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

Holland

This first year is almost over. I have spent the hours of the year on the verge, tears settling passively quietly in the corners of my eyes but they stay there, centurion-guarded settlements. I have the most difficulty maintaining my composure whilst shopping for food. I believe it is because I spent so much of my time doing that when I was raising my children. Grocery shopping is one of my favourite choirs. I am an avid label reader – of course labels are part of the advertisement world and like everything else we read it is all about persuasion. I first read the ingredients and work out whether those ingredients would be happy swimming around in my body interacting with all the bits and pieces that they will pass on their journey from hither to thither. If the ingredients sound OK then I let myself get taken for the advertising ritualistic ride; ‘this will make you feel brand new’ or whatever the lines are. Most write-ups are close to the mindset that the Divine created the product – maybe even crucified for our good. I have seen labels that could have been in a phrase in The Bible. There is even the guilt that the Christians love to hold on to, that if we really cared for our body or for our family, we would buy this product. Colours and pictures of packages do a lot for me too. I will purchase a product if the pictures or colours are better than the ingredients. I am also greatly influenced by commercials; if I see a commercial that I find offensive I will never buy anything by that company again. I spend a lot of time shopping if I am on my own but since being married and not having children to buy for my time in the shops are considerably less then what they were when I was a sole parent. Narda is very much the type of person that believes grocery shopping is a chore with little merit and the best way to do it is to have a list and go in and get what is on the list and nothing else. I prefer not to have a list and create meals by what I find on the shelves. We are in the Netherlands this week, Utrecht, and I love shopping here. I cannot read the labels, and I am very dependent on the pictures. And even if I get help with the words, it is not always useful. Yesterday we went to a restaurant and Narda, knowing Dutch, ordered what she thought was a steak dinner and it was fish

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I have had a terrible week. It began in Skerries, Ireland, I have felt pangs of depression but nothing totally beyond what I could handle. I am finding that if I do not think about Leigh with much depth I am fine. I never think about what could be as that is wasted thought. Whilst raising my boys I would fantasize a bit – thinking of various possibilities that could be Sacha making a successful album, Leigh pitching a no hitter and moving up to the majors. I no longer fantasize about possibilities because when you are dead the possibilities are never to be. I am always on the brink but I went over in Ireland. It happened in my sleep a moment I had no control over. I was having a dream about an argument with Lesia, something to do with her telling me I was a bad parent. Then she was out of the dream and I was left to grieve about Leigh. In my dream I was crying uncontrollably, and I awoke, and I could not stop crying. I must have been going at it for a while because my pillow was quite wet. Narda woke and wanted to know what was happening but I didn’t know myself. I felt such despair and that was the most I had felt in the year. Once I was fully awake I stopped, and I did know why I had been crying. For a year I had suppressed so much but the subconscious will always crash the party at some point and my surface had been penetrated, the balloon popped, parachutes ripped and there was no obvious place to land. I slipped into a murky and thick darkness. Narda did what she could to be supportive, but I wanted to be alone and we had to pack and drive to Dublin airport.

Over the more than ten-year since my ‘episode’ in Ireland I have had others with Narda waking me and telling me I was crying. It is always Leigh.
I knew what Leigh had gone through during his last days, it was like I was becoming him for a moment, and I was to know what he suffered. I knew what Jesus had gone through and every martyr before and after. Leigh felt alone, despair was all around him and his life was over and there was no future.  To plan for a tomorrow was not worthy of the effort the only experience to look forward to being was that of the end of death of life no more; the last breath, a final farewell. But Leigh had prepared for a change of mind – he did take extra clothing, and he had left doors open to return but he was not going to fight for his life. If my life were threatened at this moment, I would not fight to save it. Faced by a gunman I would bless her and say thanks. Thousands die in hospitals because of the wrong medication, we die from accidents, mistakes, conditions unknown and yet some live on and on and on. Leigh dies at the age of twenty my father is going strong at 99 but it is really not much difference in the time. Leigh did not last long but no one really does but nevertheless I feel sad and I did not want to progress any further, but I had to.

We flew to Amsterdam and the darkness lingered and deepened. I just did not want to live I did not want to breather I did not want to move but I continued pulled forward by an invisible string. We stayed with Narda's relatives in Utrecht and even though it was good and everyone was kind and happy I held to hold my breath and go forward. I was not really irritable, but I was not cheerful either. I watched the Netherlands lose to Portugal in the semi-finals of the European Cup and it summed up my mood. Then the day before we were to leave the darkness lifted and I did not miss Leigh so much. I   awoke just as I had a week earlier, and my mood was just as contrasting.  Nothing set me off either time – maybe the waking crying set me up for the next several days but conversely, I did not wake up laughing or cheerful or feeling light in the middle of the night but I did awake feeling better – almost good.

This will probably be what I must look forward to for the rest of my life – periods of grief and periods of non-grief. Now flying off to Hong Kong in 2004 like a year ago in June 2003 shortly before Leigh killed himself, only then I looked forward to the future now I am just going to just observe it. Life on this planet is beyond understanding and that is all that I understand anymore. Years later in 2013 and again in 2014 I would be having heart surgery in Hong Kong; firstly four stents then a year later a kissing-balloon. Was my heart stopping because of Leigh?

8/22/04 12:10 PM United Flight Portland to Chicago

After reading, studying, being taught, even making up a few dogmas and “this is the way it is” declarations, along the way along with variant theories, views; the thoughts all mingle and mangle. It is so much a part of us - wanting to know what happens next or even why we are here and how did we get here - that we all believe something. I have tried not to believe anything, but I have not been successful. Trying to function in a void of consciousness is difficult if not impossible. Something has to be my adopted “this is the way it is”, ‘truth’ but as an orphan, adopted by stray rhetoric, I am no longer interested in adoption - especially of beliefs.

There are so many ‘off the shelf beliefs’ one can take aboard. Not only are we “blessed” with several major religions but also there are so many variations and sects of the major religions that any one of hundreds can be one’s own belief - religion.  The ‘off the shelf beliefs’ are the easiest way to go. My parents were not just Christians, they refined themselves to being protestants, but that was not enough - they had to have a ready-made brand so they became Methodist. Methodist come in all sizes and shapes and colours and they also are further categorized by the sect of Methodism they prescribe to. My parents were Wesley Methodists and they were convinced that this narrow band of righteous Christians were the real inheritors of the Kingdom of God.

My father was particularly upset by the Methodist churches that allowed their congregation to dance. Shenendehowa Methodist church actually had dancing at their church and they were surely bound for a serious eternal life spent burning in hell. My parents, like most people, did not question their lot in life - their religion was handed to them as ‘off the shelf beliefs’ from their parents. They did what they could to brand me with their brand. I was attracted to the new age philosophies - though I do not remember at what point I began to say that my parent’s beliefs were shit. I think I was attracted to astrology and it did not take long to discover that there was more to astrology than just the Sun-sign, newspaper mindless stuff that people actually believed.  Thinking that there is any realty to Sun-sign astrology is right up there with believing that there is a loving righteous god that will send people to hell to burn for eternity. Astrological theory opened my mind enough to look at different things. I looked at Buddhism, Hinduism, and then new age philosophy. The Order presented a set up teachings that seemed to make sense and I would like to think that some of their teachings could be right.

What we can only know whilst we are doing the human experience is what we feel we cannot fully pass our emotions on. I grieve for Leigh – maybe others do, I am sure his mother does and Sacha too and those who knew him but we all feel it so differently. I feel as if I will stop breathing at times the pain comes up from my stomach – maybe it is one of those new age philosophy charkas or The Self the Order and other metaphysical organizations waffle on about. At times I look forward to leaving this level of consciousness and I think I feel what Leigh felt at the end. There is really nothing in this life that is worth going on with. Leigh with all his potential saw no potential at all for life.
Only our most immediate generation – only those who have known us personally can truly grieve for us. No one sheds a tear or feels a loss for Einstein, Freud, George Washington or anyone who has lived in the past. Our life is really only emotionally significant to those we touch now. No matter what we do, how we feel there is no one else that will know us soon after we die. What is so tragic about the death of Leigh is that there will be no one to grieve for him after those who knew him have died, soon there will be no one to miss him. Our life is an immediate event – we can leave a trace of ourselves through art or writing or photos or events but gradually even the trace will disappear. Surely everything digital will disappear or be unable to be played or retrieved after a few years. The Internet is a metaphor for how quickly our life disappears. A significant blog or tweet is forgotten are overwritten in importance seconds later whereas hundreds of years ago little snippets would last as long as humanity does.

Sayings from two-thousand years ago are still being passed on but if something as succinct as little biblical sayings were tweeted now there would be some likes for it and then it would be forgotten. There are two things that bring me incredible deep-seated pain that nothing can ease. Firstly is not knowing where Leigh is – it is the worst of all loses. Not knowing where someone is in the physical is difficult to live with but there is always the sense that they will be found. Not knowing where someone is in the universe is impossible – different world-views make up scenarios but now that I do not believe any of them I can not avail myself to a belief that Leigh is in heaven or hell or he has reincarnated as the neighbour’s cow or cat or a passing pigeon. I can believe that he is on another planet or at some other vibratory level or on his way to Planet X – good golly some beliefs are stupid. I hate the belief that we are only memories and when the memories die then finally the person dies too. I will have to say for now that I believe that Leigh lived and died and that is it – he does not exist anywhere except in my mind and in the minds of those who knew him. Anyone who would read this does not know him so he does not exist for them except as a name in a story. No reader will cry for him – at the most someone may think that he was a life wasted. Some stupid wanker of a Christian will say Leigh is an example of what happens when a person is not a Christian – they end their life and burn in hell for eternity. The Dodgers will calculate how much money they spent and lost and the fact that he died on their watch and maybe even at their hand will be washed from the corporate mind. The mother somehow blames me but then I blame her. If only we could have moved to the States so much earlier and he had not got sucked into Veronica’s web things may have been different. If his later years had not been fought over in court so that he could do what he wanted to do – play baseball – things may have been different.

Secondly, I find it almost unbearable that I am left alone to grieve for Leigh. I have so many of his possessions and I am sure Veronica and Lesia have a lot of his things too but these things do not bring any sense of relief. Though I do get some comfort writing this story on Leigh’s computer. I think I am making some connection that is difficult to describe. Today, Saturday, 4 September 2004, is only thirteen months since he last wrote his long goodbye letter to Veronica. On August 13th 2003 he wrote 5897 words. The police in Sydney spent six months interviewing people and trying to determine what caused Leigh to go over his fifteenth floor balcony. They had his computer but because they could not figure out how to open it they did not read the clearest evidence that Leigh was going to end his life. Within three days of my getting the computer I had a local computer shop crack into this computer and one of the things I found was the letter. I also found that he had been going to a lot of suicide sites on the Internet – all from this computer I am now writing on

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At the end of the day I have a wishful belief system that even incorporates some ‘off the shelf beliefs’. I would like reality to be that we were created by a consciousness that is filled with creativity and love. In my wishful ‘the way it is’ belief we have many life times and life times are evolving and we come to earth for lessons and experiences. The ones we love and have experiences with we continue with forever. This would mean that for example those who have died, such as my mothers, brother, Leigh and other friends, I could communicate with and share moments with them. My brother would let me know how he is doing and I could share whatever he is doing with him. If Leigh has taken on another body and is living on Jupiter I want to make contact with him and tell him how hurt I was by what he did. I want to know he is OK that he is happy somewhere in the universe. I refuse to believe the Christian doctrine that he is burning for eternity in hell. I do not like the idea that is currently growing in popularity that we were ‘humans’ were created some 450,000 years ago

footpath on a Magill  Street

I saw this one day walking to the Magill Campus of the University of South Australia when I was preparing for my PhD graduation in 2005. We had returned for the northern hemisphere southern school break and I graduated in August in an Australian winter. It may have had nothing to do with my Leigh but there it was.

coffin plaque
We went to Sydney and I put flowers and a poster of Leigh on the post where he landed. We stayed at the hotel he stayed at and then returned to the States to teach and live until coming back to Adelaide for Christmas.

NEXT - 46. - PART 3 - DREAM'S END -VI - My name is Sofija …

Leigh Neuage webpage

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

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Leigh Neuage webpage

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