natural selection

My son joked once that when he grows up he wants to be natural selection.  I'm reading a book about it now and wondered if he was defeated by natural selection - his traits too rarefied, too unfit to perpetuate.

I once planted flower seeds that a friend had brought me from Holland.  I knew nothing about it and planted them in pots that were too small.  They grew tall but never flowered because the stalks broke - they were too tall and fragile to survive.

nostalgia

This is a new phenomenon for me. I find myself gripped suddenly with a longing for the past - any past - not just when my son was here, but even before that.  Any past time in my life now seems idyllic.  Even last year when I was undeniably depressed.  I want that back.  Anything but this, anything but now.

Our Dark Knight

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absence

"the hours after you are gone are so leaden..."  Samuel Beckett, Cascando
"All the years keep rolling/The decades flying by/But ahh, the days are long..."  The Walkmen, On the Water

I can deal with the years, the decades without you. It's the individual moments that can break me. The void is too much to bear. My love is going into a black hole, never to be returned. I am slowly turning cold.

mourning

So I had a crisis after I finished the book. At first it was about the reaction to it and thinking of maybe having to rewrite it (which I can't and won't do).  But really it was about not having it as a nightly ritual of grieving.  Where to channel my grief now?  Can I let go of it or will it come back with a vengeance? 

The pain I get upon awakening has been a little unpredictable lately.  Sometimes I don't get it immediately.  Sometimes I look for it and that provokes it.  Other times it skips me.  Then it comes back as usual.  That is also something I've been clinging to, I think.  Without it, what do I awaken to?

This morning I had an intimation.  I woke up thinking of him.  It's strange that people think the photos of him covering my walls would be a constant reminder.  They are not. I don't need a reminder.  What was different this morning is I caught a glimpse of the endlessness of despair.  I have been telling myself that grief is forever.  Today I felt it.  The finality of it.  Every Saturday I will wake up to nothing to look forward to.  He is not just away for a while.  There is no substitute.  There is no way for me to rejoin him.  Even if I die.  We die alone.  He died alone.

audience

When it comes to writing they say the deeply personal is also the most universal.  I think that applies to my story, as well.  I know it has the power to shake people up.  I think my critics so far have been too close to be objective.  I will try a couple more, who are not that invested in my well-being.

reaction

Well, I asked for it and it's unnerving.  Even the well-meaning comments from friends and family still feel like an intrusion.  What happens when I put it out there?  Will I regret it?  Will I want to un-know what people think of it?  Maybe I should give up on a wider audience.  Maybe some things are better left unsaid.

greatness

So, done.  I've shared my manuscript with a few key people.  Now it has a life of its own.  I still have to perfect it and find a way to get it to a larger audience.  The process is daunting and makes me queasy, but it has to be done and technology has made it that much easier.  I've done harder things than that.  But nothing as wrenchingly personal

I must pull myself out of my self-ascribed mediocrity to reach for greatness.  Not for him, but with him. 

book

I'm trying to wrap it up.  I already wrote the ending, but I'm not sure it stands up as a whole.  I've never written anything as long.  I start reading it to revise it and I get caught up in it and change almost nothing.  I guess that's a good sign.  But I'm not sure a casual reader would understand it the same way.  Some of it is written almost in shorthand.  I've done this twice now.  And yet I'm not satisfied with it.  It seems both too short and too long for what it is.  I'm not sure what it is - it's a hybrid, really, of trying to reconstruct my feelings about his death and his character traits which might explain it.  A lot of it is his words. That I'm satisfied with.  He needed a forum.  But I'm not ready to part with it.  Will I ever be?  I should let someone else judge.  Soon.

birthday

Mine. Had my first surprise party (was really surprised), got my first bike (am really intimidated by it). Shows how little I've lived. I've basically just hibernated.

A friend wrote to me that she dreamed of my son.  She's not the first to say so, but she described it so eloquently.  His hair was like spun gold, she said, streaming with an otherworldly light.  He was sitting at a big table and he wasn't eating but she knew he has everything he needs to be satiated.  I'm sure that's right.  He lacks for nothing now.  And I'm still accumulating stuff.  For what?

mother

“She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” - Kurt Vonnegut 

Really that says it all.  I can try to dissect it and reconstruct it, but it seems that one truth is inescapable.  

regret

"some mornings its alright, some mornings you pet your cat with bare feet and watch him eat breakfast"

If you have a cat, that is. Maybe if he'd stayed with the cat, he would still be here...  They say that animals can regulate your heart rhythm if the connection is there.  He said he missed him, when the question of love and loneliness came up.

But that's not what I wanted to write about.  Some days you just can't put one foot in front of the other without thinking of all the missteps you made.  It's common wisdom that only the present exists - the past is gone and the future is uncertain.  But I think only the past exists for sure.  And it's unchangeable.  The present turns into the past with each breath.  Just as you can't change the past, you can't change yourself.  That's why regret is useless.  Even if you return to the past you would still be you.  How could you do things differently?  Even with hindsight.  It's not like I lacked foresight.  I was just powerless to change things.  The game is rigged.  All you can do is wait for it to play out.  Then you'll know the score.  And then it doesn't matter.

near death

Yesterday I went out to eat my lunch in the summer heat that had descended on the city. I sat down with a friend on a bench on a dead end street near a park. Seconds after that something seemed to explode right next to us. A huge umbrella had been blown off the roof. Its cast metal stand separated from it and shattered on the pavement, with pieces scattering at our feet. Only a couple of yards separated us from the site of the impact.

I proceeded to eat my lunch. I was not even fazed. Somebody I shared this with told me I had a super power now. Another person said an angel was protecting me.

Both are true. I do not care about death now. My son gave me this gift. I survived his death, so I'm ready for mine, whenever it comes.

Having watched my mother part with life was one of the most heart-wrenching things I've been through.  I'm glad my son won't be there for mine.  And I promise I will not be sorry to go.

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!"