40. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - 2 Australian 'Idol' shocked by death

Funeral

Humans were not created to function alone. I have tried many times decade after decade. The self-made, self-actualized, self-only, selfish-gene, selfish-me; try going through a day with your own thoughts and be free of any influence outside – it is impossible. For the past year (2015) I have rarely listened to anything on the radio. Even driving for an hour to teach at a school here in South Australia I just want to be left alone with my own thoughts. I watch a bit of telly in the evening: news (I hate news), a television show with Narda – we tend to watch series, but most often I am working on my laptop. Playing around with Photoshop or some such program. Like 87.4 percent of humans in the west I use to listen to music. Especially at the gym. No more. I just like to think. I like to reflect. I wake in the middle of my sleep each night and just think. Reflect. Question. Wonder.
August 16th 2003 I could not function alone.
I only know of events in the world by looking in an Internet Search:

• 16th August 2003: Libya Accepts Responsibility for Lockerbie Bombing in 1988 in a letter to a United Nations Security Council meeting formally taking responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.
• 16th Aug. 2003: Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana has been shot dead by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison when his camera is mistaken for a rocket propelled grenade launcher.
• 16th Aug. 2003: Idi Amin, whose eight years as president of Uganda were characterized by bizarre and murderous behavior, died in Saudi Arabia.
• 16th Aug. 2003: Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh, a 35-year-old surgical resident, was decapitated in a freak elevator accident at a hospital in Houston, Texas.[128]
• 16th Aug. 2003: A tourist visiting Las Vegas, Nevada, Rebecca Longhoffer, was electrocuted by an iron plate situated in the ground while crossing Las Vegas Boulevard.[129]
• 16th Aug. 2003: Cristiano Ronaldo's debut in Manchester United F.C. against Bolton Wanderers F.C.

Of course, one could search the news for any date and see how many things happen that not only do not affect us but we do not need to know about. 87.4 percent of the news on television, online, in newspapers, have no bearing on our life. We have connection with most of the news. Why do we watch it? What can we do? I could easily go the rest of my life without the news. In 67 years I do not recall one news item that had a direct impact on my life. For example, during the SARS epidemic we went to Seoul in 2003 on the way to Australia. We saw the warnings. We also saw that the airport had very few people, the hotels were renting top rated rooms for a fraction of their cost – which we took advantage of. So I did see the news – doom and gloom as usual, but it did not change our holiday plan. We went to Mexico City even when the news was doom and gloom about drug wars and the same with Guatemala and everywhere else we have gone. We are tourists of life. The news sucks. Don’t pay any attention to it.
I went to my office and picked up a few items; notebooks, computer discs – yes people use to save stuff on computer discs – I have boxes of them and no way to play them on today’s computers. A portable hard drive. I still have that hard drive, 80 gigabytes which at the time was enormous and today we have that much on a thumb-drive that fits into the change part of my wallet. I just was out of it. We were hours from leaving for Hawaii. Instead we had a one-way flight to Sydney at 5:35 pm.

Narda did it all. Got our flights to Sydney, got Sacha there, spoke with my professors working on my PhD with me.

We collected Lesia at the airport. I tried to embrace her but after all we had gone through that was not on. Later she would snap at me and say it was all my fault.
From what I have been able to piece together, primarily from police and Veronica was that Leigh arrived at the Novel unexpected. I only know what happened on the morning of Saturday the 16th. According to his ticket he arrived in Sydney on Wednesday the 15th at 6:35 am Los Angeles time which would be early Friday morning of the 15th Sydney time.

From what I have been able to piece together, primarily from police and Veronica was that Leigh arrived at the Novel unexpected. I only know what happened on the morning of Saturday the 16th. According to his ticket he arrived in Sydney on Wednesday the 15th at 6:35 am Los Angeles time which would be early Friday morning of the 15th Sydney time.

From his return ticket he had planned to fly back to Florida a week later on the 21st.

Leigh 's last flight
Leigh ’s return flight
From Veronica’s narrative Leigh arrived at the Novotel and the first thing he wanted to do was change Veronica’s room from a lower flower into a suite with a balcony on the highest floor.

video memorial 2008

When had Leigh made the decision to end his life? He had mentioned in an email to Veronica he had those intentions. Did he decide when he was in Vero Beach when he bought the ticket with his flyby points, making his flight cost $69? Maybe he decided on the flight. Whenever it was his behaviour in Sydney was a bit crazy. After probably not sleeping, having jetlag and being besides him with depression, being upset that his relationship had ended or was ending he was not in good shape. Veronica said that usually Leigh was not a spender and was actually quite tight with money. But on that Saturday he spent like there was no tomorrow. There would be no tomorrow for Leigh. He bought Veronica expensive purses, musical CDs, clothes. They spent more than a hundred dollars for lunch in Sydney Harbor and went to the aquarium. I have the memory card from Leigh’s camera and the above pictures sitting at lunch with Veronica, with Veronica, the very sad photo of him, in tears, at the start of Part 3 are from that day.

last receipts

Veronica said that when she went to bed before mid-night she thought Leigh was going to sleep then too. He used his credit card last at 12:38 shortly after mid-night for $11.90 from a burger shop in the hotel so he was up and about on Saturday. A street cleaner found his body five hours later. I had to identify Leigh at the coroner’s. The back of his head was crushed in and his face was twisted in the more terrifying look I have ever seen. There was fear on his face. I have been haunted for the past twelve years by that look. Did he change his mind after falling? According to the police he would have sat on the railing and fallen backwards having a final view of the Sydney Stadium as he fell.

I never had much of a conversation with her. I was beside myself with grief and males do not tend to carry on emotional conversations with their son’s girlfriend at the best of time. I do not know what they discussed. A nineteen year old and one who just turned twenty in or ending a relationship. I could not imagine what they would be saying. According to the police he would have taken less than four seconds to end one journey and perhaps start another one. Were those last few seconds a play-back of his life or was there a play-forward of what could have been if he had chosen to stay? I am writing a novel based on those few seconds when he glimpses what life would have been if he had stayed.

I have a pile of letters from Veronica to Leigh that he saved during the couple of years they were together. I do not have any from him to her. What she had written were all typical teenager stuff about loving him forever and how difficult it was having him in the States and her in Australia. I wondered if they had considered living together in the States but being new into the baseball world he would not have been able to support her and she would not have been able to get work.

When Leigh and Sacha were in primary school in various schools: Victory Harbor Primary, Pt, Elliot. Primary, Mt. Compass and a few others – we did not have a very stable life – I had little idea about education. Back then I had a tenth-grade education. Now with a PhD and some other degrees such as a teaching one, I doubt I still have primary school sorted out. I use to go to meetings with teachers, I use to try and sort out various issues though maybe I was not a very good parent to teachers and they no doubt saw me as a single-parent that was quite confrontational. They may even have seen me as a bit feral. Now having taught for fifteen years I see the parents as the issue. Today was a typical day of temporary relief teaching. I had years (grades in the States) 2 – 5 and I was sent to look after an ill music teacher’s class for the day. Holy cow. Firstly, I am about as far removed from music as one can be; for example, at the 2015 Eurovision I only liked one entry and that was Finland’s. They were my age, had learning disabilities, and did the only punk song at the thing. The lines suited me:

“I always have to clean up,
I always have to wash up,
I always have to see the doc,
I always have to go to work;
Can't go to my PC,
Can't watch my TV,
Can't even see my mates;
I always have to stay at home,
I always have to do things,
I always have to eat properly,
I always have to drink properly;
So, no candy for me,
No soft drinks for me,
Not even alcohol;
I always have to rest,
I always have to sleep,
I always have to wake up,
I always have to take a shower…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Y0HOPL5GU

Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät - Aina Mun Pitää (Finland) - LIVE at Eurovision 2015: Semi-Final 1

As I wrote in Facebook after seeing this; “I feel like I have a future – going out to my shed, stand in front of my green screen and start yelling – after I take a nap, my meds, get my blood pressure and sugar levels checked, and ask my wife if it is OK.”

So, with my ‘music classes I found a box of finger puppets and had students get in groups and create stories. What a mess. What makes some of these days more difficult is that I am on lots of medications and what takes the most out of me are the ones that are supposed to be curing hepatitis C. I am through with the first medication and that allegedly cleared the virus after maybe thirty plus years and I am still on pegylated interferon-based and ribavirin-based triple therapy. It is the interferon that is nasty and I am doing it for eleven months. Half-way through it I question every day whether I will make it to the next day. I feel exhausted, fatigue to the point that I think of going to bed most of the day. My gums hurt, I feel like I have a bad case of the flu every day especially for a few days after injecting the interferon. They say it gives memory loss. Not sure how one can be given a loss but there it is. I am not aware of any memory loss not any more than usual. I am writing this story or at least editing it whilst feeling sick. I teach with aches and pains and tiredness but sometimes I think maybe it is OK. Rarely do the children get to me. In the past annoying children annoyed me.

Now I feel too ill to differentiate between being sick and being stressed by feral children, so I probably ignore their impact on my well-being or lack of well-being. Some days are between OK and good because some schools are easier than others. I enjoy teaching. Just yesterday with a grade two class I really enjoyed myself. We made kites, did some creative writing, had discussions, laughs and played outside. I felt awful physically but overall, I was back to raising children and having a good time. The drive to the schools is scenic going for an hour into the Barossa Valley through the vineyards or up One Tree Hill to Gawler or One Tree Hill Primary. The 45-minute drive up One Tree Hill Road is a winding road and takes me to three different schools. Of course, the ride home is even better. I get home at four pm and take an immediate nap or do an immediate collapse on the bed.

Twelve years ago (today is June 17, 2015) when we got back to Albany, New York after Leigh’s funeral I had to start work the day we returned at Russell Sage College Troy, New York. I had not much sleep for days, I had jetlag, and I was experiencing indescribable grief. I got to school an hour before class would start. It was my first day at this school, after teaching at the State University of New York in Albany the year before. I still was teaching there and would for a few more years but it was part-time and Russell Sage was part time.

Russell Sage is an all-girls school and there they were twenty girls in their late teens or early twenties staring at me. I was on the verge of tears, and I was teaching a class in communication. As this was the first class of the day some of the girls were in pyjamas. I was so out of place. I introduced myself and worked hard to keep my composure then the next class came and went and by noon I was at the University of Albany starting my first class of the semester. How I survived that day I still cannot fathom.

Twelve years later when I teach for a day here in South Australia in primary school I wonder if I will survive the day because I am on chemotherapy and have been for seven months. But this is physical and I can drag myself through the day and get home at 4 pm and pass out on the bed for an hour and make it until bedtime a few hours later. This is doable but exchange fatigue from medication with fatigue from grief and there is no comparison.

Snippets

Letter – writing

Reading letters I sent my father since 1998 gives me a perspective on how I thought when I was not thinking the way I am today. We tend to think only in terms of how we are viewing life and interacting with others now. Separating me-now from me-yesterday and even me-then is difficult. I can remember how I felt or interacted to something or someone at another time but only partially. Yesterday (Friday, January 16, 2004) I was looking through a box of papers of my father’s. In it was a collection of letters I had written but only from 1980. I have found letters from the 1970s and 1960s that take me back further into how I related to the world. I am finding in these letters that not only do I write differently which would be obviously because I have done more years of university as well as being older but it is not just the grammar and sentence structure that has changed – or even my poor hand writing – but I saw things differently and that is the difficult thing to find in these letters. What was important in 1980, when I was just getting settled in marriage at the age of thirty-three and what was important when I was a single parent in a foreign country with two children is quite significantly different and then when the boys got older it changed more. There was more writing about Leigh and his baseball than Sacha. It is because my father could relate to someone playing baseball but he had no experience of someone doing graffiti. When we go to visit my father, he relates to Narda more than me and asks her about her work and not mine and again it is to what he can relate to. His wife and his sisters were teachers, and I grew up with piano lessons and he relates to Narda being a music teacher and having piano students. Whereas trying to relate to my teaching ‘globalisation and Culture’ at university is foreign. This limitation in communicational familiarity affects relationships and reading my letters from the past I wonder if my father had a clue what I was saying. I have not received a personal letter, aside of a few Christmas cards for years.

Letter writing is giving way to email, and it is often deleted after being read. I keep what I write to my children and a few what I believe are important emails and print them out to save but in the future there will not be handwritten letters. In my father’s possessions there are letters and postcards from the early 1900s. My next project is to go through these correspondences to discover how my family related one to another through their written word. One card I came across yesterday from 1908 started off with,
---- grandpa is dead ----

This was before telephone was so common and before the Internet so writing a card would be the fastest way to break the news.

After so many months of trying to get Leigh’s possessions sent up from Florida finally some breakthroughs but as everything continues to do so I am once again surprised at how this is turning out. Again, the question arises is there a pattern? How are things happening randomly when it all seems so orderly? A minister at Narda’s church a couple of weeks ago said that we often view the workings of God by looking at life as one would an embroidery. From the wrong side all one can see is a lot of stitching that looks haphazard, and it is almost impossible to see what the finished picture is but from the other side, the complete picture is clear.

Four months ago, it seemed that we were close to dispersing Leigh’s belongings. At that time Lesia had said that any letters of Veronica should go to her and any CDs to Sacha. I had no problem with the CDs going to Sacha, but it did not seem right for Veronica’s letters to go to Lesia. I wrote that the letters should go to Veronica. There was no response from anyone. In October I wrote to, Detective Ryan, that the letters should go to him so he could have them to help determine what was going on in Leigh’s life before he went to Sydney. I wrote that besides the letters the CDs surely could go to Sacha and the rest of the stuff could be sent to me. I sent the letter to Leigh’s agent, to detective Ryan, our estate lawyer, Lesia and to Dodgertown. No one responded. Dodgertown wanted a letter signed and notarized from both Lesia and me. I did my part in September and by December when Sacha came to visit nothing had been done from Lesia toward resolving what was to become of Leigh’s belongings. I told Sacha that in order to wind up Leigh’s estate I needed to get his belongings. I believed that there were bills, perhaps monthly debts that needed to be ended. I had one invoice for more than one hundred dollars for health products from the first of September. If products were being sent on a regular basis then they should be discontinued. I had already found that one credit card was owed $3500. It was in Sacha’s interest to stop any monthly payments as soon as possible as all of Leigh’s estate was going to go to him and he would be losing money. Sacha wrote his mother an e-mail soon after arriving in Round Lake asking her to send a letter to Dodgertown and she did. I thought she would send a letter just sending everything up to me so that I could deal with any outstanding debts. But anything to do between Lesia and I has never been that simple.

NEXT - 42. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - (40B) "I hope you are still breathing."

Leigh Neuage webpage

Leigh Neuage first homepage which he made at age 15. 1998 This is here in memory of Leigh Neuage

Leigh Neuage on Facebook - obviously not - I made this page for him on Facebook in 2003 and for decades people have visited this/his page to comment on their love for him

Videos of/about Leigh Neuage

Leigh Neuage Memorial Sydney 2008
Leigh Neuage pitching -1 South Georgia Waves 2003 - workout one week before death

Leigh Neuage ballparks pitched in - 22 videos

Leigh Neuage memorial Christmas 2006

List of many webpages mostly of teams Leigh played on

Leigh Neuage ashes are 1/3 holding up my computer screen, 1/3 Sacha Neuage has on a shelf in his house in Melbourne, 1/3 his mum put in this grave in Adelaide

Leigh Neuage

Leigh Sebastian Kenneth Neuage

• Bats Right, Throws Right
• Height 6' 4", Weight 210 lb.

• Born July 6, 1983 in Adelaide, South Australia Australia
• Died August 16, 2003 in Sydney, New South Wales Australia