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!"

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.

How are you?

I mean, I hate the question in general, because nobody wants to know the answer, so why not just end it at hello?  But now I've begun to dread it, because I'm not a vacuous person who can smile and pretend it doesn't mean anything when you ask me that.  So when I shrug and say 'okay,' I expect you to take that at face value.  And I mean okay, considering my son is dead, not okay in general.

Yesterday someone actually answered me with 'just okay?' and when I confirmed, he proceeded to assure me that I would feel better on the weekend.  Umm, actually, no, I prefer weekdays, but thanks for ignoring the reality of my life.

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 think 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.