• Bluelight
    Shrine




    A memorial
    to Bluelighters
    who have passed away

RIP ektamine

Loosing family pets is so sad :(. My family's beloved dog died last week and it was really heartbreaking.

Mouse is a pretty great name for a cat though.... your family certainly seems to have a healthy sense of irony.
 
^I'm sorry about your dog, cj. How old?

Caleb, I had a great dream about you last night. I love these dreams but they come so infrequently. I try to will them to no avail. The white sage plant in your garden has grown full enough to harvest some. Going to make a smudge for you on Christmas, remember how you loved the lights, remember Grandpa Tom harmonizing to the songs and how you loved to hear that. I miss you so much and that does hurt, but I love you even more and that never hurts.<3
 
My dog Luke was 11. He had a good life it just hurt because through all the trials and tribulations by family has been through with my addiction he was always there for a lick or gentle nudge. We got him when I was 16 so he was a connection to that part of my life when everything was fun and the future was a great mystery to be solved. Before heroin wrecked all that.

I hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday herby! Ill be thinking about you.
 
cj said:
My dog Luke was 11. He had a good life it just hurt because through all the trials and tribulations by family has been through with my addiction he was always there for a lick or gentle nudge. We got him when I was 16 so he was a connection to that part of my life when everything was fun and the future was a great mystery to be solved. Before heroin wrecked all that.

I hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday herby! Ill be thinking about you.
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The future is still a great mystery to be explored. I'll be thinking of you, too, cj. You are a beautiful soul and nothing, not even heroin, can change that.<3
 
One more without you. We all missed you but we had a lovely holiday, full of laughter and good meals and lots of friends. I made you and me two special cookies to share.





I'm going back to Ecuador in an hour or so. It will be hard to remember how broken I was when I was there last. I love you so much. I know you will be there, as you were before.<3
 
Thinking of you Herby. I hope you find some peace in Ecuador. I sent you a PM a week or 2 ago after Axl, but I know your inbox is always swamped. Stay safe my friend <3
 
^ Back safe and more sound. Thank you to all my friends here that look out for me--I love you. And I don't say that lightly.

In honor of Bluelight's tragic losses and my own son's existence, a brief moment between his three rabbits, may they all rest in peace:

 
A Prayer in Spring

Robert Frost


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

 


26 years ago today. Carrot cake and Chinese take out in your honor. Stories, Dad's, your brother's, mine. And as always, the "I wonder what.....?"
 
Today I wrote an email to thank a poet who had written these words describing poems he wrote after the death of his mother:
"Is it ever finished, our argument with death? Our dispossession? There is, I think, no way to complete it. It becomes our work no matter how we approach it. Our work, in the face of this unalterable fact, is the always ever bringing back of remembering."
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But each memory is a death in and of itself. A memory, it turns out, is simply a retelling of the last retelling which was a retelling of the last and on and on...we all know how that goes, trained in childhood by the game telephone. You whisper a sentence in someone's ear (in this case, your own) and they in turn whisper what they heard to the next person and by the time it winds its way back to you, it is a new sentence altogether. And so I ask you, boy of my flesh and my imagination, what do I still hold? And what of that is true? Strangely, the most overlooked sense of our five senses is the strongest in the end. I know your scent. It appears not to be a memory but perhaps deeper--a recognition of any mammal of her own offspring.

When I was house-sitting for Auntie Marla I slept in her room. Across from her bed she has her "ghosts" on a shelf: a picture of our Dad in his signature blue shorts and orange shirt, a painting that someone did of Linda's eyes and her photo of you that she calls, "The little god." Yes, I remember that you and your brother were like little gods set down among us. Your hair in that photo is luminous, so blonde it is almost white. Your eyes are piercing blue, before they mysteriously turned green, and you have the little compressed smile that you so often had, as if you had to hold all that mirth inside and just let a trickle out, for fear of what would happen if that much joy was released at once into the world. And of course there was always the irony in it--as if the absurdity of absolutely everything was already apparent to you at 3. Your chubby hands on the tricycle handlebars are full of purpose. You were always full of purpose. What the photo cannot hold is your voice back then--the clarity and purity of it. Sometimes I wish I had been one of those mothers that obsessively filmed and recorded your every move. I am so hungry for these pathetic representations and the memories they evoke. But then I think, no, they would be like a house full of too much stuff: momentarily satisfying but ultimately empty and burdensome. Because they are not you. I only still and forever want you. Not the memories, not the photos or my own stories, not the shrines or the garden, not anything that I can touch or see or hear now, all the illusions of my own making. I want what cannot be. I want the you that was separate from me.

 
Your brother is coming home! Just briefly--it's a visit--but I'm so happy. I am making his bed, which has been the guest bed, up with fresh sheets, dusting, fixing the broken shade in the window--all the joyful preparations. And completely out of the blue, after 6 years of living with the immutable fact of your absence, I think of calling you and saying, "For his first night home do you think we should order Thai food or do you want Chinese?" Crazy. I feel crazy. One minute I'm on solid ground, working hard to accept that your death has now become more familiar than your life and then, these strange occurrences, like breakthrough pain,or, like Grandma said: phantom pain of a severed limb. How is the limb gone from the body but not from the pathways of the brain? How are you in the past and then suddenly, right here in the present?
 
I wonder if I would panic so much about your brother if I had not lost you. I hate to panic. I hate to burden him with knowing that I panic. I haven't heard from him for one day in Turkey and already my mind is cooking up horrible scenarios--they've thrown him in jail on some trumped up charge because they found out he was working with the refugees; he's been beaten up by muggers and is lying in a hospital with no ID; he's been kidnapped. It's ridiculous. I hate these kinds of mothers. I don't want to be one and find myself not only unable to stop feeling like this but find that it is growing in strength. Ugh.:(8(:p
 
I think your worry is completely justifiable. Turkey is a dangerous place for an American to be right now. I'm glad it ended up being ok though. He sounds like an amazing guy to be going over there helping people! He gets it from his mom :)
 
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