the research, realized the expense would be significant and worried about being a financial burden to his parents.
“We tried telling him, very clearly, ‘You are loved, you are safe. This will happen,’” Adam said.
Still, changing your sex doesn’t happen overnight. His parents said Sam was excited about the changes he saw in his body and simultaneously frustrated things weren’t happening fast enough. There were times, they said, when Sam would say aloud, “I will never be who I am.”
And Sam, as the pills started to pile up in a shared bathroom, finally told his brother and sister that he considered himself a woman. It was difficult for him to get the words out, his parents remembered, but it actually made sense to Josh and Sophia. After all, they had seen their brother struggling. And they offered their all-out support. Turns out, unconditional love is a powerful thing.
The shopping, too, had been fun. Sam was uncomfortable going into the women’s section of stores, so Vickie grabbed stacks of things for him to try on, skinny jeans, lots of colors –different from his typical baggy, drab wardrobe. And the family laughed together.
Before leaving San Francisco, they all went to see Sophia, a talented ballerina, perform with other dancers at the school she’d been attending. Sam was happy for his sister, so gifted, so beautiful, but, seeing all of the young girls dancing, he felt cheated.
“It hit him hard,” Adam said.
As much as he may have wished it so, the unwavering support of the people he most loved and even all the new clothes in the world weren’t going to change some truths, including one that Sam Edelman was never going to be a ballerina.
They took lots of pictures that day. Sam smiling. Sam looking happy, hopeful, getting settled into his dorm room on the fifth floor of Miller Hall. Still, as Vickie and Adam dropped their son off at the University of Montana for the start of his freshman year, they knew the struggle he had in front of him. Hard enough, they thought, for any kid being away from home for the first time.
They knew, too, that they had to leave, to trust Sam to begin finding his way. Sam wanted that, as well. Just the same, as they drove away, when they left him, Adam turned to his wife and asked, “What if we don’t see him again?”
That apprehension, that fear, was real, so that first week the parents admittedly texted Sam a lot. Food was good, classes going OK, meeting some people. Went to a couple of parties, played some beer-pong, took a selfie by the “M” on Mount Sentinel overlooking the campus. Joined a Jewish club.
“Really, it was as good as you could hope for,” Vickie said.
The relief for his parents back home was immense, and some of those positive reports from Sam had the added benefit of being true. Sam, though, was hiding plenty.
In a paper he wrote later for his freshman composition class, Sam told a different story about those first days at college and primarily about the night of Sept. 7, 2015.
“I was depressed. I went about my day like usual. I woke up late after a night of crying. I made some coffee. I read the news on my phone. Then I packed my bag and went to class. I said hi to my friends and gave them a fake smile. After classes, I sat in my room and stared at the wall for three hours before trudging down to eat alone again. I called my parents. I told them I’d never been better. My day went great. I assured them I was going to get an appointment with a counselor. But I don’t really need one. ‘Bye, Mom. Love you. Afterwards, I smiled one last time at the picture of my dog hanging in my room before swallowing every pill I could find and opening my window to jump.”
Sometime after midnight, the caller ID on Vickie’s phone read, “Missoula PD.” Sam overdosed and was in the hospital. But he hadn’t jumped. As Sam wrote for his composition class, “I decided I didn’t want to die.”
