43. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - III - Christmas 2003  Round Lake, New York with my 98-year-old father, Sacha, wife number next and her son

Christmas  2003  Round Lake , New York  with my 98-year-old father, Sacha , wife number two and her son.

For Christmas 2003 with Sacha being with me for the first Christmas since 1997 and for the first Christmas after Leigh’s departure and our first Christmas together in New York since 1985 I hung his stocking though I did not put anything in it and Leigh’s stocking stayed where it had been since we returned in September 2003 – hanging next to my desk upstairs. 

Sacha stayed for a few two weeks along with Narda’s son, Stu. We drove to Montreal and to Toronto where I left Leigh’s baseball card at the Blue Jay’s baseball stadium where Leigh had pitched a few years ago when he was on the under 18 Australian National team. Narda had a severe case of the flu for the week’s drive through Canada, so she stayed bundled up in the backseat. I never really spoke to Sacha about Leigh when he was visiting, I did not know what to say. I did not know what he was feeling. He was a bit anxious to get back to Australia to a new girlfriend he had met shortly before coming over. He is still with her now in June 2015 so at his age a twelve year so far relationship has kept him somewhat stable.

Last week, January 12th, 2004, I began to feel anxious about Leigh’s belongings and wrote Dodgertown asking if a letter from Lesia had yet been received. They responded that she had agreed to have the belongings sent to me in New York but that the correspondence and letters were to go to her. I initially became quite upset with this arrangement.

The idea that she would have any of Leigh’s final correspondence and not share them with me, which would be the case, was not what I wanted. I wrote a long letter to Dodgertown explaining that this did not seem right. In the past I would have sent the letter right away. Mistakes are only a click away with the Internet and I have had such a history of writing then clicking then regretting that I sent the letter to Narda and asked her what she thought. She said that I should just let go of the correspondence and go for having the belongings sent to New York, otherwise everything would become stuck in Florida for another forever. I deleted my letter and said that I agreed to have the correspondence and letters sent to Lesia and the belongings sent to me. Dodgertown wrote back the next day that after opening the envelop of letters that there was nothing but bills and receipts, there were no personal letters. If I had sent my letter explaining how it was wrong for Lesia to get all the correspondence then everything would just sit there – but wait, there is more.

For two nights I had trouble sleeping and I was obsessed with the situation not only with Leigh’s stuff in Dodgertown but also with his computer still in Sydney. Leigh’s computer is the one thing I wanted the most. There is this thought I keep having that I will find what he was thinking or at least where he had been going on the Internet. I also want to write to him using his computer believing that something of him will be remaining in the keyboard. Of what I have now this will be what will bring me closer, or this is what is constantly in my mind. From 1992 we bonded over two things, the computer and baseball and there will be some linkage that I cannot get in any other way than to use the same computer. As I lay awake at night thinking that Lesia somehow would end up with his computer and/or that she would end up with everything of his in Florida it became clear that I had to be more assertive with moving this all along.

On the 17th I got a letter from Dodgertown saying they had sent six parcels of Leigh’s belongings to me via UPS and the envelope of bills and receipts was on its way to Australia to Lesia. On Monday, today, Martin Luther King Day, I checked my email and there was a letter from Detective Ryan saying he had written an email to Dodgertown to send him Leigh’s belongings. Everything is due at my home tomorrow and if I had waited another few days and not followed my intuitive agitation Leigh’s belongings would now be on the way to Australia. Detective Ryan also said they could not open Leigh’s computer to send it to the coroner for inspection but they had opened it in safe mode one time and there did not appear to be any suicide note or anything of interest to them so they were finished with the computer. I wrote back quickly that I expect to have the computer sent to my relative in Sydney. For now though I am waiting for tomorrow with mixed feelings.

My feelings for Leigh change, sometimes hourly, from being upset that he is not alive to an almost acceptance that he chose to leave and is now not here or maybe that it was time to go that there was a reason that is impossible for me or anyone else to fathom that there was no further for him to go. Tomorrow I will receive all his worldly goods from Florida or at least a fair share of them. I was sent a list of what was his from the folks at Dodgertown two months ago but I have totally forgotten what was on the list. There are some clothes, CDs, a CD burner and that is about all I can remember. Waiting is always a mixture of anticipation of what may be and what could have been and finally when the moment arrives the result of waiting is scaled somewhere between disappointment and satisfaction.

I waited to grow up and to leave home. For years whilst I waited to grow up I prepared to join the air force, but I lost interest in that at about the age of 13. Then there was basketball; whilst I waited to get to some towering height I practiced my skills. Hours a day shooting baskets even during winter I would shovel out my area to shoot baskets and dribbling for hours at a time. When I stopped growing at about 14 years of age I gave up the notion of becoming a great basketball player, but I still played and continued to do so. When I lived in New York City I would go out and shoot baskets. I had a girlfriend once who use to go with me and she would even get the ball for me so I could stand in one spot and shoot repeatedly. I played basketball with my kids since they could pick the thing up. They evidentially got onto teams themselves from the ages of eight and I would shoot and play games with them in the backyard. There was a time when I would play against my two sons and a friend or two of theirs and beat them all. Then came a time when I could not beat either one and they were about 14 years old. The last game I played against Leigh was February 2001, he had recently signed with the Dodgers and our lives were going in directions we could not imagine. I had recently ended a six-year relationship and had met Narda a month before. Leigh was preparing to go to the States to fulfill his dream of being a professional baseball player, Sacha had recently moved to Melbourne and was getting settled there.

Of the three of us Sacha is the only one still where they were three years ago (now twelve years later he is still there). Leigh wanted to play one-on-one against me at the elementary school next to our house in Christie Downs. I was 54 and Leigh was 17 and six foot four and was able to dunk the ball. I was feeling a lot older than 54 so Leigh fronted me 20 points and we played a game to 21. Somehow, I got the ball when the score was about 18 to 20 and even though he blocked every other shot and made it impossible for me to get near the basket I managed to throw the ball at the hoop from a long way out and it went in. The last game I played against a 17-year-old pro baseball player I won and I would never attempt to play against a young player again. Last month, January 2004, Sacha and I went to the YMCA gym in Clifton Park to get some exercise. He wanted to shoot some baskets and shortly after we started, a man and presumably his son challenged us to a game to 21. We had not played together since Sacha dislocated my finger when he was 14, eight years earlier. But we held our own and Sacha made most of our points, though I managed to get one in. The score was tied at about seven and Sacha and I were both exhausted, so I said the next point wins and we just moved out of the way, and they made a lay-up and were quite happy that they ‘beat’ us. We were just happy not to play anymore as neither of us was very physically fit but all those times I practiced beginning more than 45 years ago whilst I was waiting to grow taller to play professional basketball were still paying off. Now almost 68 I have a basketball in the shed and when I have a chance I go and shoot.

Leigh waited to grow up to sign a contract to head to the States. Sacha waited to be successful and though he is working on his waiting cycle actively he is still in essence waiting. The one thing we usually do not wait for is to die. My father is waiting to die he has been waiting for about thirty years or more. He believes in heaven and that he will go there and he will see his wife and everything will be groovy. Sometimes I wait to die though I didn’t use to. I want to know where Leigh went and where my brother went and my mothers and friends. Where did everyone go?

Now I am waiting for Leigh’s belongings to arrive. Hour after hour I wait, and I think what I will feel like when I unpack his things. Can we really know how we will react? Will I cry? Will I be disappointed that all there is are some shirts and pants? Will I find closure by finding something that will tell me what his last day was like? I have tried to picture his last day many times. He left in the morning so did he pack his suitcase to take to Australia that morning or the night before? When did he decide to go to Australia? Unpacking his suitcase in Sydney was an emotional experience but then it was also calming. I have had six-months since August 16th to think and grieve and look at life so I may see his suitcase and boxes of things from Florida differently than when I did in Sydney six months ago.

In Sydney at Leigh’s funeral there were only six of us. Narda, Sacha, Veronica, the mother, and a friend of hers and me.

Leigh was cremated at Northern Suburbs Crematorium, North Ryde, Sydney. There had already been an ‘A’ list of famous people cremated there: at the time I only knew of  Michael Hutchence, INXS lead singer, then later on I saw the long list from poets (Banjo Paterson is the only one I had heard of), to the inventor of the lawnmower, Mayors, cricketers, Premiers, writers, country singers such as Slim Dusty, a Prime Minister of Australia and an assortment of others passing through life and being burnt to a crisp in the same place as Leigh.

We were allocated a small chapel. We had half an hour of the place to ourselves. Half of us were crying but we all had a bit of a chuckle at one point. We had requested that they play a song that Leigh liked, ‘I try’ by Macy Grey;

[Chorus]
I try to say goodbye and I choke
Try to walk away and I stumble
Though I try to hide it, it's clear
My world crumbles when you are not here
Goodbye and I choke
I try to walk away and I stumble
Though I try to hide it, it's clear
My world crumbles when you are not here
I may appear to be free
But I'm just a prisoner of your love
And I may seem all right and smile when you leave
But my smiles are just a front…..
Songwriters: RUZUMNA, JEREMY/GRAY, MACY/LIM, JINSOO/WILDER, DAVE /

Published by Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC

We gave someone the CD and it took half of our time there before it came on – and with the volume very high. We were all jolted out of seats. It had been set on repeat and after six or seven times we asked to have it turned off. By then it was time to go.

I did not know what to do. I went up to the coffin and put Leigh’s rookie baseball card on top. He had several in his suitcase and up to a few days earlier I did not know he had a baseball card. As I had moved so far from any religious inklings I asked Narda to say a prayer over his coffin. None of us other folks were going to.
We had the ashes divided into three. Veronica was going to toss them out somewhere. I have no idea what the mother was going to do with her third and I still have a box on my desk – holding up my monitor for my computer.

I had ashes put into two memento silver urns; one for Sacha and one for me. The last I heard Sacha still had his urn sitting in some toy setup and mine have been on my desk in upstate New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, China and Adelaide.

ashes holding up monitor

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Why did he take what he took to Sydney and why did he leave other things behind? When I see what he left behind maybe I will have a sense of whether he intended on returning or did he go to Sydney to die?

I was both disappointed and relieved when it all arrived. I had waited until one PM and that I suppose was not long to wait considering it could have arrived any time up until 7 PM. I even took a video of the truck driving away in case I wanted to review the moment which now seems as silly a thing to do as I have ever done or at least up there with the top one-thousand things I could have left undone in life.

The first thing off the truck, and I do not remember seeing it on the list the Dodgers had sent of Leigh’s belongings was a refrigerator. A bar fridge but a fridge nonetheless and it weighed 75 pounds. There were four other boxes in various sizes and a large suitcase. I video tapped everything in the living room with the fridge standing like a bully over the rest of the things. I peeked inside of it and it was just as the box had said, a black fridge and there was nothing inside but the shelves. I dragged it into the kitchen where it has sat for a few days now as I feel a bit attached to the thing and don’t want to give it away just yet. Leigh must have gotten himself a fridge to cut back on eating costs. He also had a blender and a ‘George Foreman Burger Grill’. The suitcase was filled with tee shirts and shorts and baseball shoes. There were six pairs of cleats – four of them new. There were Nike sneakers and a dozen ‘Waves’ hats. I filled a baseball bag with the ‘Waves’ logo on the side and put them in our spare bedroom. After so many years of packing Leigh’s baseball bag to go off and play somewhere in Australia or overseas packing his bag with what he normally would take with him was not very difficult.

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Leigh ’s new room

Sunday, January 25, 2004 6:46 PM
I set up the spare room with Leigh’s belongings from Dodgertown a couple of days ago. There are still two beds in there from when Sacha and Stuart stayed and Leigh would often be sharing a room with someone when he travelled so to continue sharing room when in essence there was no one there to begin with seems realistic to me. What is important is that I finally have a place to go to that is just Leigh and I. For me there is no place in the world that I can go to and be with Leigh in like going to a cemetery plot or a memorial place so I needed to create one.

The fact that Leigh never saw our home in Round Lake seems insignificant. Round Lake is in the physical and Leigh is not just as wherever Leigh is I cannot visit him. Perhaps he wants me to visit where he is now but because I am unable to put myself in that place I cannot visit. I feel so earth bound and like everyone else in the physical I do not know what it is like in the non-physical.

Every religion and philosophy has some notion but no one really knows anything more than what they have made up.

On the dresser next to the bed I put what was in the pockets of his sports coat. As one who almost never wears a suit coat it is difficult to imagine Leigh wearing a suit but when he travelled as a Dodger he was required to. In his suit coat pocket there was a ticket to a baseball game he attended on Tuesday, the 12th of August – one day before he left for Sydney. The psychiatrist who saw Leigh in late July told me that the team was concerned about Leigh’s mental health and took him on with the single A Dodger’s team to a game in Miami between the Florida Marlins and the Los Angeles Dodgers. (The Dodgers lost that game 5 to 4 in the 13th inning. Marlins to claim sole possession of the Wild Card lead for the season. Ramon Castro's walk-off homer off Paul Shuey with two outs in the 13th inning lifted the Marlins to a 5-4 win over the Dodgers, ending an exhausting 4-hour, 5-minutes marathon in front of 12,025 at Pro Player Stadium.)

What thoughts were in his head during that game? I wonder if he knew that his life would end soon that he would fly to Sydney and never return? Did he watch the game and realise that he was no longer interested in baseball? Did he think it was too far to go to get to the majors? Did he see the Dodgers as a losing team and that he was losing in life? It was a four-hour game in front of 12,025 people in a stadium built to hold 36,331. The average attendance for 2003 was 16,290 so Leigh may have found himself as alone as he wanted to be in a huge place. It seems that if Leigh were of an ill mood which it appears he was, then spending so long at a game when his team lost and not many people were there would just have made him feel worse. The Dodgers lost the next night’s game too, 2-1, but Leigh didn’t go to that game, he was headed for Australia. I think he would have thought of Veronica and that nothing else mattered except to be with her. When Sacha was visiting he frequently spoke about his girlfriend. He seemed to lose interest in whatever we did toward the end of his visit. When we were in Toronto for New Year’s he was as depressed as I was and he wanted to be in Melbourne. When we want to be with someone it does not matter to what is in front of us and even though I would find being at a professional baseball game especially as a professional baseball player of twenty years old extremely exciting Leigh may have seen it as something he did not want to be a part of. Whatever went on in Leigh’s mind he did not throw the ticket it away and it is now on the dresser next to the bed Sacha slept in, in our spare room.

I have a photo of Veronica too. Considering it was because of her that he went to Sydney and I really have not wanted to see anything of her it should have seemed odd to have a photo of her on the dresser next to ‘Leigh’s’ bed but it seemed the right thing to do. The caption on the top of the photo says:

Sweetheart, happy 20th B’day How quick does time pass… And look at where you are now” Congratulations on everything… on us…on you…. I love you with all my heart

A month later he was dead. I have other things on the dresser that I think he would put there if he was staying somewhere, perhaps staying at a motel in some southern city for a four day series. There is his exercise cord, his travel alarm clock that was in his suitcase in Sydney still set to the time in Florida and the alarm for 7.30 AM. Maybe that was the time Leigh had to get up on August 14th to get to the airport to fly to Sydney. There is a letter from Veronica that he would have received at the beginning of the year before going to the State telling him how much she will miss him and how proud of him she is. There is the Dodger’s Media Guide with all the players, including Leigh, the coaches and everyone else involved in the Dodgers organization. His two passports are there and a flight ticket for the 20th of July 2004 from Atlanta to Orlando. A couple of his baseball hats and his sports bag with the Wave’s logo on it and his clothes for playing inside are near his bed. Several of his shoes, dress shoes, baseball shoes and sneakers are under the bed. And his baseball glove and a ball are also on the dresser. There is a copy of Baseball Today on the desk next to the computer. We use to get Baseball Today when we lived in Victor Harbor, we got it for years and I use to tell Leigh that someday his name would be in and sure enough it is.

His baseball card is tossed on a table in corner. Today, Sunday, I took an afternoon nap on the bed and for the first time I felt extremely close to Leigh. I went to sleep right away and woke an hour later feeling like I was waking in his room back in Australia. I sometimes took naps in the kid’s rooms at different times when no one was home and I always felt close to them when I did especially if they were gone for a few days or weeks. I could have made it all up in my mind and anticipated that I would be closer to Leigh because I was next to his belongings and almost how he would have left them – it is much how he would leave things at home in Australia. Or Maybe Leigh can contact me and even though I cannot exactly hear him but can only sense his presence he was there with me now that I have a place he can identify with and where his belongings are. And now back in Australia in June 2015 I am still surrounded by his things. I still wear his sneakers and tee shirts. I still pretend he will be home later today. What I overlook is that he no longer is a teenager. In three weeks, July 06, he would have been 32. I cannot imagine him as a 32-year-old. Sacha is 34 and I saw him a few months ago in Melbourne but when I am on my own, I still think of my children as ten- and twelve-year-olds with great plans in life.

At that time, more than twenty years ago I had just started university, and I was only 45. I was a single parent without a job living in Victor Harbor, South Australia. I was selling my picture poems in Adelaide on weekends, I did not have a girlfriend, we had a dog, life was good. Life is good now even with doing a course of chemotherapy for hepatitis C, and trying to control diabetes and working a few days a week teaching. Overall life is good; a fantastic partnership of fourteen years, a house almost paid off and surrogate grandchildren: Narda’s two granddaughters and a grandson in the States all make the progress of life quite OK. Narda has a son who is 32 so I see that age often.

No one else is the same but Leigh could have had children by now, be happily married and still doing his sport like Stu who plays footy on weekends and we sometimes go watch along with the grandchildren. I should be flying off to the States to watch Leigh win for his team in the World Series this October, but I won’t. He is dead and I have to continue my chemotherapy. This is my reality. My fantasy is what I am writing of what Leigh saw when he fell of what his life would have been; all the way from August 16, 2003 just having turned twenty to 2027 when he would be 44 and I am 80 and we die together in a plane crash returning home from Leigh’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He experienced those 24 years in a couple of seconds from the fifteenth floor of the Novotel Sydney Olympic Park to the pavement below.

It is now July 08, 2015. Leigh’s would have been 32 two days ago. He made it to age twenty and five weeks twelve years ago. That was his end. As these things are it was my end too. Dead dreams. The killing dreams. The killer of dreams. We drove here this week from Adelaide towing our camper van. We managed to use it three nights but it was around the zero temperature mark and last night we stayed in a motel in Gundagai rather than freeze our butts off. Today we got to the Novotel/Ibis at Homebush – Olympic Park by two pm. Nard being the world’s greatest trailer backer-upper managed to get the trailer, still attached, into a very narrow car park in the basement carpark of the Novotel. Our twenty-five year old car and much older popup camper looked like the Beverly Hill Billies parking amongst those who could afford better which is everyone. This is the most peaceful place in the world for me. For seven years we were here every year in August then we missed five years and even though it is not on the anniversary of Leigh ending his dream it is soon after his birthday.

Narda has been here from the day of his death in 2013 to each visit. We have usually stayed at the Ibis as it is much cheaper but we always are in the same restaurant and I always sit on the park bench across from where Leigh landed.

We speculate if it is possible that he is still here. Walking around Olympic Village; a shattered spirit that changed his mind by the seventh floor wanting to re-wind and have his life over again. To continue with the Dodgers back in the summer of 2003 in Florida rather than to have collided with the cold winter payment of Sydney. Is he still walking up from the train station toward the Novotel knowing that his life was soon to end? It was always his decision’ ‘I will fly to Sydney and end my life in front of Veronica.’ Was this his last twenty-four hour thoughts?

I find it peaceful here. Narda was saying today that some people would never want to return to where such a tragedy occurred. I cannot help myself. It is where and when Leigh decided there was no reason to stay on this planet. Whatever led up to that moment is second to what actually happened. We all have the moment in front of us to do or not to do. There is no cosmic-metaphysical force that will stop one if they make a decision like this. I know there are lots of people wandering around selling their story of how they were going to end their life but some unseen force stopped them. That is bull-shit. The unseen force was themselves and then later on the opportunity to sell their story. If one goes off of a fifteen-story balcony there is no cosmic force that will stop them.

NEXT: DREAM'S END - IV. Farmville of dead people

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

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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