I can't write

I still hear it in my head, what I want to say and how it should sound, I still edit as I walk, finding better words, stringing ideas together, but I can't get it out of my head any more. Everything leads me back to Jesse, to tears and then despair. I don't know how to get past that minefield, I can only skirt it and keep moving. I want to talk about Italy, about how I knew Jesse had been there; could feel it. Feel him, in Venice. Maybe he told me once, and I just don't remember. I do remember sitting outside the neurology ICU with his ex=girlfriend. There were a series of black and white photos of European cities hung along the hallway where we all camped like, my mother said, gypsies. Knowing he would never wake again, keeping vigil for him anyway. And his ex-girlfriend said, Jesse and I have been to all of those places. And I said, thank you. Thank you for taking him there, thank you for helping him to really live in those last two years. Thank you even for taking him skydiving--that was his Facebook photo, too, before they took it away, him in the plane wide eyed with an almost-grin on his face, the kind of expression you wear when you are about to do something amazing and you know it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. At least I know that happened. At least I know something wonderful happened for him. Not nearly as often as it should.

Lave a mano

...she said, mimicking handwashing the sweater. We were standing on the corner of Broadway and 8th, it was sunny but too cold for a toddler, and the hand knit sweater was Jesse's size. And wool. Bright blue, darker than the sky. On the chest was an applique merry go round with little cloth dolls sewn onto the horses. The kind of thing I would have loved at two, myself. Expensive for me back then, $25. It had probably made its way up to New York from somewhere in South America, but I don't remember any more and now, anyway the tag is too faded to read.

It was seldom cold enough for him to need it, so it never saw much wear. It still looked new when I opened a box today, marked baby clothes. The worst though, was the little stuffed-tiger headed slippers I'd wrapped in a plastic bag -- long forgotten that I'd done it, kids size 5-6; I nearly doubled over. I sat down and dumped the whole box out onto the bed, wanting to get it all over with at once, like ripping off an enormous bandaid.

Time goes by for all of us. Everything changes. The baby is gone, no matter what happens to the man. I buttoned together a little onesie, and realized I will never do this for my own child again. I'm fifty. That part of my life is over. How do I let go of it? Long before anything had happened to Jesse, just after my new husband told me that he'd changed his mind, and didn't want to have a child with me (despite what he'd said repeatedly when we were dating, when I asked, when I told him that's what I wanted)I told him, if I lose one of them, I'm going to have another. I must have had some idea. Maybe just knew that I don't get to go through life unscathed. No Hail Mary pass gets me safely to the future. That's never been the life I had.

If I were to write a play about this, act two of my life with Jesse would have begun with the phone ringing on June 10, 2004. "Mom, don't freak out.... I have leukemia."

Whom can I tell?

About riding down 5th avenue with you on the bus, when you were only 3 or so and no little brother, a winter morning and we're going early to your little program you loved so much, and the sun is just breaking over the street and you say, "Mommy, what's that yellow stuff on the street" and I say, "It's the sun honey" and you make a disgusted face and say, "I don't like it."

Or when you were 2 almost 3 and we're walking away from the library toward the park and it's early spring and you point up at the gingkos and say, "Mommy, what's that green stuff all over the tree" and I say, those are baby leaves and you say "I don't like it." And I laugh, but not too loud and tell you that it means the weather will get warmer and you say, "oh, ok."

Whom can I tell these little stories of your childhood that tell me so much about the person you would become. Mothers need their children to grow up just for this reason, but not you. You leave me again. I don't know how I will ever find you in this vast dark universe.

A Benefit, for Jesse, for LLS

Peachy Ciucur is throwing a Leukemia-Lymphoma Society benefit on Friday. In a sense, Jesse will be the guest of honor. Last year, she rode with his photo silkscreened onto her racing shirt, and she won the silver. She told me, this year we're going to win the gold. She means, she and Jesse; she wants him to have the gold. I think Jesse would have been all for it.

She asked me to make a poster of Jesse, to hang at the entrance where she takes donations; but he seldom let us take his picture at all, much less a professional shot we could blow up. And I can't bring myself to keep using his senior high school picture-- it's nice, but solemn and stiff. You can tell he didn't like having to sit for it. Jesse wasn't one to sit still for much.

So I made a poster, a collage of snapshots we'd taken through his life, starting with his birth, and ending with a party photo one of his friends sent me, from one of the Christmas parties he'd gone to, just a couple of weeks before he ended up in Sloan Kettering. It wasn't as painful as I thought it would be, to sift through all the boxes and books of pictures. It's hard to look at the thing now that it's finished.

She just sent me the location and time today:

Friday, October 3rd @ 6pm
Location: The Irish Rogue
356 West 44th Street(Between 8 & 9AVE
New York, NY

Minimum donation suggested of $30.00
or you could donate in advance @ http://pages.teamintraining.org/nyc/tucson08/cciucur

Sometimes, I just have to stop, and sit back and realize that in some way Jesse has found a way to inspire others to help those in need, even after his passing. I hadn't realized how much he inspired his friends, until they all took turns speaking at his funeral, and I'm sure I'll never know how many lives he's touched, with his own words, and now through them, and people like Peach.

I'm not asking you to donate (although it'd be great), all I'm saying is, think about who you are in the world, and what you can do, even if it's a little thing, and do it. Let a little Jesse into your life. You'll be surprised how one act of support and care (even if it's like Jesse's personal brand of smart-assed coaxing and cajoling) can ripple through your life and the lives of those you love.

Eyes Open.

Jesse used to sleep with his eyes open sometimes. We were living in a shotgun flat in Chelsea. He and his brother had the long narrow bedroom that led to the bathroom. I'd pass them in the night and Jesse would be lying there, as if staring up to the ceiling, seeing nothing. Just sleeping. I would close his eyes for him, because I was afraid they'd dry out like that. I'd walk back from the bathroom and they'd be open again.

What was he dreaming about? What did he see? He hated that I'd moved out of the loft he and his brother were born in. He would argue with me when he was at this new little apartment. It wasn't big enough. He didn't have enough toys, clothes, games. He missed his dog. He wanted to go home. I know he had no idea how this lacerated me, all of it. His father did, and I could read his imprint on all of Jesse's criticisms and unhappiness. I knew his turn of a phrase. But Jesse was just being a boy, miserable because everything he knew had been turned upside down and he couldn't understand why, only that I was the one who did it.

But you know, I was happy then. Not because he was miserable, but because now I was free, and if enough time could only pass, he would see that it was better this way. HIs father would calm down and stop feeding him this bitterness. I can't even bring myself now to say what happened in that loft that drove me out, but the only witness left in the world alive from those days is Jesse's little brother, and he was too young to understand or remember any of it. He wasn't even old enough to be upset at the split. He thought it was fun to have two houses at first. At least until their father realized how much mileage he could get out of making him unhappy too. I don't think my younger son sees it that way. I don't want to change his mind. It's better for him not to know or believe what I saw, what everyone who knew us saw happening. And what difference would it make? Proving I was right? For what? His father is gone. Jesse is gone. Even the dog is gone. All that's left of that life is my only remaining son, and me. And I will protect us at any cost.

There were people who saw a little of the drama. My sister. She testified in court. My mother. Family friends. People at the school. Jesse and his brother's friends, their families. I don't know why I'm talking about it today, except to make a little bookmark in history, to help you find this spot where the book of my life naturally falls open, because it's been pored over so many times. How I could have handled it better. How I could have left sooner, and gone farther, how I could have saved Jesse if only I had done this or that. And I don't even mean, saved him from dying. I mean, saved his heart from what he suffered from the time he was only seven or eight, when things started getting bad. I would go back to that time, and pluck us all up and away from there if I could, but how could I know how things would work? I didn't believe it at the time. I thought going slow, building a plan, an exit, a safe way out was the right thing. I didn't know how little time we had.

And still, I'll wake up in the middle of the night here, back in that loft where both boys were born, but safe now, because we tore out everything their father had built, tore out even the walls and bathrooms, tore it bare to the shell of the building itself, and rebuilt everything. I put up new walls, new bathrooms, new kitchens, with my own bare hands. We even stripped and sanded the floors down to bare wood, stripped them on our knees, and brushed away every trace of their father I could remove.

And I'll wake up in the dark in this reborn loft, and I'll remember Jesse's eyes wide open in sleep. Remember how I used to cry when I sang him lullabies when he was a baby. I must have known, somehow. I dreamed of losing him again and again, from the time he was born. Terrible dreams about disasters I couldn't save him from. How can I say I didn't know? Something in me knew I wasn't going to be lucky enough to keep this child. Who saved my life just by being born. Without whom his little brother never would have been. Whom I saved. I can't even say the words. I don't want you to know what his father wanted at first.