Check my Defend Equality page TODAY's QUOTE In the arms of the angelfly away from here from this dark cold hotel room and the endlessness that you feel you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie you're in the arms of the angel may you find some comfort here ~ sung by Sarah McLachlin Yesterday's Entries 2001: Just Shoot Me TODAY's FOOD Breakfast: Fruit bran cereal TODAY's ENTERTAINMENT Reviewing Starlight Express, Getting to know me....
You’re half-angel. Not exactly human, but not quite angel, you walk on earth freely. Half-Angels have no wings, but tend to show some signs. No one really knows how half-angels are born. Some say that when a child is born, one of the angels blesses her with her gifts. Others say that they are cursed creatures, because half-angels cannot die, while their familly and friends around them do. Half-Angels are very beautiful and Kind, and have the power to speak to animals, but at the same time, sad that they are this way. Some Half-Angels love being human. Being able to see, smell, hear, taste,and feel are all miracles to them. They crave to be more human-all the time. What Kind of ANGEL are you? |
GHOSTS 11 March 2003 Maybe it’s all the cemetery walks I’ve been doing lately, where I park near Paul and Dave’s grave, pass by and talk with the kids, then walk up to the dog run behind the cemetery, take my walk, then stop back at the grave again to say good bye and then come home. Maybe it was the wine tasting Walt went to last night, where he ran into the parents of Dave’s best friend. Maybe it was the unexpected, sudden death of our next door neighbor’s daughter. She was in her 40s and we don’t know how she died, but we read about it in the paper. Maybe it was the newspaper article talking about finding the body of Spalding Gray in the river the other day. Or maybe it’s just that "anniversary season" is coming up (April 20 for Paul, May 18 for Dave), but I’ve been thinking a lot about the kids this past week. It’s so difficult to think that David has been gone 8 years. He is permanently frozen at age 24. I can’t even picture him at 32. Walt was saying what a wonderful relief it was to talk to his best friend’s parents yesterday. Their son, a massage therapist, was the one to get the call from the police--I guess Dave had his number with him somewhere. He was the one who managed to get the family together. And he was in the hospital, while his wife was home in labor, massaging Dave’s feet as he lay dying. The son that was born the next day was given David’s name as a middle name. The son is now 8 and knows how he got his middle name. How Dave would have loved to have been "Uncle Dave." The problem with losing a child--or two--in a town that is really pretty small, and where you know a lot of people is that even this far down the road, a lot of people aren’t really sure how to approach you. There is this big "THING" hanging between you no matter how long it’s been since the tragedy. You kind of feel like you have to take on the job of making people feel comfortable but basically people who know you only casually just would rather avoid talking to you at all. I know this because I’ve been in that position from the other side. There are still people, whose children died long, long ago, whom I am uncomfortable being around, even though I now know that things would be just fine if I were to act normally. But when you talk with someone who was in some way part of it all--someone who was there, or whose kid was there, or who showed up at the house during the week after, or who helped plan the funeral, or whatever. All that awkwardness is gone. You can talk about the kids or you can talk about politics and feel comfortable about either. It’s always like a breath of fresh air to come across someone with whom you don’t have to constantly monitor what you say, how you say it or anything else. People with whom you feel comfortable bringing up the name of one of your dead kids and know that they don't mind. I suppose that as long as we live in this town, that is going to be the way it is. We can’t get past the fact that we do have two dead children and that there are some who, 20 years from now, still will feel uncomfortable around us because of it. The death of Spalding Gray naturally makes me think of Paul. Paul never became as well known as Gray, of course, but there were those who compared his monologues to Gray’s. Both of them, for whatever reason, were beset by demons and they both chose to attempt to exorcise those demons on the stage. As Paul said in his first show, "An Evening of Morbid Self-Attention," he found that therapy didn’t work for him so he decided to charge his friends and family money to come and listen to him talk about himself and his problems. I read an article about Gray today, where it talked about how his "stage" was a simple table and a glass of water. Paul probably chose that set for the same reason. He would sit at the table, glass of water close by, and just talk to the audience. You should never see his show twice because it would spoil the illusion seeing him evoke the same emotions in the same spot each time. If you could step back from the intensity of it, it reminded you that this was a performance as much as a conversation. Because he suffered from what one doctor diagnosed as "hysterical blindness," where he could see, but could not read, except in moments when the ability to read would come flashing back briefly, he had no script, so he "wrote" (in his head) and rehearsed his act sitting at a table, essentially "doing it" for the living room furniture, and sometimes for the mirror in front of him. It was during such a rehearsal that he screwed up and lost his life by doing something dangerous that he should never have attempted without someone nearby (or after several drinks). I’m wondering if somewhere in the universe Paul and one of his heroes, Spalding Gray, are sitting at opposite sides of a table talking about the demons that ultimately drove them both to their death. It will be 4 years without Paul next month and 8 years without Dave the following month. I have such conflicted feelings about their deaths. I miss them both terribly and would give anything to have them back. But if I’m totally honest about it, there is a sense of relief having them gone. They were the two I worried about the most. I worried that David would get drunk and kill himself in a car accident, and I worried that Paul would commit suicide. Well... don’t need to worry any more. They’ve gone and done it. It’s like having both shoes drop. I worry about different things for Jeri, Ned and Tom. But I don’t worry on the same level that I worried for years about Paul and David. I suppose it makes me a bad mother to admit that on some level life is more peaceful these days. But when March rolls around...well...there are always those ghosts that rise up and make me wish that just once more I could spend a sleepless night worrying about Paul and about David again.
|
|
PHOTO OF THE DAY
|
||
For more photos, please visit My Fotolog and My FoodLog |
||
Weight Lost to date:
43.8 lbs
(yes really--didn't change this week...)
<--previous | next-->Journal home | bio | cast | archive | links | awards | Fotolog | Bev's Home Page |
Created 3/08/04
