Olivia died on the Fourth of July weekend of 1994.

I remember that afternoon so well. It was Saturday, around 3:00. I was sitting at my computer, working on something long forgotten, or perhaps just passing time. The phone rang; it was Louise, the gender therapist who worked with both Olivia and me.

"Have you heard about Olivia?" she asked.

Something felt wrong immediately, perhaps in her tone, perhaps in the complete absence of any reason for her to call and to ask that particular question.

"Olivia's dead," she said.

We talked for a while. Olivia had just moved into a new apartment a few days before, and had gone to Maryland for the weekend. She had been "fatally injured" in a car accident--I never did find out exactly when she died--and the police were trying to find some way to get in touch with her family. Olivia lived alone, and possibly hadn't even changed the address on her driver's license yet. The only lead the police had was Louise's business card, which they found in the purse Olivia carried as both male and female. Louise was calling all of us--Dale, Amy, Cathy, Julie, me--to see if we had any suggestions. Olivia had talked to all of us at one time or another about her family, but none of us had anything like names, addresses, or phone numbers, the kind of things the police needed.

The only suggestion I had was Olivia's endocrinologist; she'd just started on hormones, and might have listed family contacts with the doctor. Since Louise had referred Olivia to that doctor, this was at least another lead she could pass on to the Maryland police.

Less than a minute after I finished talking to Louise, Carol, my significant other, called. "Has something happened?" she asked. She'd had a feeling all day that something bad had happened, and that it was related to me. She just--knew. I told her what it was.

I was in shock; we all were. Olivia had been my closest friend in the local gender community. We were about the same age. We both worked as programmers. We shared our experiences and feelings about gender, and about so many things.

We talked about therapy. When I first met Olivia, she was seeing a psychiatrist, one who was quite reluctant to recommend her for hormones. I remember her talking about wearing a "Screaming Man goes to Therapy" t-shirt to therapy, and about how she'd once been recounting a work conversation to the psychiatrist--a conversation that she had as a male--and happened to say, "I was talking to another woman." which set the psychiatrist into a bit of shock. Olivia got a good chuckle out of that, but it didn't help her progress toward hormones. After Olivia started with Louise, we continued to compare notes; at a time when Louise was counseling me about risks to the sexual side of my relationship with Carol if I started hormones, she took Olivia through visualization exercises to "say good-bye to her genitals." I remember Olivia telling me that she watched her male genitals fly away, and that it felt "pretty damned good."

We got our referrals for hormones the same day. We chose different doctors, as Olivia wanted to combine starting hormones with a trip to Asheville to visit friends. Because of that, I started before she did. We talked for weeks about the advantages and disadvantages of every known form of estrogen and of testosterone suppresser. When I came back from my endocrinologist with a completely different regimen than anything we'd considered likely, the second thing I did (after taking the first estrogen tablet) was to call Olivia and recount the entire hour I'd talked to the doctor.

We went out to eat together, Olivia driving her red Corvette harder than I would ever have dared, leaving me glued to the seat as we flew through the streets of Cary. We watched an awful movie, "Valley Girl," that had been recommended to help us learn a feminine voice. ("Learn to speak valley-girl, then learn to tone it down." Right. We decided to do without that part.) It was a special friendship; it may have been the blind leading the blind, but we were exploring the early phases of gender transition together, almost in lock-step. But now Olivia was dead, and I was terribly alone.

Over the next few days, I learned a little more about Olivia and her death. O. D., Olivia's male side, collected knives--large, hand-made, ornate knives. As O. D., she'd gone to Maryland to pick up a knife from a knife-maker friend. They'd been out driving, Olivia in her Corvette, and she'd lost control on a curve. Perhaps she'd still been tired from moving, perhaps--we all speculated, but none of us ever really knew how or why, most of all why. Olivia hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and the fiberglass body of her beloved Corvette did nothing to protect her. Her knife-maker friend was not seriously injured.

I checked the newspaper each day, the first time I've ever read the obituaries. A couple of days later, there it was: O. D. Palmer, age 43. Olivia was not listed, either as deceased or among the family.

I called the funeral home listed in the newspaper, and was told that there would be no public ceremony, no public viewing, no public anything. That was the way the family wanted it. This was a second blow, as unexpected as the first, and in some ways even harder. Olivia would go to her grave as O. D., and none of the people who knew her as Olivia would be there to mourn. O. D. would be buried by friends and family, but Olivia had simply ceased to exist. For me, and for Olivia's other friends, there would be no closure on her death.

In Olivia's family, only her brother knew. Thankfully, he had accepted her fully. Thankfully, because it fell to the family to clear out her apartment. The clothes and the makeup could be explained, perhaps, but the wigs and the bottle of Premarin with O. D.'s name on it would have given away Olivia's secret. Thankfully, because someone had to tell Olivia's father.

Olivia was afraid of coming out to her father. She described him once as a patrician, an old southern gentleman who ruled his family. His health was not the best, but his mind was still sharp; the control was still there. Olivia was terrified of losing him, as much for their relationship as for the fact that losing him would have cut her off from most of the rest of her family as well. But Olivia was not short on courage; she'd started the process of coming out to him, the hard way, a little at a time. He knew that something serious was going on, but Olivia had not yet told him what it was.

Olivia's brother was the one who told him. "Is that all it was?" was his reaction. He was actually relieved; he'd been afraid of something much worse, like elephantiasis. One never knows what will happen when coming out, and it would seem that Olivia may have had little to be concerned about with her father. That's the catch--you never know, you can't know until you've committed yourself, and then it's too late. Olivia needed his acceptance, and she died too soon to get it.

O. D., Olivia--who died? Both died, but O. D. is a stranger whose death I mourn along with Olivia's. There are patterns among the transgendered; in Olivia's case, O. D. overcompensated toward the macho side. Olivia herself described O. D. as a "hard--drinking, hard-driving, hard-swearing biker." She told me once about being out at a biker bar, and being out in the parking lot with a "biker momma" who was getting really hot for O. D. That night, O. D. was wearing pink lace panties under her biker leathers. Olivia was more than little scared of what might happen if the woman found out what O. D. was wearing. Things never progressed quite that far. Olivia carried scars--literally--from those days; because of a motorcycle accident, she always wore dark hose or leggings.

I never met O. D.; I only glimpsed him once, when I stopped by to pick up Olivia when we were going out. She wasn't quite ready to go, and met me at the door in her dress and makeup, but without her wig. O. D. was completely bald, with a long gray fringe around the sides and back.

Cathy knew O. D., though; they worked in different parts of the same company, and had lunch together frequently. It was Cathy who got to see O. D.'s biker jacket, and who told me about it.

Julie knew O. D, too. Julie's wife could not accept Julie's feminine side, so Julie stored her clothes in Olivia/O. D.'s apartment for a while. Linda, our electrologist, knew O. D.; she never got to see Olivia as Olivia.

Olivia, O. D.--and another casualty. In the days following her death, I learned just how close we all were to Olivia. None of us had realized it, but Olivia was the emotional center of our transgender community in Raleigh. After her death, friendships remained and even grew, but I never again felt that sense of community. Perhaps my own need for such a community had passed, but we all felt this loss. Amy felt it harder than any of us, and we were all worried about her for a while. As much as we shared our grief, though, the community did die; of that group, I remained close only to Cathy. While I started my transition with Olivia, it was Cathy and I who carried on as sisters.

We all did our part to bring Olivia into our community. Dale was her first contact, probably on the Internet. Olivia and Amy joined the community at the same time. The first time I met her, I remember her telling about coming out to a friend and his wife; afterwards, the friend's wife hesitantly asked what this meant about "what flavor do you like?"

I introduced Olivia to Louise at a gender community Christmas party at Louise's home. Although Olivia knew no one else at the party, she was able to guess--correctly, in every case--whether each person there was a cross-dresser, transsexual, or neither. It's all in how they're dressed, she said; cross--dressers are flashy; transsexuals dress to blend in.

That is the Olivia I remember, gentle, soft-spoken, almost grandmotherly--but a youthful grandmother who would take you to a Pink Floyd concert, because it was her idea, not yours, and who would enjoy it as much as anyone there. O. D. lived inside her, and showed through in flashes such as that, or in jokes about how the Cadillac was her car, but the Corvette belonged to her husband--at least as far as the neighbors were concerned.

And that--the joke about the neighbors not knowing, her fears about telling her family--became the legacy of Olivia that I carry inside me. I am still angry that we came so close to never knowing what happened to her. If it were not for that chance call from the Maryland police to Louise, we might never have known. Olivia would have just vanished, leaving us all to wonder, with no way to know the truth, ever. Our ties to each other are that fragile, and it is our own fault. Because of shame, of secrecy, of fear, too many of us lead this double life, and when the double life comes apart, as it did for Olivia, how are the ones left behind able to pick up the pieces? If Olivia had simply disappeared, it would have hurt far worse than the knowledge of her death.

From that legacy, along with other forces that have shaped me, I made a vow: no more secrets. I will not lead that double life. If a person is important in my life, they will know who I am; they can make their own decisions about whether to accept me or not. I will not cast anyone aside out of fear of what they might think of me. I will not be ashamed of who I am. Shame and secrets carry power, and I will not give that kind of power over me to anyone.

But while Olivia's death helped to shape my life, I'd rather that she were still here, still my friend. Eventually, I would probably have made the same decisions about my life without her having to die for it. So either way, then, I have no answer to the question of "why?"

Louise is the only one who ever ventured an answer. She said once that perhaps Olivia had dealt with the issues that she needed to take care of, and that because she was done with this work, her time had come.

I did not, do not, and can not accept that. Olivia had too much left to live for. She was still in the process of becoming Olivia. She had not completed her transformation, nor did she have the opportunity to go beyond that, to simply be the person that she should have been all along.

At the same time, Olivia had a streak of fatalism; I remember more than once when she said, "It will all be over before long; either I'll be a woman, or I'll be dead." I never considered any possibility except that becoming a woman would win out. But Louise must have known about that fatalism, and must have thought hard about it through those difficult days after Olivia's death.

The life that Olivia would have lived still waits for her. It will wait a very long time.