44. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - IV - Farmville of dead people

twelve years later

Now twelve years later I feel little different than I have the whole time. There has been no healing process, no letting go, no understanding, no lessening of the emptiness and pain of watching a dream be self-destroyed. I have never seen Leigh, caught glimpses of him in the shadows like others say they see their loved ones after death. That too is bullshit. I have dreams of him, often, even 12 years later. I am glad about that on some levels. I use to have a fear that I would forget about Leigh. I would lose his essence. I feel it strongest here. I still have his ashes, they are holding up my computer screen back in Adelaide. I use to think of scattering them somewhere but I do not know where. This is the only place for them and I am not ready to leave them yet. Probably the best thing to do is to add them to mine at the end and toss us both away together. Anywhere.

I hope to come back here. In the future if I have one, on August 16th next time. I have been thinking about being here for the past five years. Almost every day. I am happy here. Tomorrow we will drive off going to Melbourne to see Sacha via the Snowy Mountains which is nuts as it is winter and we have a canvas pop up to sleep in but we are here now and this is where I have been wanting to be for the past five years. To sit on the bench opposite from where Leigh died if only for half an hour to embed this place back into my consciousness as it has become a bit distance to me until again today.

Novotel July 2015

Leigh throwing shadows

I have often felt haunted by this photo. The last photo I have of him when he was living with me in Christies Beach when he was 17 before going off to the States. Now I see it as him leaving his body and going into the next world. This image was not Photoshopped and is just how the camera took it.
Once or twice a year I look at an account I set up for Leigh on Facebook. He has 230 friends from his school days and baseball playing times. I am a somewhat lurker and see his friends who have children and are his age. He should be on there with them. On his birthday he gets a lot of friends who say something in his memory. Here are just a few from the past eight years – almost when Facebook started.

Maybe one of the stranger things I have done in life is when I played the online game via Facebook, ‘Farmville’, I put Leigh as one of my people I traded and played with. We gave each other gifts to the point where I built up quite the farm during six months of playing it. At the time I was living in Jersey City and doing an online course through Australia to get my teacher’s certificate so I could teach in Australia. Farmville gave me a break from the nonsense of writing lesson plans. I had already been teaching for ten years and had a PhD so felt above it but I still needed a teaching degree.

So having a Farmville showing on a dead person’s Facebook was weird to some. However in my world most of my friends in Farmville were dead. I had set up an account for my dead father, mother, brother, some ex-girlfriends and even a dog. I also had about a dozen accounts of me using different emails. Some names that I used are: ‘Another Instance of Terrell’, ‘Terrell Farmer’, ‘Terry Adsit’, ‘Terry Miller’, ‘Saint Terrell’, and others I no longer recall. We all gave one another gifts and my site rapidly grew from so much giving.

Leigh's Farmville
I have a page for this at http://neuage.co/Farmville/ but as I may delete that domain soon the jest of those crazy Farmville days is the below composite image.

Farmville of dead people

NEXT - 45. - PART 3 - DREAM'S END -V - This first year is almost over

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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