Valentine.

Freud warns us not to love, he says
it doesn't pay off who betrays us but
those we love, whose death injures us most

we don't think this way in youth that's how you know you are still young do you think whose bed you will hover over in dreams?
What graves we will haunt before and

after our passing

and why
Why do the dead always speak so slowly?

My personal stations of the cross

January 16th- he went into the ER. They realized it was a relapse of leukemia, but the local cancer center didn't want to admit him right away. He told them he'd be dead by the time they got through their waiting list. He called his doctor in Chicago, who pulled some strings and got him in. Once there, he couldn't call out from their intake to reach me. They gave him a bone marrow biopsy without painkillers. Not even darvon, because they didn't want to wait the 20 minutes it would take for the darvon to hit.

January 17th: I can finally see him. He's ok. We talk about how soon he can get out and get back to law school. I bring his text books. During the next 10 days, his younger brother and I get tested for donating bone marrow. We try to figure out how long he'll be stuck there. We're all in good spirits. We've beat this before. Every time he gets a headache, they rush him down for an MRI. He jokes about this.

January 27th, I wake up in his hospital room. I start realizing I have a cold, and will have to stop coming for a couple of days. I'm worried about it: he's been taking medications that cause him to hallucinate, he's too tired to study. He asks me to call his student advisor to see if he can attend classes via the Internet from his hospital room.

January 28th, We talk on the phone. Friends have been seeing him. He reassures me he's fine, don't come up till I'm well, it'd be terrible if he caught it because of his immune system. Don't worry, he says. He has a friend coming over on Monday.

January 29th. I'm awakened by a frantic phone call from the nurse. It takes me a few seconds to realize why she's so upset. I'm at the hospital with his brother before they wheel him out of the room. Medically induced coma. Brain hemorrhage. We're here, Jesse, I call to him. I believe he can hear me somehow. Neurological ICU. I don't leave his side for the next 9 days. They put shunts in his head to try to alleviate the pressure, but you can see from the monitors that his arteries shoot off geysers of blood in there, exploding his brain, slowly pushing it into non-existence.

February 8th. It's too late. He's gone. They pull the plug. They don't want me there when he stops breathing, but I'm just on the other side of the curtain, holding his foot. I don't want him to be alone when he crosses over. Even though I know he hasn't really been there for days.

He was only 22. I lost my firstborn son. And with that lost my fear of dying. Because he has gone before me, how could I be afraid?

Plumbing the Immeasurable

Placing

Peachy invited me for drinks on the Wednesday before her race. She wanted to give me a tee shirt to wear while she was racing, with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society logos and a picture of my son silkscreened on the chest. After a couple of plum mojitos she told me how she'd gotten involved in bike racing for charity. I'll try to repeat more or less verbatim here, but the quotations are more for reference than an indication of her exact words. Like I said, plum mojitos had taken place.

"I was walking through the Village with my brother, and a man comes up and hands us a flyer for the AIDS race to Boston. So I say, why not, and we go to the community center and I sign up. I don’t even have a bike.

"My brother buys me a bike, but says I have to give it back to him after the race. On the night before, I invite friends out and we are drinking and someone asks me how I trained. Trained? I didn't even get on the bike yet. So the next morning I show up at the parking lot and get on the bike. We don't know what the gears are for, but my brother watches some other people change theirs and he puts them in the same position. So, okay, I ride around a few times and I’m ready to go. And everything is just fine until we get to Connecticut, where there are a lot of hills. Everyone else is just speeding by” — Here she pantomimes a person riding uphill in low gear, then herself struggling in high gear-- “and I’m pushing and pushing and getting nowhere. This guy rides up next to me and notices my Romanian flag on my bike and he says, “How are you my Romanian flower?” and I say “I am not a flower! I can’t ride this bike and everyone else is whizzing by!” so he looks at my gears and says, “put it in low gear” and I say “huh?” So he tells me to pull over -- and I still don't know how to get my feet out of the clips, so I fall over. I somehow get my feet out, and he shows me how to adjust the gears. I get so involved I don't remember how to get the clips off next time.

"Now on the whole ride, other people are shouting, "Passing!" "Slowing!" "Stopping" and I have no idea what it means, but I say whatever they say. So when we come up to the light, I yell "slowing!" stopping!" then as I try to get my feet out of the clips again, "FALLING!" But finally I learn how to get out of the clips, I make it to Boston in a couple of days, and when I step on the scale, I lost 7 pounds!"

She told me her brother did in fact take her bike, so when she decided to train for the Arizona race, she had to buy a new bike -- and train. Team in Training seems to have a good coach and training program, because when Peach called me after the race, her first words were "I got the silver!" I was so proud of her. Jesse would have been too, and I told her so. When we got together last week for her birthday, Peachy wore her racing shirt, bright green and purple, with Jesse's photo on the shoulder. I don't think Jesse's brother or I will ever take off our purple rubber bracelets, Peachy. Thank you so much for letting us be a part of your victory. And please let me know if I quoted you wrong!

Is love real?

I'm glad it's taking a long time for summer and now fall, to pass through town. In September I was dreading the change of seasons: one more season Jesse would not see. One more step away from his time alive. I'd rather not move forward.

People say that those we lost live on in us, in our memory, but how, really? It's only the memory that lives on, certainly nothing of the real person. Sometimes I do really feel Jesse's love all around me but is that real, or is it some kind of emotional buffer my mind creates to protect me from his loss?

I think of what it was like as a teenager, crushing on someone. I remember convincing myself that if I felt "love" strongly enough, that it would somehow affect that person too, that he would feel love toward me because I loved him so much with a love that would last for all eternity. Of course, a month or two later, I'd have totally forgotten him. So whatever that transcendent feeling I'd had, it either wasn't really love, or love has to do with what's within us, more than the object of that love, or both are true. We call something love, and adorn it with mythology and neediness and hope, but the feeling we have inside is something else.

In a way, mourning a lost loved one is like an unrequitable crush. There's no hope of reciprocation, your life is warped around an emptiness that nothing can fill. You satisfy yourself with pictures, memories, maybe hope, but you're not really in a relationship with the object of your longing. You stay in stasis, because regardless of what you feel, nothing can move forward. There is no "there" there. No reality to check your feelings against. No one to communicate with, to rediscover, no one to save, no one to save you.