• Bluelight
    Shrine




    A memorial
    to Bluelighters
    who have passed away

RIP ektamine

We have the memories. I have to remind myself that the gift of the life, no matter how tragic, still overpowers the pain of the loss. I've been told to forgive myself so many times, that it wasn't my fault. We all could have done more maybe, but the stories of so many other great parents like yourself who live on in similar circumstances are so similar in the end details. No one deserves this, but we are only human, with many of the same weaknesses of the people who were an intrinsic part of us. Could've, should've, would've. We didn't know, we didn't directly cause this, we are human.

All I believe now, as I think you do as well, is that we can only do the best we can to help others. And you've done more than anyone I know. I've seen your work here and you've saved others the pain of this kind of cruel loss. <3
 
I am cleaning out my closet. Unearthing things stuffed into the far recesses anywhere from last month to twenty four years ago. I came across so many little daggers to the heart. Here are a few:

The one shirt I saved and never washed.

The toxicology report and coroner's report, hidden because your Dad never could stand to read them.

A whole envelope of our collaborative rabbit drawings from the train trip back from Oregon when you were 6. You drew the underground warrens and I drew the rabbits. You drew the airplanes and helicopters firing at each other in the sky overhead. I added some trees with worried faces and tears.

My beginning Spanish notebooks. On one page, learning the verb agradecer I conjugated it with these phrases: "Agradezco que no te muriste el fin de semana pasado." Estoy agradecido que ya tu vives." At the top of the page there is a red check from the teacher whose name I have forgotten.

A box of random pictures of you and Tyler I had planned to make into a book about brothers. In every one of them you are smiling.

A birthday card from Jane that says, ".....how beautifully you continue to paint even as you face the deep pain of a son you love and all the uncertainty you must hold." Was it ever uncertainty? I remember waking so many nights, sure that you were dead. Why then now is it still so impossible to believe it?

 
Herby, I'm so sorry and sad to hear about what happened to your son and listen to your memories.
That's a beautiful picture you have.
The one above I can see his hands and the one you carry in your heart.

I don't have enough words to make you feel better.
I can only see that your son is alive in your heart and that's forever. I share the feeling of loss I have about my sister who passed away 3 years ago. She was beautiful inside out. She was the especial one.
But she had been living like a vegetal and her loss is deeply felt by me.

Sometimes we really question if that really happened and play in our minds over and over again so many situations we remember and what I could have been done differently or if I was present enough.

People say God has His plans and I find it very difficult to accept as I still feel her energy, I still dream about her. And I hope that time helps us to deal with such a loss in better ways.

I can see that you have a good heart and help a lot of people here. I truly hope you can deal with such love in a less painful way.

My best wishes.

Erik.
 
Have you thought about making the book about brothers despite Caleb's passing? I know it would be painful but it might bring some more closure for tyler as well?
 
Oh yes, definitely. It will only grow more meaningful with time. Tyler is a rather amazing person. He has dealt with his brother's death in ways that are mostly mysterious to me. I have often thought that he will have it come up more intensely once we are gone and also when and if he ever has children. He is a private person in many ways when it comes to his emotions and I've tried to respect that. Caleb, on the other hand, couldn't hide an emotion if you paid him. ;)
 
Thinking about how much you loved music, how much it meant to you, the day you described synesthesia to me on the way home from middle school, Led Zeppelin being yellow, "almost a taste", you said. Hoping maybe it is all music for you now, pure music. <3
 
We go on down here. We go on having birthdays and growing older. Your brother has all the possible roads of his life stretched out in front of him and we are excited for him. We all go on loving each other, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes clumsily and even poorly. A cat has died, and two of the biggest trees. The neighborhood has kids in it again. Your Aunt Laureen died and broke your Dad's heart. The country is worse off than when you left it and so is the world. Even these words I am writing to you are data on a screen, collected somewhere, mined for who knows what. Selfie sticks exist now. And facebook sent me a message letting me know that my 62nd birthday is tomorrow. You would have railed loud and hard over that and then had a good laugh. I still laugh. I cry about equally. Most of the time I just feel a growing wonder at everything--the mess we've made and the perfection that still exists.

I saw the world's largest tree lying down in its only home, the forest of its birth. When it fell it registered 3 on the Richter scale. I walked along beside the still-solid body of that tree and felt the small, short span of my own life and of course that made me think of yours. Everything is in reverse. I carry your words, your stories, the memories of your smile, your walk, the funny or ridiculous or amazing things you said. It should be the other way. I would be gone and you would carry me forward. I would exist in your memories, memories that you could share or argue about with your brother.

It is hard for me to get older without you getting older. It ignites a kind of rage in me when I'm forced to think about it by a birthday. It is because the years that you have been gone would have been the years in which you came fully into adulthood. I wanted to know Caleb the man; not just Caleb the boy. It seems a travesty to only be able to recall you as a boy, poised as you were on the cusp of something altogether different. Now you are life, not a life. Not the mysterious boy that jumped each night into the dark sea with no one watching. Who does that at 19? Surely a man I would loved to have known.
 
Herbavore, I visit this thread on occasion. Each time I cry-it helps put life (and death) into perspective. I imagine you as 'my' mother and cannot bear for her to try to live w/o a child, lost to the claws of chemicals. That said, I find myself making the same horrible choice/s.

Your strength and your struggle move me and many.
 
Young Men and their Music

Sometimes grief knifes through a moment
and the heart splits again,
reveals the old yearning
still breathing where I carry
your death.

It happens when serious young men play solos on the cello
or the violin, any string instrument really.
The way they lean down in their uncomfortable dark suits,
incline their heads
every muscle of their faces
in private dialogue with the wooden body,
the taut strings, the black mystery of the mouth,

as lovers sometimes speak, nose to nose,
pupil to pupil, without words.

All I wanted was for you to love something that much
that it could anchor your soul to your body and your body to the present;
that the present would persist in being just the note before

the next note,
while you leaned further into the future of love,
all the notes to follow still held in the string
The bow still lifting.
 
In three days you will not turn 25. Your father says, "I wonder where he would be at 25?" He thinks things would have gotten easier. I'm not sure. But what is this concept anyway? What is easy about life? Nothing that I value has come easily, even ease itself. If anything, it seems like life is a layering on of hurt and defensive response, more hurt, more hardening until finally that tiny sliver of awareness that has not been scarred over asserts the need to breathe and you begin the process of peeling back the layers. I would have loved to see you do that. I think you chose a different path. I think you took a shortcut through all that slow and tedious peeling.

I have been dreaming about you quite a bit. In my dreams you might be any age. One night you are 3 and the next you are 19. You are always so thoroughly yourself that you are indeed resurrected and so the mornings are rough. In my dreams I have no awareness that you died. You are simply back with us, usually in the most mundane way--the activity of the dream is rarely focused on you but your presence is integral.I was telling Lori about this the other day and she asked if now that it had almost been 5 years, if things had gotten less raw? We were driving and it was not until she looked over at my face that she got her answer. The answer is no. The sadness lives right under my skin. The reality of your absence is a membrane around each moment. When we were in Turkey I burst into tears twice when poor unsuspecting strangers asked me how many children I had. I told your grandma that I suspect this will happen until the day I die.

The thing is....I don't mind the sadness. If there is anything I wish I could have taught you it is not to run from your sadness. Let it catch up with you. Walk with it always at your side. It is never the only reality but it needs to be heard. It's not nearly as terrifying as what you imagine it as when you are busy running from it. There is a soft side to sadness, a tenderness. Sadness is pure and without blame or anger or even regret. It is as pure an emotion as love itself.

Gina called and asked if she could come down for your birthday. Here you are with her before you'd even ever had a birthday:
 
Great pics and deep posts Jan.. I'm always thinking of you and admiring you in my thoughts.
Is that a duo of Bun Buns that I see?
 
<3 thinking of you today Jan. The picture of Caleb dressed up as the cheerleader for Halloween always cracks me up. He owned that costume!
 
Yeah, there were always a few stuffed bunnies that got to come along with Bun-Bun and that one in that picture I believe was Flopsy. But there was ever only one Bun-Bun and he was the essential soulmate.;) And, yes, he did own that cheerleader costume but I think my favorite is still the old man.
 
You think you cannot live anymore.You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the love (the parent or child or friend or lover who has died) who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.

You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your own throbbing vein. How can you say he is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?
Click to expand...

Elif Shafak from The Forty Rules of Love
 
Hi, all... I was a friend of Ektamine's for ages. First time I've been on BL for quite awhile... been out of the RC scene, but am looking to get back in... D.
 
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