heat

First summery weekend in NY. The hot, humid air always conjures up my nostalgia for this city. When I was growing up here I was always lonely. I longed for the summer when I would go back home and see my friends and later my boyfriend. Then I would return, usually around Labor Day, to the suffocating summer city. That came to symbolize New York for me and when I was away from it for nine years, that is how I imagined it and missed it.

When I came here with my own little family I felt I had won - I had the best of both worlds - the city I loved, without the loneliness it went along with.

The first summer I sent my son home to his grandparents. When he came back he was all tan from the beach, with sun-bleached hair - a vision of beauty at 7. We went to Central Park and as we were descending towards the little pond near the Alice in Wonderland sculpture we passed by Paul Simon and his then pregnant wife, Edie Brickell. Our son was running ahead of us dressed in a white button-down shirt bought at a garage sale and khaki pants. As they passed us, he turned to her and said "what a beautiful boy." I felt so fortunate right then to be envied by someone who had everything.

My beautiful boy is gone, but that vision of beauty still makes me feel fortunate for having had it.

pain

The truth is we can only feel so much of it. Then the body's anesthesia kicks in and you feel nothing. I feel nothing most of the time. Only upon waking up, without fail, do I feel the gripping pain in my abdomen. First consciousness, then pain. Then it passes and I either fall asleep again or I get up. I know the drill now, I wait for it to pass. I wonder if it will ever stop. I wonder if other people feel this. I wonder if it's a coincidence that that's where my womb is. Sometimes it spreads to my chest. But it always starts in my core. Sometimes I wonder if it's a muscle spasm. But no, it's just in my mind. And it will never go away. As long as I live.

time

8 months today.  Not that time is relevant.  Every day is the same day. 

"I get up in the morning, put my dreams away.  I get up, I get up, I get up again." 

It's from a song by a group called Dead Man's Bones.  Ryan Gosling's their frontman.  My son told me about them, of course.  All their songs feature death.  In a non-morbid way.  There's even a children's choir.

When there is no future, does time really exist?  Once we stop growing up, we measure time by our children's lives.  That's when time is meaningful.  Now it doesn't matter.  Yes, I'm getting older, but when you're already dead, age doesn't matter. Just a little bit older and colder every day.

good death and bad death

So I read this article today, which asks if death is bad for you.  I have always said no.  The quote above is from Dylan Thomas, This Side of the Truth.  I wrote a term paper on it in high school and it has stuck with me.  The deal, of course, is that there is no good or bad death - it's all the same in the end, or as my son was quoted as saying "We all fall short in the end."

So why do I feel bad about my son dying?  For myself, of course, because I miss him.  But I also feel bad for him, though not because it's better to be alive than dead, but because of what I failed to convey to him, because of all the times he felt lacking, because of his self-doubt.  I want to make it all better, but I can't, because he's gone. 

I don't know where I read this - I thought it was Dostoyevsky, but I couldn't find it in The Brothers Karamazov, it could have been C.S. Lewis - that heaven, if it is to exist as a valid concept, must go back in time and remove the pain that was suffered by innocents.  That's what I want to do, but I can't. I can't make amends.

risen

I had a dream that my son had died, but he was younger - 9 or ten. We had scheduled the ceremony and informed people. But as I was watching the body he awoke. I was only briefly startled, then I was happy and relieved. He was still weak, but he was calm and seemed happy to please us with his revival. As I stroked and kissed his head I watched him for signs that it was really him. We had given away his clothes, so I thought I must go buy him new ones and that pleased me, but then I thought maybe I should ask someone with older boys to donate some. I remembered some of the clothes he had at that age or earlier and thought he would have outgrown them anyway. I had the feeling that we can start over now.

reading Batman

I dug out from under my bed the stacks of comics he left. Roughly a third of them are about Batman.  He kept buying them up to when he died.  They even emailed him after to pick up one he had prepaid.  It was called Avaritia.  I liked the name.  In our last fight I questioned the recurring charges at the comic book store.  “Sometimes I buy lots of comic books because they let me feel like a little kid for a few hours,” he replied accusingly. 

I am looking for the key to his obsession.  Why Batman?  There's a lot about death and redemption.  I'm reminded of the novel Fortress of Solitude, but Yassen never liked Lethem.  Too close to home?  I don't know if I can read any of these.  It's an alien experience.  But I'm running out of ways to get to know him better.  To understand.

woke up screaming

...last night. 

There was an elaborate assassination plot against my son.  We were trying to subvert it with the help of decoys - other tall young men.  But I realized they were tracking us by our cell phones, so I went to the terrace to throw out mine, but couldn't because there was some kind of net that I had to claw through first.  Then the assassin caught up with me.  It was someone I knew.  My first boss in the US.

I woke myself up with a choked out cry of "I'll kill you!"

past life

My husband made me take one of those silly tests, multiple choice - he didn't tell me what it was about, I assumed it was a character test.  It was, but with a twist - it was supposed to determine who you were in a past life.  It said I was a nanny on the Titanic, because I stay calm under pressure and my first thought is to help others.

He didn't see the irony of it.  I had to look away because my eyes filled.  If that was indeed the case, let's consider how I feel about my present life.

No mothers day

There's a well-meaning, if misguided, campaign by that title, asking mothers to disappear on Mothers Day to bring attention to the preventable deaths of mothers in childbirth.  Look it up.  But this is not what this is about.

Mothers Day last year was the last day I spent with my son.  He had come to NY to meet with a casting agent, who had seen his photos on FB.  When he told me he was coming I reminded him it was also Mothers Day that week.  He rebuked me for reminding him and said that's why he was coming then. 

The night before he quarreled with his father.  He almost left then and there, but I convinced him to stay.  We went out on Sunday.  First I took photos of him, because the casting agent wanted to see natural light ones.  They were terrible.  I probably cost him the job.  If he had gotten it he might have moved back to NY instead of going to California, where he died.

There is also a photo of us taken by me - the worst photo ever, actually, two of them - the second one is worse, but they are the last photos of us together.

We went to brunch at one of the neighborhood restaurants.  Waiters were handing out roses to the obvious mothers in the room.  He looked at me, not getting a rose, and said - you know it's because you look too young to be my mother.  That much was true - we could have been a mismatched couple.  We got that a lot on a cruise we went on several years earlier.  I was neither flattered, nor upset. 

Then we went to the park where I took the photos of us.  On the way back he got hungry again, so we stopped at an Asian restaurant.  I had undertipped in the morning, just because I couldn't calculate after the Bloody Mary, and he was upset with me.  Here I overcompensated and he asked me sarcastically whether I liked Asians better than Mexicans.  I admitted I was bad at tipping.

That's all I remember of that day.  Next day he left and four months later he was dead and I never got to see him again.

can't breathe

I had agreed to be transported somewhere while in a tight and airless space. It was like a car, but I was pressed against the window, and we were supposed to go under water. I tried to practice yoga technique, telling myself I would be okay holding my breath and won't suffocate, and I shouldn't panic. But I guess I did panic because I woke up.

I went to the bathroom and temporarily forgot the dream. But then when I went back to bed I kept having trouble breathing and was wondering why I was upset. Then the dream came back to me.

The thought that first came into my mind was I must scatter my son's ashes - he shouldn't be in a box. Then I thought: maybe this is what he went through when he died. Did he dream he couldn't breathe and he couldn't wake up?

Didion

I finally finished the book by her that I started last summer - her first novel Run River.  No wonder I had trouble finishing it.  A 26-year-old dies in it. Her sister-in-law burns her journals, because she doesn't want her husband, the brother, to 'see the pattern.'  He blames himself for not keeping her safe.  He eventually kills himself after he murders somebody, and as his wife holds his body, she tells him her memories of him.

"She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much."

the horror

A friend wrote to me when she found out: “You gave him so very much of your life to help make his... horror. what horror. how incredibly cruel.” Cruel, yes, but a waste, as is implied by the first statement - emphatically, no. He made my life as much as I made his. Maybe more.

I always felt sorry for couples who were childless by choice. Maybe even felt superior to them. I know, that’s not very nice. Do I feel chastened now? To the contrary. A child is not an investment. A child is the closest an atheist can get to God. That’s what I felt when I was in labor. I was just a vehicle for life to come through me. That’s what I always felt it was – a sacred responsibility. That’s why I feel like such a colossal failure. I had a treasure – I held the meaning of life in my hands – and I lost it.

forgetting

In going over his Facebook posts, trying to keep his voice alive in my head, I’ve come across this quote repeatedly. It was like a mantra. It’s from Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

This is its continuation:

“We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

Except when death freezes things and the present stops obscuring the past. Surely then we don’t forget.

from a reader

"Maybe he knew it all along. Knew that this was just a brief visit.... Through his death and your writings, you have become closer than ever. You see your similarities. Maybe this was what scared him sometimes: he was afraid of exposing his own vulnerability to you, because he knew you would understand too well."

Thank you, E. for making me feel understood.  And thank you to all of you reading this and making me feel less alone.

Second-guessing

This is an excerpt from the book I'm writing:

He told me I was in denial, but really he was hiding the truth from me all along. ‘Can I trust you now?’ I wanted to ask him. I don’t want to relive my whole life, I just want to redo that conversation. Even if it fails to change anything. I just want another chance. There are so many things we think are impossible to change, but death is really the only one. There is always another chance before death. We just don’t want to take it for fear of being wrong. I didn’t ask him ‘can I trust you now’ because I thought he would fly into a rage as he did whenever I doubted him. I predicted his behavior and acted accordingly. But what if I was wrong? What if that would have been the right opening? What if even if he had still died we had had a different conversation from all those other ones. There are signs that he really changed towards the end. I missed out on the opportunity to acknowledge that.

“Every day I wake up and spend five hours training my body to exhaustion just so I don't have enough energy to actually throw myself off a bridge. Everyday I am forced to reconcile the mangled peices of a human being and I don't thinly you've even noticed.” 

Of course I noticed. With a mix of pride and terror I watched his boastful postings about his injuries. A really bad shin scrape, the ‘still prettier than you’ almost broken nose, the bruised ribs he complained of a few weeks before the end and which I suspected had caused him to overmedicate. The Fight Club therapy he was practicing. Was he rebelling against me? Against my emasculating power. He ended our last fight with: “I have to go hit people now. Thankfully.” Three hours later he apologized. It was self-punishment, wasn’t it? Freud’s melancholic, who rather than hating others turns it upon himself.

Our Dark Knight

I got up last night to write down this dream.

Batman had to withdraw from the world because of a super villain who was after him, so he feigned his death and from then on would live in secret with his family. And that would be enough because being with the people you love is like being with everybody. This was a movie in the dream, but the ending was only revealed after the movie ended, so it was real.

Some writer said you never have to revise what you get up to write in the middle of the night. I guess it's true. I was questioning the title of my book, but I have a reason for it now.

acceptance

I've been wondering all these months what people mean when they say it will get easier, except not knowing what the hell they're talking about, obviously.  But I think I know now - it's this, this terrible calm, this acceptance that nothing will ever be the same and yet things will go on regardless.  And this is so much worse.  It's like hoping for a death sentence and getting life in prison.

live in dreams

In my dream you had come home because something went awry with your plans - you screwed up.  But I was happy because you were there and I could hug you.  You looked over my shoulder as I was cooking chicken and kale - what I actually plan to cook today. 

When I woke up I wasn't pained that it wasn't real, because in a way it was.  I got to hug you again.

money

First time I remember that I've had money in my account come the end of the month.  It hurts so much.  I wish you were still here, so we could keep arguing over money and getting me into debt.

You were right about that, as about so much else.

writing

“No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.” - Jack Kerouac

Writing is becoming a tyranny.  Not just this, but the 'book' I'm writing.  I'm tired of judging my emotions by how good a writer I am.  Yes, a lot of it is trite.  That doesn't make it less true.  'Trite', a word I learned in creative writing class in middle school.  The worst condemnation.  Enough.  I just want to feel.

Spring

The nice weather makes me want to die.  And I don't mean just now.  I've always been like that.  It's like I've been created to tough it out, but I don't have what it takes to let go and enjoy the warmth.  No, that makes me want to quit. "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair."  It brings so many expectations that will never be fulfilled. 

more dreams

Well, I thought the fear had disappeared.  That gut-gripping fear upon awakening.  But that's because I hadn't dreamed of him.  It came back one night.  I was following him and watching him go somewhere, a bad place, at night, looking for danger. I wasn’t trying to stop him, more spying on him, but I was cut by the knowledge that this is what he does, that there are things I don’t know about, risky things.

Then last night I had quite a different dream, a very Freudian one.  He was 6 or 7, we had gone back home for good and I was concerned that he would forget English so I was going to get my father (a former Ambassador) to ask at the American embassy if they would accept him in their after-school program so he could go there maybe once a week. I was concerned that he would grow up not speaking English. There was also some other opportunity - a play(?) that I wanted him to try out for. The embassy's back yard abutted on our own (or what appeared to be my grandparents' village house yard). We could hear the kids playing. As I was formulating this plan there was some urgency to it, but at the same time I thought, well, what's the point, when he's dead now, but I still planned to go through with it.

why me?

Sometimes the unfairness of it just chokes me.

End of the day

Such a blessed relief. Especially on weekends when I'm at a loss as to what to do with myself.

I did my yoga, I cooked lunch, I did my writing (thank god for that), I'm having my drink (never enough, but I resist overindulging) and soon (not soon enough) I will be unconscious. Overall a success, I think, considering I have no hope for the future.

'Life is how it is, not how it was.' - Bright Eyes

the question of self-pity

"People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it.' Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is unnatural, a failure to manage the situation." - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

How many times did I say this to people - it's only self-pity that makes me sad. I'm not sad for him - he is no more, I'm sad for me. But I'm also sad for who he was. Now that I'm writing about him the hardest thing is not writing about the death. That gives me a certain comfort. I can feel a certain detachment as I'm describing what I'm going through. But when I write about his life, everything makes me sad - the good and the bad, the things we did and didn't do. I wish we had done more.

I wish we as humans didn't dread death. What is death to us? I just wish we knew what we have while we are living. But we can't. We just can't.

writing

I've started writing what I hope will be a book. Working title is Our Dark Knight. In a way it comes easily. I'm never at a loss as to what to write next, but it comes at a cost. Being truthful brings up pain that would otherwise lie below the surface. I realize that I'm in a peculiar state, one in which anger and self-blame become one. But I have no choice. I've failed at life. I need to succeed at writing. Otherwise I have no excuse for continuing to occupy space on this Earth. I owe it to him. His life is complete, but mine isn't. It's a lonely task. It makes me feel like I'm at the bottom of a well. Memories are not things you have. They are things you will never have again.

reading

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues

 I first heard the poem in "Four Weddings and a Funeral".  Was reminded of it reading Joan Didion's memoir about the death of her daughter, Blue Nights.  Went on to read the one about her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. 

I never liked Joan Didion, although she was one of my son's favorites.  I always found her cold.  Now I think she is just like me.  Or maybe all people who lose their only child are alike.  In any case, it helps to read about someone else experiencing the exact same thing.  It makes you feel less alone.  Thank you, Joan.  You take comfort where you can find it.  I have always looked to literature.  Never thought I would find it in non-fiction.  It has changed my perspective on writing.  That even the most profoundly personal can be universal.

just deserts

Lately I've been feeling that I deserve what happened.  More than that - that we all deserve what we get.  And so I deserve this barren life, bereft of its only meaning - love.  Why?  Because of cowardice.

You told me I lived in denial.  Not exactly.  It's not that I couldn't see.  It's that I couldn't act.  My sins are all ones of omission.  I never did the wrong thing.  I just didn't do the right thing.  Because of fear.  There are instances that come clearly to mind.  But this is not the place. 

I said in the beginning that I knew I was always meant to write.  The reason I haven't is not because I think my writing is not good enough.  It's because I have no imagination.  I'm always amazed at how wildly imaginative my dreams are.  But in real life I have no access to that power.  But there's one thing I can do.  I can write what I know.   I was kind of a journalist after all.  I can take what I know and make people understand it.  Maybe even feel it.  That's all I need to do now.  I need to write about you.  Because you were amazing.  Because you had no fear.

Another reason I gave myself a pass on becoming a writer is because I thought you could do it better.  You were as good a writer as me, but you also had a life.  But although you wrote, you didn't leave behind much.  You were too busy living.  Well, I have no life now, so I have all the time in the world.  I will write about your life.  I don't pretend to know all of it.  I was in denial, remember?  But there are people out there who know about it.  They can help me fill in the gaps.

no love

Oh, who am I kidding?  Love can't save anyone.  You knew that.  You were wiser than me in so many ways.  Love is at best an illusion.  The best kind, but still an illusion.  No one can take away another's pain.  No one can give another's life meaning.  I was naive to believe that.

And you were right about me - I did live in denial.  As cynical as I am, I could never face up to how ugly things really are.  I was always secretly hopeful that truth and beauty will prevail.  

I am no more.

love

"everything passes before you get to scream I LOVE YOU out the the window of the train"

I hadn't seen that one before.  I know you meant it more than literally, but that's one of the biggest regrets I have for you - that you never really found a deep romantic love.  I think that if you had, it could have saved you.  I know that mine couldn't.

black hole

I think it gets harder with time.  Fresh grief has its consolations, not least among them - disbelief.  I remember the night it happened.  My mind balked at accepting it.  It tried to remove itself.  It would forget for a moment and then be cut anew by the knowledge. 

Now it can't hide from the knowledge.  I don't have to remember it each time I wake up.  I know it even in my sleep.  There is no place to hide.

It also gets harder to evoke your existence.  Your words are still fresh.  I get a fix of them every day, but there are only so many of them.  They are only you at a certain point in time.  They are not your essence, which was ever moving and evolving.  The hardest thing is not that I miss you.  I missed you even while you lived - you were away most of the time and the phone was a poor substitute.  The hardest thing is that you are frozen in time.

You lose a child continually as it grows up.  You miss the different stages of its life.  But you never expect its life to be complete.

One thing that I did not miss while you lived was your love.  It was as strong as when you clutched me with your chubby baby arms.  I feel supremely unloved now. 

Worse - I feel all my love is going into a black hole, never to be returned.

four months

"The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless." -- Samuel Johnson

And yet time goes on, to no avail.  

dream where I die

"I'll trade you one for two nightmares of mine,
I have some where I die, I have some where we all die." - Bright Eyes, Hit the Switch

They say you can't die in your own dream.  Nonsense.  Here's how I did it.

I was in my parents' apartment.  The time was twenty-some years ago.  Everything was correct - the topography of the apartment, everyone's age - my brother and I in our twenties, my parents fiftiesh, my son (who was absent) around five.  My parents and I opened the door to the bedroom and there lying on the floor by the bed were two bodies.  One was my brother, who was in some kind of fit, but conscious.  The other one, lifeless, was me.  I cradled my brother's head trying to calm him and I told him my son would need him as a friend.  My parents were strangely detached, just there as observers.  Nobody mentioned the body, but it seemed to be the reason my brother was distressed and at death's door himself.  And, of course, my son would need him, because he wouldn't have me.

pity

I find it hard to explain to people why I am not crying all day long.  When I do cry, it is for myself, because I miss you, because you were so precious and so profound and there is no one I can relate to or love as much as I love you.

But as for you - I feel you got the best of it.  I read some speculation, just to confirm, that your death was a painless one.  You stopped breathing and your brain was tricked into not panicking at this.  I knew that already when I saw how peaceful you looked in death. 

You were free while you lived.  You even traveled across the country like you wanted to and you loved it, despite the discomfort of being confined on a train.  In one of the comments on your photos you wrote:

"The country unfolds in your heart. The landscape is such a powerful message. Makes you want to run wild like a comanche. Brother I am in lov with this life."

You never had to compromise.  Yes, 26 years is short, but it is well beyond the time when most people find they have to settle, and let go of a limitless future.  When I was 26 we came to this country and I started on the 20-year grind to sustain our precarious existence.  Now I am safe, but with nothing to show for it.  The reason I lived for - you - is gone.  You, on the other hand, never lost your child-like optimism.  You still felt anything was possible.  What better way to end.

Still, I can't help wishing for my sake that you were more ordinary and less foolhardy.  That you are still here.   

half angel

wish

I always wished I could take your suffering on myself and now I have.

remorse

That's what the book was really about.  The fact that some words of unrestrained cruelty could unleash a chain reaction that ruins lives.  When you're with someone from the time they're born, when you are solely responsible for their very survival, how infinite are the chances of being thoughtlessly cruel. 

I am sorry, my son, for making you feel worthless because you didn't conform, for making you feel like a burden because you made my life difficult.  At least that's what you heard.  It wasn't what I meant.  I was angry at you for making yourself suffer.  Your suffering was my suffering.  Your well-being was my well-being. You were never separate from me.  I told you I loved you more than anything.  But that doesn't begin to describe it.  I love you more than being.

purpose

"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be."  The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

Figures that the first new book I like is about a young suicide and his converse - the guy who "wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."

What kills me is that I knew this when I was young.  I just closed my eyes and hoped against hope that it wasn't so.  I irresponsibly created another life, just to justify my own.  And he had to die in order to open my eyes to the ultimate meaninglessness of what I had done.  He died for my sins.

remains

I had braced myself for the holidays.  They are mercifully over.  But now I feel worse.  The new year is supposed to be a new beginning, but all I can do is cherish the past.  There is no light on the horizon.  No new life.  All I can do is gracefully wait for it to be over. To be freed of the chains of existence.

I know there are heavier burdens than mine.  I will try to be generous with what I have left to offer.  I sent a contribution to the project that made his last days brighter.  I know he would have wanted to keep that promise unbroken.  A part of him will live on in the extreme passion he lived and preached.  That's all I can do.

I decided I don't want his remains scattered in this country.  It wasn't kind to him and he railed against it.  What I didn't expect was that shopping for an urn to keep his ashes in would bring me down so.  Hiding him within a pretty object is not what he would like.  His friend, who visited on New Year's eve asked to see them and cried.  I look at them every day and feel nothing.  I know that's not him.  I knew it even when I saw his stiff body emptied of its organs.  His body let him down.  He was so much more than that.  He was light.  And darkness.  His father painted a shadowy half-angel just before he died. There is more of him in that than in the white ashes in the black box.

drama

The first time I heard this story, I reassured the person you had told it to that it was a tall tale.  But last night an eyewitness confirmed that you didn't break your foot slipping down a flight of stairs as you had told us.  You jumped out of a third story window after your friend died.  This ups to 3 the number of times I know you were near death.  I'm starting to think we were lucky to have you around this long.

things I look forward to

1) 10 p.m. - the time I feel I can legitimately go to sleep.  It's crept back from 10:30.  It sometimes backfires when I wake up before my alarm goes off in the morning.  Any night that I don't stay awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night after waking up with a pain in my guts or chest (I wonder why it varies between the two) is a success.  I still don't dream about him. Very different from when my mother died 11 years ago.  I would dream that she is there, but yet know she's dead, and I'd desperately try to reconcile the two. The difference is I watched her die and felt sorry for her, because she felt sorry for herself.  In the dream I would know that she couldn't survive and that I would have to relive her death again - heartbreaking.  Maybe because he didn't know he was dying, I don't have the same kind of dreams now.  But I also don't have the comfort of 'being with him' in my dreams, except for one time, early on, when I dreamed we were walking along a scary cliff together holding hands, and the dream ended as I turned and kissed his shoulder.   I guess that was goodbye.  In those days I felt his presence intensely.  I think it's a defense mechanism we have - goes along with the myth of the spirit staying around for 40 days.  I think it lasted about that long.  Now, I'm constantly aware of his absence.  When I sometimes feel for a second an animal optimism of being in my body, it is immediately crushed in the next moment by the thought that what's the point when 'that' happened.  I also think of this horrible year ending, but can't find any comfort, because 'that' cannot be undone.

2) my mid-morning cigarette

3) my after-work drink

That's about it.

foretold

I found your notes for a novel from a few years ago. It starts with a phone call telling you your mother's dead. Your biggest fear. You imagined it pretty well - the inanity of the stranger telling you he's sorry; no histrionics, no tears, just the physical weight of it, the broken sleep, the silence. It's uncanny. Just the way it happened. Only it wasn't my death but yours.

That must be the novel that went missing with your stolen laptop. I wonder if it's still out there somewhere.

won't you try?

Do you know there are spaces open and wide?
Believe me, there are days longer than nights
And you will be happy the minute you try
So won't you try?
--The joy in forgetting/The joy in acceptance, Bright Eyes

I had the first line of those lyrics inscribed on the iPod I gave you one Christmas, which you promptly lost.  But who was I kidding.  Days longer than nights?  Never for me.  Did I instill in you this sadness you couldn't bear?  You tried to be stoic, but you were too exuberant.  Not like me.  I can trudge like this forever. But you said:

"Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."

That you did.  That you did.

godlessness

I'm sick and feeling sorry for myself.  I don't know what I'm trying to be anymore - superhuman or something? I'm trying to be philosophical about it, but the animal in me just bleeds.  I feel like my soul is hemorrhaging.  Yes, I need to be loved and I need to be pitied.  I'm not above that.

But there's only so much other people can do for you.  I regret every decision I ever made.  The difference between a world without God, I read today, is not lack of morality, it's lack of redemption.  There is no redeemer.  Everything is cast in stone.  Loss is forever.

unreality

From the first moments this happened I've been fighting the feeling that it couldn't be real, because it's so literary - to be precise, it's like a bad novel.  Life shouldn't be so pitch perfect, with everything taking on meaning, everything being foreshadowed.  Life should be messy - the bad guys should win, nobody should get what they deserve, a parent's worst nightmare shouldn't come true. No, this can't be reality.

As a result, it's not only his death that seems unreal, but my whole life has taken on that tinge.  It's like - you can't be serious.  I am not going to play along anymore.

nightmare

It was like a horror movie.  I was in a house that was mine, but suddenly these people, who were my friends wanted me out of it and they changed into something else - they were still outwardly themselves, but they attacked me and I realized they were not what they appeared to be.

I woke up with the old familiar pain gripping my stomach and my chest and couldn't go back to sleep for hours.  I still feel hungover.

record

I am so grateful to have your words.  Some of them are the best and truest things I've read, ever.  I love the technology that has allowed me this glimpse into you - smartphone, Facebook.

I never knew we were so alike.  Though it figures - a misfit will beget a misfit.  This line, especially struck me:

"I'm too judgemental for a real relationship. I always think people should be harder on themeselves than they are." 

But I'm so glad you had someone to say it to.  And to see your growing self-awareness:

"the things we hate in others we learn to recognize from ourselves first. its nice being a little bit more enlightened but it sucks to have to go back  and undo soooo many mistakes. I feel like i have maxed out all my existential credit cards. Its like living on bread and water my greatest achievements involve not fucking up that day." 

"'We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget'  joan didion"

It used to drive me crazy when you would write off the past with a simple 'but I'm not like that anymore.'  I'm glad you came to see that it's not that easy.  Our actions define us, not our intentions, or our words.  I feel all the weight of that judgment now.  How I wish I had dropped everything and flown to you when I realized you were alone and lost.  I offered to come for your birthday, and though you dismissed it, you mentioned it to someone, so you were not averse to the idea.  Instead, I mourned you on your birthday.  The birthday party you never had as an adult.  I wish I had celebrated you more.

his words

I'm sober and at my best, or at least my strongest. I just want to be good, whatever it costs. It really is love it just manifests as fury.

I just feel like there are parts to a person that you have to go somewhere to find. Moving around helps you feel new. It makes you braver.

Shakespeare says being born is like being kidnapped and sold it to slavery. I don't want money I don't want power I don't want any of the things they tried to teach me to want I just want dignity.

I am constantly in love, with all of it. I'm just not strong enough to carry it. It tears me apart. I have to face the horror of it all to be able to really feel that love. At least that's how I have it figured.

Happy is just one thing, it can't be permanent ever. I want more than to be happy. I want to be strong. I wanna be strong enough to carry the weight for those that i love

Aug.18, 2011

I miss my country that deep distant part of it. Everything becomes kind of hallucinatory when you feel so far away from where you are.

I have a need to be wanted. It's a massive cruel weakness.

I feel like my intentions are so good, something just gets lost in translation. That's why I separate myself. I feel like I just hurt people. This monastic lifestyle is some sort of penance but sometimes I still fuck up.  Because I'm needy

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in he has no choice  but to become an outlaw' nelson mandela. That was hanging on the wall at the farm. I don't understand why the world around me seems like its fabricated from my thoughts.

Aug. 19, 2011

I just assume that people are with me until they find something better or newer. Like everyone is just playing to win not trying to love.

Because you are what you love, not what loves you back.
Because love must be courageous.

I'm probably always going to be alone. It's just how it is. I make people sad when they are close to me. It's unfair to drag people into that. I have to much love for the real world.

Aug. 24, 2011

It's rare that I feel that I inhabit the same world as most people.
I was writing for a while, now i feel incredibly agitated. I need some sort of catharsis. I have been reading like 3 books at once like 200 pages a day on top of training and I just feel so FULL I could fucking scream.
I don't know, just trying to live my life I guess. I'm always hungry for more even now its never enough.

Aug. 27 2011

I feel my rich imaginary life helps me live my ordinary one. Ordinary life isnt really that ordinary and when you let your mind swim with really lush shit it gives you faith that you can do anything. I mean maybe its hard to actually become Batman but I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

There's so much more to life than what happens. There's an entire world inside people.

Sep.16 2011

Ive sacrificed fun, I have sacrificed companionship, I deal with enormous amounts of pain and frustration on a daily basis. Sometimes I am crawling on hands and knees but if I don't get better that day I can't sleep. I don't get bored, I fight for my spirit from when I wake up to when I crawl into bed. It doesn't define me it is only one expression of who I am. It teaches me how to live. It teaches me how to persevere.

Sep. 20, 2011

It's the past but emotions are memory.

Sep. 21, 2011

2012

I always thought I "supported" you. That is laughable. You held me up. You took away the nagging feeling that there really was no reason for me to go on. Now it's back for good. Why am I here? Twenty years in this country and I haven't left a dent. I have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing - painful memories and financial debt. Here's a thought - I don't need to be here. I'll pay off my debts and take my pitiful compensation and leave. I have nothing to lose after losing you.

13

The number of photos of you in my room. Your beautiful face, at different ages. All magnificent. They say you looked like me, or your father, or my brother. But you didn't look like any one of us. You were yourself - unique, inimitable, never to be again, never to get old. Usually I can look at you without crying, but not today. Somewhere along the way I equated your death with your magnificence. You were too big for this world. It's hard to see it as the random event that it was. And yet, it is. You didn't have to die. Your luck just didn't hold out. I always thought the 13th was lucky for me, because you were born then, on a Sunday. And you died on a Friday. Now 23 is forever odious.

Illusion

The stable bow

"You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."

I read Kahlil Gibran's famous poem when I was very young and I took it to heart.  Despite being so young when I became a parent, I knew that it was the end of youth.  Youth being the contemplation of the many yous you could become, the many paths you could take, the many people you could love and be with.  I was one thing - a mother.  Everything else was incidental.  My job was to keep still, so my son could wander freely.  And we stuck to those roles, although as he grew up he would exhort me to 'get a life' even as he never relinquished his right to eschew stability in favor of pursuing whatever struck his fancy.   That his life would end before mine, emptying mine of its purpose is, of course, the ultimate irony.

But that's not the only reason my life is barren without him.  As mundane as most of our communications were, he was the only person I know, who lived for the sublime.  In practical matters he was frustratingly inept.  He told me a few weeks before he died that he admired me, but had no idea how I do it.  How I did it is I had him as a flame I had to keep going.  At any cost, through winds and storms, through barren days and nights.  How do I do it now?

Vale of tears

All this time I haven't allowed myself to think of how this affects me. I've been thinking of how you lived, how you died, how you suffered, and the joy you had. All the rest is self-pity, I told myself. I cannot allow myself to wallow in it. My first duty is to you. I had to take it, for you. But now as I survey the remains of my life, it is a desolate landscape, indeed. How will I trudge through it? You were the only being I felt bound to live for. (In anger you told me once you were the contract I couldn't break - that much was true, although you were wrong that it was just duty that bound me to you.) As you did for me, I hoped. What now? Why continue to suffer through this vale of tears, when you have shown me how easy it is to leave it? Sure, I can tell myself it's still for you, but you don't exist anymore. And I don't know how to live for myself. We are mere animals, after all. If we cannot procreate, what sense is there in our existence. And it seems I got the terminator gene.

Beauty

So typical of you to throw away what others go to extreme lengths to preserve - life itself.  You threw away whatever privilege you had, and the comforts others hold so dear.  There was nothing to take away after you died, you had so few possessions, and those were expendable.  Nothing to tie you down.  You quoted Camus:

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

I wish you could have borne it a little longer, for my sake.  But I understand that you couldn't.

The weight of your heart

350 grams.  So says the coroner's report.  Larger than the average range.  But you were so tall, you needed it to pump the blood all the way to your extremities.  Bruises on your body from the martial arts.   But otherwise perfectly healthy.  The drug that killed you was at a "relatively modest level" in your blood, but "in the potentially toxic range."  Death ruled accidental.  So you didn't want to die.  That's good.  It was all a stupid mistake.

"It wasn't me, I wasn't there...And it doesn't count 'cause I don't care." 

I forgive you.  I know you didn't intend it and I will gladly suffer the pain to know that you didn't know it was the end.

Words

"Time, so far from soothing the agonies of our past, may simply preserve and even intensify them."

 This is from a review of "The Tree of Life," which deals with the loss of a child in terms of its cosmic significance.  Not a bad attempt.  Not a good one either.  There was another movie I saw not long ago on the same topic.  It said a mother's grief never fades away, but feels like a brick you carry in your pocket, which you kind of become fond of and touch, because you don't have your child, but you have that.  It's all been said before.  What could I possibly add to it?  Just that it's not a sharp pain.  Not at all.  It's just always there, sometimes getting heavier, sometimes receding.  It's worse when I think of it as something that was not accidental, but maybe inevitable, when it's not something that was just inflicted on me, but something I had a part in.  Even if that was just bringing him into this world.  Bringing him into suffering.  Not that I regret it.  If I had a choice I would do it over.  That's it - I wish I had a do over.  But you never do with life.  That's the unbearable lightness of being.  

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Again, nothing original to say. 

Depression

Saw the movie "Melancholia".  My reaction was "yeah, so what?  I already knew there is no point to anything."  My husband:  "it was about depression."  Me: "yeah, what's your point?"

Depression.  I've always thought of it as realism.  Smart people are depressed, because they see through things.  It doesn't mean they don't try.  But they know that in the end it's only sound and fury, signifying nothing.  My son was diagnosed with it when he was barely a teenager.  They put him on medication. The kind they issued warnings about only a few years later, because it leads to suicide in teens.  He didn't commit suicide, but he committed social suicide and got himself expelled from his prep school.  He said it made him not feel anything.  And he dumped the pills in the toilet one day.  I saw his point.  But why did I agree to it in the first place?  That is perhaps my biggest regret. It was his gateway drug.  I've always been leery of mind-altering substances myself - legal or illegal (the only time I tried pot I turned green and puked, and another time, just from the second-hand smoke).  He, on the other hand, probably tried everything he could get his hands on.  He almost died twice before.  Third time was the charm. 

But back to depression. It runs in the family.  My mother had it, my grandmother had it - along with migraines, they passed it on to me.  But at least I got some of my father's dogged get-on-with-it-ness.  My son got it from both sides.  Sometimes he blamed me for picking his father to procreate with (never the other way around).  It was useless pointing out that any other child I would have had would not have been HIM.  But I see his point - we have qualities that get exacerbated in our children.  My son's height for one - my own height was taken to arithmetic progression in him - he ended up at more than six and a half feet.  My depressive tendencies, as well.  To that he added anxiety.

In the movie the character of Kirsten Dunst, the depressed one, appeals to her mother, and tells her she's scared.  Her mother tells her everyone is and basically to get on with it. That cuts uncomfortably close to my own attitude.  But in the movie the world ends.  I'm longing for that ending.

Writers

"After my father left us, my mother cried all her sad-sac tears into the meals she fed me and my brother.  All those tears are no good for a boy -- they sit in his stomach like broken glass, eating away at his strength. .... All her fears leaked into my brother’s dreams, and his heart became like an attic full of trapped animals."

This is from a story my son wrote a few years back.  It's about two brothers, one of whom dies.  The narrator is the survivor, obviously.   When I reread the story now it is so clear to me how he wanted to be the strong, cynical narrator, but was afraid he was the weak, sentimental brother - the dead one.

The portrait of the sad mother is damning to me, although I'm not divorced, nor had he ever seen me crying, except on his account.  But I know he blamed me for being sad.  Hell, he blamed me for bringing him into this world.  Now we're even.

In the story, the brother dies at war and is given a hero's funeral, but the narrator knows he really died of his own weakness and stupidity and he can't bear his mother's exalted mourning of him.

"People never remember the dead for who they were, everyone’s life becomes the television biopic of itself."

I am guilty of some of that.  I want people to remember the good in you.  I know you do, too.  You were all about the image.  People actually think you lived life to the fullest and were always happy.  I know better.  I remember all of you.  You are part of me.  Sometimes I feel the best part.

I got a tattoo in your memory.  I hate tattoos.  Your father hates me for getting it.  This morning I looked for it and stupidly missed seeing it for a moment and got scared.  But it's there.  It will always be there.  I can always look at it.  You didn't mark me in childbirth.  I was too young - my body bounced right back.  But you have marked my life.  I know you had many fears, but you never accepted living in fear.  Losing you was my all-consuming fear.  Now I am fearless.  But I have no life.

The Unconscious

As much as I try to be rational, to think life is finite and dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you, my unconscious seems to be rebelling.  Until recently I could sleep and not dream of my loss.  But now I've been waking up with tear-crusted eyes.  Last night I dreamed I had a fight with my mother, who's also not alive.  She was blaming me for not cleaning her house (not something she would do) and I was really upset and told her she never taught me how to clean a house.  But furthermore I was upset that we were arguing about something so stupid and I wanted to tell her that none of this matters now that my son is dead.  This mirrors a fight I had with my son three weeks before he died, except I was the child now.  He blamed me for not giving him guidance and inspiration.  Then he took it back, but I know he meant it.  I will always regret not saying more than I did then.  Though I did tell him I loved him more than anything, I never told him how proud I am to be his mother and how sorry I am that he's had to struggle so much.  (Does anyone ever do that?)  But that's not why I cry now.  I simply miss him.  My life doesn't make sense without him.

The Beast

The title of this blog comes, of course, from a story by Henry James, a writer so cerebral that many find him unreadable.  All is allusion and moral ambiguity - bring it on, I say.  Anyway, the point of the story is that this guy, who thinks that something terrible will happen to him in his life shares this thought with a woman, and they spend many years musing over it.  She obviously loves him - to spend her life commiserating over his phantom misfortune - and only when she dies does he realize that the terrible thing he was envisioning has actually happened: that he could have returned her love, but didn't.

And so did I spend 26 years of my life - my prime, as they say - afraid of losing something that I never really appreciated while it was here.  Sure, I cherished the early years with my son - it was hard not to - he was like a magical being that every day brought me new wonder at his precocious mind and he was lovely to look at - with a clear amber brown gaze that even when he was a baby appeared unchildlike and thoughtful.

But when I had to release him out into the world, it just killed me.  Thinking of  him out there unprotected filled me with angst.  So I tried not to think about it.  That was easy enough - I had to work hard to keep our family afloat financially and to get ahead.  I was the sole breadwinner.  I was also only 20 when I had him.  So instead of confronting this world alongside him, I let him fend for himself.  And this was in the new country I brought him to.  As the years passed I understood less and less what he was going through.  I trusted in his intelligence and social aptitude.  I let teachers bully me into things I never should have agreed to.  And most egregious of all, I never got to know his friends.

When he died I found out what these friends thought of him.  Their response was overwhelming.  So many of them spoke of how well he understood them, saw into them, taught and inspired them.  How could he be that to so many?  How could I not know this?  Of course, I thought the same of him, but to others he offered the best of himself.  To me he often entrusted the worst.  Perhaps not the very worst.  That he kept to himself.

Dreams

Case in point: I dreamed that my son is 3 years old and his grandmother let him wander out of the apartment (in a Manhattan high-rise) so that he would "learn a lesson."  We both went in pursuit and got stuck in the elevator, whereupon I woke up with the typical waves of dread rolling through my torso.

Writing and Life

I have always known I should write, but other than letters, emails and quasi-diary entries I have mostly resisted this imperative.

Literature has always been more real to me than life.  Growing up isolated in a foreign country, it taught me the language and it taught me how to live. It made me happy.

My first boyfriend encouraged me to write.  He said he knew I had it in me.  It was mostly a long-distance relationship, so I wrote him many love letters over the four years we were together.  When I didn't want to be with him anymore, he returned them and took his back.  He wanted to be a writer and thought his would provide good raw material.  I dumped most of mine in my grandparents' outhouse.  I couldn't bear to look at the childish handwriting, often veering off on a diagonal across the pastel unlined pages.  I never looked back, either to him, or the writing.

The writing that I did keep still feels like I could write it today.  I'm the same person I was at 16.  I haven't learned a damn thing in 30 years.  Not about writing, not about life.

Which brings me to life.  I never aspired to be a writer, because I had no personal ambition to speak eternal truths.  I thought if I could just be understood by one person, that would be enough.  I wanted an ordinary happiness - a lover, a child, an occupation where I could be useful, some friends.  For that I would forsake the eternal truths. That's the bargain I made with fate.

That bargain failed.

I kind of always knew it would.  Somehow, I knew my life would be spectacularly shattered.  That's why I made the bargain.  If only I was never too happy, I would never be in too much pain.  But life thrust on me something, which would make me so happy that I couldn't bear its loss.  My son.  And so I spent my life in fear of losing him. When he was a baby I would wake up paralyzed by a nightmare that he was falling from a height.  But I didn't lose him then.  My fears were lulled.  Until he grew up and refused to live by the rules, refused to stay safe, refused to accept an ordinary happiness.  Recently I started waking up again, with that paralyzing pain that spread from my stomach to my chest.  I tried not to think of him.  I tried to think of my petty happiness (or lack thereof) instead.

And now I've lost him.  And I know I made a false bargain.  If only I had loved him without fear, I would have had a happy life.

That's not possible any more.  So all I have are words.  They will have to do.