I get a phone call from my mom, and she tells me that my father is about to get on an emergency life flight from our home in Montana to go to Denver to get a liver transplant.

My mom is perennially optimistic, and she's telling me, "Don't worry. We're going to pull through this. It's going to be all right." But I know something is really wrong. I'm living in New York, so I get the next flight I can, hoping that I can get there before my father dies. And I'm really glad I got that flight as fast as I did, because I was able to spend a couple of hours with my father before he passed away. And before I know it, I'm at the side of his hospital bed with my mom, and we're sobbing, because he's gone.

My dad was a strong, silent type. He grew up on a farm, and he was one of two eye doctors in town. So he could fix anything. It was apparent that my mom and I were going to have to be fixing things ourselves this time around. And the first thing my mom did was to call my two brothers. One is a year older than me, one is a year younger, and it was going to be really comforting to see my younger brother – we were really close. It was going to be much more complicated seeing my older brother, Mark. We'd always had a really complicated relationship, and there was something really big about me that he did not know. The last time he saw me, years and years before, I was male. He was not aware that I had transitioned from being male to being female. And you know, I always wanted to tell him. I was trying to find the right time, the right place – trying to get up the nerve. I was worried about his reaction. He was a bit conservative. He had a temper, and I just kept putting it off – never found the right time. And now here we were.

Mark wasn't the only one who didn't know my story – my home town didn't know about me, either. I was trying to find a way to tell Mark, but I kind of figured that with my home town, I would just never go back there. So my mom calls my brother, and in one phone call tells him that he has lost his father and that he has a sister.

I have to say, Mark was really great. We met him at the airport. He gave me a hug. But it was awkward. And I think we did what a lot of families do at times like that – you just kind of fall back on tradition. We wanted to do something that my mom and dad had always done, because it was my father's birthday. He had passed away 20 minutes before his 65th birthday. So we all went to Applebee's, and got a slice of sizzling apple pie and put a candle in it. And Mark, who worshipped my father, got the honour of blowing out the candle.

I remember the expression on his face when he was blowing out the candle. He was trying to process my father's passing. He was figuring out why it had been so long since the two of us had talked, something that really frustrated him. And it was all coming together. I took a business card out of my purse for a job that Mark didn't know I had. It had my new name on it. I wrote my cellphone number on it, and I gave it to Mark. I said, "Look, you know, we haven't talked for so long, but here – any time, any place, no barriers. We can talk any time you want."

And my mom started crying because her children were reuniting. For years she had been running interference between the two of us, using every excuse in the book to explain why I wasn't getting back to him, or why packages to me were being returned because they had the wrong name on them. And her job was over.

We were all in shock. I was thinking about the fact that nobody in my home town knew. And I was wondering if I could go back for the funeral – if I should go back, if my mom and my brothers really wanted me to, deep down. I never even thought I was going to go back to my home town, but I now had this deep yearning. I had gone to school in New York and San Francisco, and travelled all over the world, and this was a place that I thought of as home. I think I had repressed it, knowing that I couldn't go back there. But as soon as there was a reason, a very strong reason, I really wanted to go. And my mom reassured me that she wanted me to be there, she needed me there for support. And she had a plan: we would all rent a car and drive the 20 hours from Denver to Montana.

So before you know it, there we were in the car. My brother hadn't seen me for years, and here we were. And we had so much to do. We were planning my father's funeral service. We were writing his obituary.

But also, my mom wanted to figure out – and I did, too – how we could introduce the information about me while keeping the focus on my father. So, driving across Wyoming, at 70mph, she had me take dictation. She wanted to invite her friends over for tea. She had this really strategic list. It was like, "You invite Judy," and she's going to tell all the people in the arts community that my mom was involved in, and "You're going to tell June, and June is going to tell all the people at Dad's office. And we'll find somebody else who's going to tell everybody at the church."

And the next night, there they are, 18 of my mom's best friends and the minister from the church where the service was going to be performed. They're drinking tea. And my mom says, "You all know very well by now that I've lost my husband. And I know a lot of you have wondered what happened to my middle son, who seemed to disappear. I want you to know tonight that I have a daughter, and her name is Kim. And this is my child, and I love my child, and I hope you do, too, and we can focus on this tonight. We can talk about this tonight. You all are my ambassadors. If someone has questions at the funeral, and I'm caught up in things, I'm going to point them to you and let you tell this story, because you can talk about it in a sensitive way."

She takes a couple of questions from the people there. And the whole thing ends with everybody raising a teacup and saying, "Hip hip hooray for Kim!" And then everybody went home, and I swear there was a brownout from all the simultaneous phone calls that were being made, dispensing the information.

Kimberly Reed: 'I probably should have also told you before that, um, not only was I on the football team, but I was the quarterback.' Photograph: Brian Harkin for the Guardian

The next night there was a viewing of my father's body at the funeral home, and I had elected not to go because I didn't want the focus to be on me – I was going to keep it on my father. But my best friend, Tim, from high school, was at the viewing, and he called me up. He had only known the new me for a couple of days. But he knew me well, and he knew I was chickening out. He called me from the funeral parlour, and said, "Hey, got a lot of people here that really want to see you." I should tell you that the people he was talking about were the football team, because I used to be on the football team.

And so Tim says, "Where are you?"

And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't want to go. You know, I want to keep the focus on my dad."

And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Either you come down here, or we're going to come up there. What's it going to be?"

And I say, "Come up here, I guess."

So before I know it, the football team is at my front door. And a couple of them have cases of beer under their arms. One case gets tossed in the snowbank to keep it cold… it's just like high school. And all of a sudden, they're in my living room. And it's this wake instantly, this show of support for me and for the memory of my father. And they're in my living room, this living room I never even thought I would see again.

And people are either laughing or crying, mostly laughing. And I remember looking around the room, and there are my brothers, Mark and Todd, and they're telling stories about my dad. And I look over on the couch, and there's Frank. He used to be an offensive lineman. It's the job of an offensive lineman to protect the quarterback. I probably should have also told you before that, um, not only was I on the football team, but I was the quarterback. And Frank is protecting me once again, 20 years later, under very different circumstances. He's got his arm around my girlfriend. They're laughing and knocking back cans of cheap beer, and that was the moment I knew things were going to be OK somehow.

And there was one more person there that night, and that was my mom. She told me something that we ended up repeating quite a bit that weekend, through the services. She came up, and she said, "You know, Dad was always fixing things, and it looks like he fixed this, too." And she said, "You know, even though your father has died, you've been reborn."

• This is an edited extract from The Moth: This Is A True Story, edited by Catherine Burns, published by Serpent's Tail at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

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