# RIP ektamine



## theotherside

We have just learned that our Trip Report Moderator Ektamine has passed away. I wanted to make it known here in Trip Reports first as this was where he was going to start as the new Trip Report Mod. 

I knew him very well and can say from the bottom of my heart that he was a great person, with a caring heart, gave out compassion to me and many others when we really needed it. His contributions to the community will not be forgotten. For those of you who knew him please pay your respects either in this thread, or in the Bluelight Shrine. I will also make an announcement in NMI as he posted there the most. 

Rest In Peace Ektamine....we have lost one of the great ones.


----------



## NeighborhoodThreat

Wow.

RIP man.  I never got to meet you in person but I really wish I could have.  TOS, do you think you could link the Bluelight Shrine thread about ektamine over here so other Bluelighters can see it?  

My thoughts and prayers go out to you and your family ektamine.  I know you're in a better place.


----------



## Psyke

Rip


----------



## NeighborhoodThreat

Rest in peace man.  

I just found out that he passed away, RIP man, Bluelight is missing one of its best members tonight.  

If anybody has any information about him, please post it here.  We will remember you always man.

 ekt

-NT


----------



## theotherside

We have also created a thread in the shrine which can be found here 
Ektamine


----------



## theotherside

I knew him very well and can say from the bottom of my heart that he was a great person, with a caring heart, gave out compassion to me and many others when we really needed it. His contributions to the community will not be forgotten. For those of you who knew him please pay your respects. 

Rest In Peace Ektamine....we have lost one of the great ones.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

RIP ektamine, you will not be forgotten.


----------



## coelophysis

This is so terrible. I was becoming really great friends with him and had no idea why he disappeared. He was totally my opposite coast equal. I can't believe to hear this news it's pretty unreal  My condolences to his family and my prayers that he's soaring a cosmic wave to freedom.

So tragic  He had such potential in becoming a mod.


----------



## coelophysis

Ektamine  Why..


----------



## Keaton

My heart goes out to the guy.
 RIP amigo.
I hope you're in a better place now.


----------



## purple_cloud

Wow, RIP ektamine. I loved reading your posts, but hope you've found peace now.


----------



## Jaxxy

*Soo sorry...</3... Rest In Peace!*

...


----------



## NeighborhoodThreat

I know he has.  I know he's in a better place.  

We'll always be here for you man.  You left us too soon, far too soon.


----------



## theotherside

I would like to dedicate this song to the memory of ektamine, not so much because of the lyrics, but because of the emotion the chorus evokes. I had shown him this song to prove to him that 70's music rocked  He loved it so I'm posting it. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k5xCkkQAEY


----------



## TestOfSanity

Wow so sad RIP


----------



## woamotive

(Rest in Peace) - It's difficult to understand why this has to happen.

Ektamine will live on, no doubt, in the hearts and minds of many.

My best to friends and family.


----------



## skillz~4~thrillz

theotherside said:


> I would like to dedicate this song to the memory of ektamine, not so much because of the lyrics, but because of the emotion the chorus evokes. I had shown him this song to prove to him that 70's music rocked  He loved it so I'm posting it.
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k5xCkkQAEY



nice choice,TOS.

ektamine,you made me love you then you disappeared. i am not angry just sad. yet i know that your energy will stay with those of us whose lives you've touched.

now,just like TOS,you are getting an old school song from me to say goodbye. 

I love you.
~Shine on You Crazy Diamond  by: Pink Floyd 

TOS can you tell us what happened? PM me if you must.


----------



## JoshE

This is devastating news 

We only just started talking in NMI social but from what i could already tell from out short conversations, you were a good guy.

RIP mate, see you on the other side


----------



## coelophysis




----------



## theotherside

He also loved this lyric: He quoted it in this thread http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=570187&page=31

There's a universe inside us, all made of liquid.
It's a case of inner space, chemically dependent.
Through the veins to the brain, a whole solar system,
And I'm a jet-setting space cadet experimenting.
Yep, I vow to this, I'm an alchemist.
I mix emotion up with thoughts and the outcome's bliss.
Inhibition ain’t my boss, without a doubt take risks.
The price of progress with that cost? I'll dish out them chips
And chip at it like a sculptor carve out a wish.
I'm on a chemical romance and life is a trip
A slow dance with destiny, and her hands I grip.
She quick, but I chase; freeze, tag, I'm it.
I keep running like a fountain, so deep as a crater is wide, high as a mountain goat.
And I'm immune to this altitude, got a high tolerance for substance. How bout you?
They say its abuse; I call it a skill rapid a river run through me like a chemical spill, no harm.
When I'm induced I live at will, whoa, the mind-marsh mellows like some lucky charms.
Blast off from an armchair into space.
So fast, so high got a sprinter's face.
So vast, vanilla skies, I can smell and taste the chemicals in them depending on the prescription.
Self-medicated chemists mixing up some inventions,
Experimenting and tripping,
Entering new dimensions.
With my eyes wide shut, intuition and vision,
Side effects make you feel like you're flying and swimming all at the same time, man
I ain't lying, no fibbing.
Throughout all found a wisdom broken down like a prism.
I think I'm neighbors with the man on the moon.
Chemistry's like music and I am in tune.

Come and lay, I'll kiss you on the eyelids,
then we'll sleep and dream good things.
Don't you know it is just the chemicals
in our brain that cause us pain?


----------



## MattPD

I didn't know Ektamine, but I know that he will be missed.

RIP Ektamine and may his friends and family find peace.


----------



## Keaton

This is really tough to read 
This is a terrible loss.


----------



## Seyer

I had only encountered him in the forums a few times but his posts were great.

You will be missed ektamine


----------



## fizzle

Certainly one who left us far too early and at far too young an age... Rest in peace, I wish I could have gotten to know you better... the few correspondences we had were wonderful and I could immediately tell what a great person you were. We really have lost an amazing person in both our little online community here and in this world. You, as well as your friends and family, are in my thoughts and prayers.


----------



## Mailmonkey

Terrible terrible news, RIP ektamine, I loved your posts


----------



## Slain

Wow...

Speechless...

May you rest in peace, and your memories and good times live on in the thoughts of others. Farewell


----------



## HofmannBlotter

Terrible news! Rest in Peace brother


----------



## HofmannBlotter

Rest In Peace! What a terrible news yes  Don't know him personnaly but his thread was very usefull ! Peace


----------



## perfect haze

RIP Bro.


----------



## apap_vs_liver

wow looking at the comments on the shrine. he made such an impression and impact others and thats just trough the internet. musta been one hellofaguy irl huh.

rip.


----------



## Beak

Ohh maan,
RIP fella


----------



## jackie jones

Wow.

Rest easy, man


----------



## Danny Weed

R.I.P

Awful news.


----------



## FlippingTop

aww fuck man... I was wondering why he had not responded to my PM.

Man that's fucking shit...

R.I.P


----------



## allium

I didn't know him as well, as some people here, but I feel sorry, and this is terrible news.

He would be a great mod of TR!

RIP, ektamine.


----------



## monstanoodle

I knew him only by his posts, and that's enough to know how much of a lovely, caring and special person he was, and how much he'll be missed...
Words are all but useless in times such as this 


 To all his family, his friends, all who knew him.. My deepest condolences 
This one goes out to him and all you - The Cinematic Orchestra - Familiar Ground (fear. Fontella Bass)


----------



## Solide

Oh shit ... I didn't really know him but I've read alot of his posts so there's always a feeling of familiarity there and it's always sad to see someone go. Wishing the best to his family and friends.


----------



## Bearlove

My deepest condolences to his friends and family - may he Rest In Peace 

Respect


----------



## ChainsawWilliams

Really enjoyed reading his stuff here. RIP


----------



## breakcorefiend

Rip


----------



## Na'vi

I haven't been here long, but I enjoyed his posts none the less.

RIP bro, you won't be forgotten.


----------



## Ne0

Rip.


----------



## chitown rollin

Rest in peace buddy.


----------



## Vader

This is fucked. RIP man.


----------



## blim

Such a warm,friendly,knowledgeable contributor to this place. Loved reading his posts.

RIP


----------



## LSDMDMA&AMP

RIP man 
he didnt...die from drugs did he?
i hope not, that makes it moar sad


----------



## Thou

This is so sudden!




I really enjoyed his posts and can say with affirmation that the forum won't be the same without him.

RIP ektamine.


----------



## coelophysis

LSDMDMA&9727071 said:
			
		

> RIP man
> he didnt...die from drugs did he?
> i hope not, that makes it moar sad



Yes no maybe so.

I'll wait to learn more about what's going on. I don't want to post a bunch of personal stuff on Bluelight if that's not what his family wanted.

It hit extra hard today when the realization of how real it all was presented itself.

I'm totally bummed. I miss you already eKtamine there was too much stuff to achieve ahead of you in life 

I'll never forget the things you told me and the places I need to visit when I make it out there. I just wish you could have joined me


----------



## Phat_bass49

RIP. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.


----------



## TheTwighlight

This is terrible news. I wish the best to his friends and family. It always weirds me out when this kind of thing happens on here. Rest in peace, man.


----------



## androoo

woah.. i seen his posts alot, lovely guy   rip


----------



## theotherside

You don't know how happy it makes me to see so much love for my boy ektamine in this thread and in the shrine. It makes me know that Bluelight IS a community...we all care about each other and should all check on each other! 
Peace and love to everyone who has shown their love.


----------



## nomy

Only just logged on and discovered this awful news. So sorry 

Go fly man. Go fly to that great gig in the sky.....


----------



## SmokeaJoint

Oh no.... no man thats fucked.  How did it happen? I looked at the PV megathread and saw this awful awful news... aw man this sucks.


----------



## SmokeaJoint

Hearing this makes me sad.  RIP ektamine. I barely got to know ya man, but I'm saddened all the same.


----------



## Unbreakable

We all die; The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will...and eKtamine def left something on this board that will live for ever and will be never forgotten 


Rest in Eternal peace my friend


----------



## the toad

I want to apologize to anyone who tthought I meant any disrespect to my dear late frien ektamine... I was speaking in a sarcastic rhetoric when I referred to him as "dumb" I know ektamine to be very intelligent... 

I don't deal with the death of people that I like very well... I feel helpless and inadequate as a friend... I always feel as though if I was somehow a better friend I could have prevented it...

I never fucking cry about shit but when someone awesome is taken away too early like this I was just devestated...

My sincerest apologies to anyone who I may have offended...

Rip ektamine.... you were, are and always will be loved by those you touched....


----------



## SinisterMuffin

I joined the site too late to get to know ektamine, but I can tell from his posts that he was an awesome person.  It is obvious that he touched the lives of many Bluelighters and my deepest condolences go out to those who knew him, his friends, and his family.

I hope that he rests in peace.


----------



## BrokedownPalace

Aw man that's seriously tragic news..  I always enjoyed reading his posts, he is a great bluelighter.  I knew he kinda disappeared recently, and it saddens me to hear that the worst has happened..

You won't be forgotten, buddy.  Once a bluelighter, always a bluelighter.

R.I.P.


----------



## His Name Is Frank

Damn it. This is horrible news! I was worried about him when he hadn't logged in since becoming a mod, but tried to remain positive. Rest in peace.


----------



## His Name Is Frank

He wanted very much to be a mod here at bluelight and I was so glad to have him chosen as my replacement in Trip Reports. I know he would have been a great mod. He was a great guy in general. You will be missed, *ektamine*. I hate that you're gone.


----------



## xtcnation

thats such sad news   rest in peace


----------



## junglejuice

Rest in peace, my friend


----------



## coelophysis

theotherside said:


> You don't know how happy it makes me to see so much love for my boy ektamine in this thread and in the shrine. It makes me know that Bluelight IS a community...we all care about each other and should all check on each other!
> Peace and love to everyone who has shown their love.





It goes to show that you don't have to meet someone face to face to be touched by their soul.


----------



## purple_cloud

I've said it in other threads, but seriously, RIP ektamine. I was excited to get to know you more as a moderator, hope you are at rest now


----------



## Kenickie

wow, i actually knew this person! well, mildly, but still, you feel it all around when a member of the community dies.

 RIP


----------



## addictivepersona

RIP ektamine.  I didn't know you, but was looking forward to the chance to get to know you when I heard you were modded.


----------



## nomy

So sorry to hear this tragic news. 

RIP bro


----------



## matt<3ketamine

RIP mate, bad to hear of a fellow BL'er going


----------



## fluffybudzz

Wow, this is really saddening . I never really spoke to ektamine, but have seen numerous posts of his and they were always helpful.

Anyone know how it happened?

RIP ektamine, may you find the heavens (if there are any).


----------



## yardbirdrc

man, that's really terrible news.  RIP ektamine.


----------



## Albion

RIP ektamine  You always had something positive and light-hearted to say. I always enjoyed reading your posts.


----------



## blue_bomber

Very sad news, my thoughts go out to his family and all that knew him.
RIP.


----------



## Thou

Why do they always take the good ones?


I was seriously becoming a steadfast follower of his wit and subtle, humane humour.


----------



## sighhill

I don't think I'll be able to speak of Shadow People again. We exchanges jokes on the matter countless times. I always enjoyed reading Ektamine's post and was actually looking in the PV megathread to see if he responded to a post I had made when I found out. He will be missed.


----------



## puke

sorry for your loss. RIP


----------



## Jbinger1977

ekatimne - searching for the right words to say.... almost pointless because they cannot come. You took a place inside me that I cannot explain. or understand. I will always remember the personal advice you had given me, when I had questions or was discouraged beyond reconginition you were there. I know this is bad but I am angry that you are gone, not angry at you, angry knowing that it was too early for you to go. Your were a young lad, and obviously someone called to you and you were needed elsewhere. Always ekatimine, always.


----------



## puke

Also, I don't usually like house or electronic but the Big Basha on his blog, I did and am enjoying, so he contributed some joy in this world to a stranger. I guess thats all we can ask from life


----------



## yucatanboy2

RIP ektamine.


----------



## Mora Fiend

Man....I am very sorry to hear this.

RIP ektamine


----------



## CatchenAces

the rhyth of life really has no rhyme when we lose a young soul so early in life. A person that is open to the world and all it offers. a person that helped peope to safely enjoy what this earth provides. well see u in the after life


----------



## n3ophy7e

It is always heartbreaking when we lose one of our own, and not only that but it is an immense tragedy for someone so young and with such a bright future to leave us before their time  

RIP ektamine, we miss you. I hope you have found the peace you were looking for


----------



## Swerlz

This is still a shock to me. That guy was the coolest. I really enjoyed getting to know him.

RIP man


----------



## Treacle

Always terrible to read of a fellow Bluelighter dying. I'd seen quite a few of his posts. A real shame. RIP, mate.


----------



## poopymcpoop

Rip


----------



## GeeMeeUpp

I loved his posts; what a great guy. May his spirit join the Overmind, and watch peacefully over us.


----------



## puke

How old was he??


----------



## Warped Reality

Wow, that's really sad to hear... I remember hearing he was the new TR mod and I've never seen him doing any 'moderating' in this section, but the last thing I expected was a death...

My condolences to his family, and not to sound rude, but does anybody know what caused his death?


----------



## Bardeaux

Rip


----------



## jackie jones

^Does it matter?


----------



## nekointheclouds

This is my first time loosing a BLer I knew pretty well. 

RIP, seriously.

I'm not going back to the MDPV threads again.

And I'm not going back to PeeVee either.

Goodbye Etkamine.


----------



## stardust.hero

Ek, I never talked to you but from what I heard you were a cool cat. So sorry we never got to cross paths. Maybe next time. Goodluck and rest in peace .


----------



## TALLY 2.0

RIP

I'll see you on the other side.


----------



## jancrow

Very sad. I only recently became aware of him but there was a lot to like there. I'm sorry.


----------



## Public//Enemy

fuck. this is terrible. sad to see him go its so suprising. RIP dude. 

would be good to know what happened exactly but can understand if the family dont want it.

I hope they are coping with the loss alright and its truly heartbreaking to see someone go before there time.


----------



## spaceroach

Just awful. It's a shame to lose anyone, especially someone who had that extra spark to them. His candle burned short, but oh so brightly. I wasn't super familiar with him but just reading his posts his geniality shined through clear as day. My condolences to his loved ones, in real life and those here on Blue Light.


----------



## Carver Slice

Rest In Peace my friend.

You will be missed by many.


----------



## tambourine-man

Happy trails, wherever you are.


----------



## RavinRaphael

rip....you made the pv thread fun


----------



## IamMe90

jackie jones said:


> ^Does it matter?



Some people like closure, yes.


----------



## ColtDan

awful news  RIP


----------



## Seattle_Stranger

Rest in peace!!!  I didn't know this person, however the vibe is universal.  I hope their family can pull through it.

I too am curious as to the cause, but if it's being withheld for reasons, let's have respect and leave it at that.


----------



## gavatron@oz

to a face i never saw,to a friend i never met.. You made many a night and dawn on BL enjoyable..hard to believe the friendship that can come from this site,despite the distance and difference in our lives.

Hope your in a happy place,all the best to your family and friends...RIP mate..


----------



## Keaton

IamMe90 said:


> Some people like closure, yes.



Hate to be a dick, but if the CoD was your business, you would already know.


----------



## neMMMM

Some people just like to know. Its human nature. Stop fighting in a thread of someones passing. I'm sure that's not what he would like to see, although I did not know him. Rip


----------



## Keaton

No one is fighting. If the family or his close friends here felt that those details were necessary for the public to have, you can guarantee that we would have them.


----------



## zamzams

R.I.P Ektamine


----------



## TearItDown

Rest in peace, future soldier.


----------



## PippUK

I can't believe this tragic news. 

My best wishes go to out to those who knew and loved him.

  I had just begun to get a hold on his style and attitude, which will be sorely missed.

Peace - Pipp


----------



## Warped Reality

jackie jones said:


> ^Does it matter?



Of course not, it was just out of curiosity.


----------



## delta_9

How truly sad.

I remember his posts well.


----------



## Samadhi




----------



## belarki

So sorry to hear this, we're losing BL'ers before their time far too often  My condolences to all of his friends and family


----------



## Fourth_Drive

jackie jones said:


> ^Does it matter?



I never knew Ektamine but always enjoyed his posts in the EADD peevee thread. Sorry to hear of his death. He's no longer with us, but for me his posts live on.

I tend to agree with Jackie, the exception being unless his death was drug related. As I say, I followed him in the Peevee thread. If this tragic and untimely loss was in some way linked to drug use and was in some way preventable, then I would rest easier knowing how myself and others could avoid a similar fate. 

Otherwise, my thoughts to those who knew him better than I. Sorry for your loss.


----------



## Alcyone

I'll miss you, mate. See you in the next one.


----------



## nekointheclouds

I am momentarily changing my icon in his honor.

The pic is from ektamine's famous Mdpv adventure comic.

You can find it here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/5dNeU7KAlj-kq0K0inToN9MKecFTpYsxgLY5L6IhSYo?feat=directlink


----------



## Bomboclat

This is very sad, he was a great guy.
RIP man.


----------



## TearItDown

nekointheclouds said:


> I am momentarily changing my icon in his honor.
> 
> The pic is from ektamine's famous Mdpv adventure comic.
> 
> You can find it here:
> 
> https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/5dNeU7KAlj-kq0K0inToN9MKecFTpYsxgLY5L6IhSYo?feat=directlink



His comic made me laugh a lot. And him passing is a little unnerving. Rest in peace.


----------



## hobhead

would it be amiss to suggest that the details of his demise, if promulgated, would not advance the core value of harm reduction?


----------



## Vader

^I think that it would change the spirit of this thread from genuine grief and mourning to morbid voyeurism. Gossip adds nothing.


----------



## panic in paradise

*rest in peace Ektamine - and live on in mutual respect and love.*


----------



## clubberdude

This is tragic news - he was a very prolific and knowledgeable poster, and I really enjoyed reading some of his posts. I loved his username too.

His shadow people picture on the MDPV thread was absolutely brilliant!

R.I.P. ektamine.


----------



## zaggy

Man, I didn't know him too well but saw his posts when I was a lurker, and when I joined. 


Rest in peace man, I wish you the best in whatever lays beyond for you.


----------



## ektamine

*Ektamine*

This is the first time I have visited this site, but I can see that my brother Caleb (Ektamine) had a connection with many of you on Bluelight. Those of you who knew Caleb knew him in a different way than myself but I am sure you appreciated his Sarcasm, Wit, Kindness, and Intellect as I did. I feel that I am obligated to let the Bluelight community know that Caleb died on May 31st as a result of his drug use. He died peacefully while in a good state of mind at his house after completing his first shift at his new job. The timing was tragic as Caleb was starting to get his life back together. We won't know the drug that ultimately led to his death until the toxicology report is released and even than it may be inconclusive. If you would like to read his obituary or leave a comment I have provided links the obituary and to the Facebook memorial event as well as my email address.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/santacruzsentinel/obituary.aspx?n=caleb-thomas-bauldry-mcgeorge&pid=151614942

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154907767911451



Take care of yourselves
Sincerely,
Tyler
localmotionsc@gmail.com


----------



## rollinlikeabigshot

Never really knew him but my condolences are with you and your family. I hate to see threads like this stating that we've lost another bluelighter.


----------



## muvolution

I am incredibly sorry for your loss. 

Ektamine was a wonderful person, and this will bring many people closure who have been unable to accept his death without cause. 

There is nothing I can say to make this better, but you and your family have the full support of the bluelight community.


----------



## n3ophy7e

Tyler, thank you so much for coming on here and letting us know. I am so sorry for your loss and also the loss to the Bluelight community. My deepest condolences to you and your family and Caleb's friends during this difficult time


----------



## skillz~4~thrillz

Tyler-i loved your brother. many of us did. he was an amazing person and i am so sorry for the loss you and your family have endured. trust me-we may have just been internet friends but we shared alot. please know that this is a HARM REDUCTION site and that we try our best to convey that to everyone. Caleb was just a balls to the wall kind of guy. if his mind was made up-that was it. i am so sorry that those of us who knew him well could not have prevented this. but Caleb was going to do what Caleb wanted to do. i am so glad you contacted us. we have cried and wondered what happened,not just as individuals,but as a community. this song may hurt but it either this or shine on you crazy diamond,by pink floyd and i have already posted that for Caleb twice. please let us know if you need anything-to talk,rant,remember. we are here for you too.
here is the song...
~Keep Me in Your Heart for a While
    ~Warren Zevon

just click the song title that is underlined.

i am so sorry. i miss him. we all do.

MUCH peace,love and healing.........................skillz


----------



## the toad

I was just getting to know ektamine and he was already one of my favorite people I've ever talked to.. 

I'm extremely sad  about this and have been liiterally crying everytime I read more ...but at the same time I think about it like a race car versus a civic... the civic will have a long and stable life... but a racecar is designed and used to push boundaries and live on the edge... and they don't last very long typically... 

I don't think ektamine was the type of person who would ever be happy going the speed limit... he went out pushing the boundaries which was what he loved doing....

That's how I want to go... doing something wild and fun... not rot away in a bed... 

This doesn't make it better except for knowing that he went in peace and in a happy place... 

I am truly sorry for the loss of your brother @Tyler... my brother is my best friend and I can't fathom what you must be feeling... my deepest condolences from the bottom of my heart to you and your family...

Your brother was a gift to all who knew him...


----------



## Mysterier

RIP ektamine.


----------



## Allein

RIP, the best sometims see to be wamted elsewhere


----------



## Pseudovoyager

Dear Ektamine/Caleb,

I did not know you for long, but you were my first real friend on Bluelight. I wouldn't be where I am right now, in this moment, if it had not been for our correspondence. I am so saddened to hear of this...but I hope and pray you've found peace, wherever you are. Your posts were insightful and funny, always helpful, and I believe that you were one of the highest quality of people I have ever had the honour of meeting.

I truly wish we had had more time to become better friends. Farewell...you will be sorely, sorely missed.

--Pseudovoyager


----------



## the toad

This says it best...


----------



## Tripman

To one who touched many, I raise my glass in the memory of a great man. You will forever be immortalised on this board. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. To the dark side of the moon and beyond.


----------



## Frank Gallagher

No fucking way , just no way ! 

im in shock


----------



## Tyler-SC

*Memorial*

My Brother's memorial is this coming Saturday. Those of you who knew my brother knew him in a different way than I did and had your own unique relationships with him. Although most (maybe all) of you didn't know my brother in person I can see that the friendship many of you had with my brother was no less deep or real than if you had known him in person. While you knew my brother solely through the internet, you were not _just_ 'internet friends' you were his friends and you knew him in a way that many people in Santa Cruz did not. I would encourage those of you who knew my brother well to consider writing something to be read or displayed at his memorial. Whether it be about Caleb as a person, what he meant to you/your relationship with him, or his contribution to the Bluelight community I know my family and I would greatly appreciate your contribution.

I'm looking towards Theotherside, Gavatron, Skillz~4~Thrillz, Laika, and Nekointheclouds but would appreciate a contribution from anybody in the BL community. I understand if nobody feels comfortable contributing but I want to stress to you that the BL community was, as far as I can see, a valuable part of Caleb's life and the connections he made here were important.

I will also try to post some of the content from the memorial here after the service.

If you would like to contribute or talk with me or the family personally please post on this thread, send me a pm, or email me @ localmotionsc@gmail.com.

Also if any of you live in the area and would like to attend the service you would be more than welcome. The service will be held on Saturday the 25th at 10am PST at Seabright beach (@ the end of 3rd avenue) in Santa Cruz. 

This beach:





There will be a reception lasting all day and into the night at our house. If you would like to attend and need directions please PM me.

-Tyler


----------



## coelophysis

Thank you for posting thing ^ I will be in contact with you.


----------



## the toad

I will be attending.... if anyone needs a ride, PM me I will be coming from sacramento area...


----------



## Darksidesam

Didnt know ektamine at all.
But spend quite a bit of time on here reading stuff, and definately see ektamine was a great help to people on here and put time and effort into this. 

May your soul rest in Peace


----------



## Samadhi

ektamine said:


> This is the first time I have visited this site, but I can see that my brother Caleb (Ektamine) had a connection with many of you on Bluelight. Those of you who knew Caleb knew him in a different way than myself but I am sure you appreciated his Sarcasm, Wit, Kindness, and Intellect as I did. I feel that I am obligated to let the Bluelight community know that Caleb died on May 31st as a result of his drug use. He died peacefully while in a good state of mind at his house after completing his first shift at his new job. The timing was tragic as Caleb was starting to get his life back together. We won't know the drug that ultimately led to his death until the toxicology report is released and even than it may be inconclusive. If you would like to read his obituary or leave a comment I have provided links the obituary and to the Facebook memorial event as well as my email address.
> 
> http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/santacruzsentinel/obituary.aspx?n=caleb-thomas-bauldry-mcgeorge&pid=151614942
> 
> http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154907767911451
> 
> 
> 
> Take care of yourselves
> Sincerely,
> Tyler
> localmotionsc@gmail.com



My heart breaks for you and your family, Tyler. 

The obituary is one of the loveliest pieces of writing too - whoever wrote it should know that they have absolutely honoured Caleb with it. I feel like I know him better for reading it.


----------



## xburtonchic

aww... fuck... I don't know what to say. 

I didn't know him well, but he was one of the first people I met on here when I joined a little over a month ago.  I talked to him a couple of times about the Marines, he said he was thinking about enlisting...

He seemed like a really intelligent person, always positive, and had a great future ahead of him... this makes me so sad that his life was cut short, even though I barely knew him this whole thread makes me cry.  I know he's in a better place now though and it's comforting to know that at least he was happy when it happened... 

R.I.P. ektamine.


----------



## spork




----------



## Keaton

So sad he's gone :'(


----------



## SATripper

very sad news, I enjoyed reading his posts, he was one of the cool guys who welcomed me to this forum 
RIP man


----------



## Solipsis

sorry to hear this! 

RIP man


----------



## Dedbeet

Tyler-SC said:


> My Brother's memorial is this coming Saturday. Those of you who knew my brother knew him in a different way than I did and had your own unique relationships with him. Although most (maybe all) of you didn't know my brother in person I can see that the friendship many of you had with my brother was no less deep or real than if you had known him in person. While you knew my brother solely through the internet, you were not _just_ 'internet friends' you were his friends and you knew him in a way that many people in Santa Cruz did not. I would encourage those of you who knew my brother well to consider writing something to be read or displayed at his memorial. Whether it be about Caleb as a person, what he meant to you/your relationship with him, or his contribution to the Bluelight community I know my family and I would greatly appreciate your contribution.
> 
> I'm looking towards Theotherside, Gavatron, Skillz~4~Thrillz, Laika, and Nekointheclouds but would appreciate a contribution from anybody in the BL community. I understand if nobody feels comfortable contributing but I want to stress to you that the BL community was, as far as I can see, a valuable part of Caleb's life and the connections he made here were important.


Hi Tyler,

Sorry I came in too late to contribute, but have been off the Net for awhile.  I really liked Caleb and wish I could have gotten to know him in person... we live on the same coast albeit a couple states away.  I feel he was my closest friend on Bluelight and that we hit it off really well from the beginning.  He was so intelligent and 'knew the score' and I think the realest part of him was always at peace.  Here's wishing all of you peace as well.

P.S. this event has genuinely convinced me to be much more careful with any further substance use, particularly the quasi-legal substances that seem safe but have hidden risks.  This has changed my outlook on substance use.

For Ektamine -- genuinely  felt.  With love and best wishes to his family and friends.


----------



## Dedbeet

nekointheclouds said:


> This is my first time loosing a BLer I knew pretty well.
> 
> RIP, seriously.
> 
> I'm not going back to the MDPV threads again.
> 
> And I'm not going back to PeeVee either.
> 
> Goodbye Etkamine.



Good for u Neko, hope u stick with it.

Wish I could say the same, but things are going to be different.  No more vaping/smoking MDPV, and I intend on being far more cautious.  I no longer trust it as a drug to be casual with, and am going to treat it as the powerful substance it is from now on... or not use it at all.  Period.  Someone died... no more "caution to the wind" roller coaster rides.


----------



## Cosmic Charlie

Rip


----------



## laudium

I was just reading some of his posts today too, man....

I will keep him and his family in my prayers.

He hasn't left us or anyone. Energy and consciousness cannot be destroyed.
RIP


----------



## the toad

MDPV is a very powerful stimulant that is know to cause compulsive and often unintentional/unknowing redosing... its sorta like cocaine but stronger... most pure forms of drugs are very potent... everyone needs to both be educated... as dear ektamine was very sharp... but drugs are to be used with respect... once you think "ehh fuck it let's try it" your screwed..

Research the drugs your going to do... or are already doing... chances are you'll not only be safer... but you'll have a much better experience...

WIN-WIN.... FTW! 

Stay safe my brothers and sisters...


----------



## muvolution

I tried PV once and was just like, nope, that one's not for me.


----------



## nekointheclouds

Ektamine,


I wore your icon in great honor for a month. Its been a long road traveled my friend. I loved away from memphis and swore to myself that when I was a month clean pf MDPV I would change it.


I finally changed it. Its a drawing of my own. I;m in control now. I like to think you would be proud of me my friend.

You are still missed.


----------



## the toad

Were all proud of you @neko


----------



## severely etarded

RIP man. damn


----------



## muvolution

Ektamine, You had just become a mod on here and were so excited about it.... since I just got an OD mod spot, I will dedicate my modship to making sure that everyone on here stays safe and aware of the dangers of RC's... and that even when we think we are in control, oftentimes we aren't. 

I hope you found the peace in death that alluded you in life. Your family and all your friends are in my thoughts. You are tangibly gone, but you live on in our hearts and minds.


----------



## DexterMeth

jesus christ. 

I need to stop checking out the shrine.


----------



## chinky

i cant belive i just saw this..this is sad


----------



## Riklet

Another bluelighter mentioned this to me last night.  I never saw this thread somehow, in the past few months.  Very sad news, but some lovely words written in this thread, and on the facebook link etc.

The MDPV cartoon he did is one of the most hilarious and awesome things I have seen on BL.  RIP Breh.


----------



## alexvolume2

Our trajectories seemed to be arcing in the same manner as I was intrigued by MDPV, speaking as a contemporary.  I never knew him, probably only posted once in the same thread, nevertheless his death affected me in a way that I am saddened by beyond my current understanding.  I feel life is heavily influenced whether we like it or not by reciprocities and the entire thing is oftentimes at best, a cruel give and take.  I just want it to be known that I feel I am alive today and currently mentally well possibly only due to Caleb's death and my subsequent reflection upon my own mortality.


----------



## herbavore

alexvolume2 said:


> Our trajectories seemed to be arcing in the same manner as I was intrigued by MDPV, speaking as a contemporary.  I never knew him, probably only posted once in the same thread, nevertheless his death affected me in a way that I am saddened by beyond my current understanding.  I feel life is heavily influenced whether we like it or not by reciprocities and the entire thing is oftentimes at best, a cruel give and take.  I just want it to be known that I feel I am alive today and currently mentally well possibly only due to Caleb's death and my subsequent reflection upon my own mortality.



From the bottom of my heart I thank you. My son's death has created ripples beyond imagination, just as his short, intense life did. Here in our home we have a physical shrine for our beautiful son/brother/friend and one of the pieces of writing that I look at the most says,

" What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice turned out to be the color of the sky."

I don't even know who wrote it or I would assign credit--but it doesn't really matter--one human writing a truth that all of us know in some part of our understanding.

I will copy down your words from this post and put them on his wall here at home. It will weave another strand into the net our family counts on.

P.S. Would you consider anonymously posting that in his online obituary? That is a place his father goes for comfort and after the initial rush of condolences of course, it has stopped. It is up for 1 year and I know that a message like this would bring so much peace to his father as well as many other relatives that are still grappling with his death in daily struggle. That goes for any other BLers BTW.


----------



## effie

Ektamine, you have a truly amazing mother. You would be so proud of her!

I did not know you well, but I miss your posts in EADD, and now I have lost someone close to me I truly understand the tidal waves and ever-increasing ripples of shock and sadness that death causes. I am sorry I did not have the chance to know you any better - you sound like such a wonderful person, you really do. However, I feel incredibly honoured to have the chance to get to know your mother now. She is helping me through my dark days, despite walking the same path as I am, and she is an inspiration to me.


----------



## alexvolume2

I'd consider it an extreme honor, I can't believe that you are responding to me...it's a bit surreal.  I have felt like this since I learned of his passing, in waves, but I never forgot.  Not to make assumptions, but addiction and hard drug use got the best of me more often than I'd like to admit.  I lack full comprehension of the scope of your loss, nevertheless I feel for you and your family.  I don't even know what to say, I didn't think my comment would reach many BL'ers much less you and the rest of his family.


----------



## herbavore

Here is the link to the obituary:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/santacruzsentinel/obituary.aspx?n=caleb-thomas-bauldry-mcgeorge&pid=151614942


----------



## effie

It's such a beautiful obituary, herbavore


----------



## muvolution

wow... I'm speechless.

Herbavore I don't even know what to say to you... I don't know how you do it. I am constantly torn up about Caleb's death. For you to come on here as a mother... it's incredible. I hope that you see how many lives he touched, and how deeply.

Thank you


----------



## effie

Herbavore.. I've been reading the obituary again. It's so beautiful. It's so strange how similar he sounds to Dave in so many ways.. So much love to you and all his family and friends. Mindblowing (in the worst sense of the word) to lose someone so incredible (words fail me a little here) and someone we loved _so_ much 

But you know.. at least we knew them. We were - are - so lucky, despite all of this pain and horrifying loss. I don't regret for a second meeting Dave and I know you don't regret for a second having Caleb as a son - the complete opposite infact. I hope that helps you like it helps me, when I am not too overwhelmed with grief to remember it.


----------



## herbavore

Effie, you are so very right: we were beyond lucky! Caleb transformed who I was as a person by his life. His death broke my life into pieces. Now I am transformed again by having to learn to be stronger than I ever thought I could be; by not just surviving but _living_, with sadness, yes, but finding new ways to invite joy back in. You were transformed by loving Dave and now you are transformed by losing him. Your grace is in your clear-eyed strength and open vulnerability. There is no script for this. We'll find our way. I'm thankful for all the little breadcrumbs you leave along the path for me and I'll try to leave as many as I can for you.


----------



## effie

You are right about there being no script for this. That is one of the hardest things I think, not knowing what to do or how it will unfold.. but on the other hand, it gives us the chance to write our own script. Influenced by our beautiful boys, and honouring their memories


----------



## herbavore

I got a phone call this morning, Caleb, from a man that only knew you briefly: a man in his sixties that wrote the word "gift" at your memorial. I thought that he wrote that word to describe you because he was referring to what a gift you were to us (your family). Turns out he was referring to much more. He started by apologizing to me saying that I might find this a bit too metaphysical and then went on to say that you continue to affect him very deeply, that he feels like he barely touched the hem of your clothes as you were leaving but that he knew you were one of the rare beings among us whose eyes were wide open. To quote him,"the life of a person whose eyes are fully open is not always pretty, but what they show us is always profound." He wanted me to know how much he thinks about you, your way of seeing, your way of being. He invokes your name and your image frequently. 

It has been so hard for me, a person with no fixed beliefs, a person who knows nothing but feels everything. I only know this: from the early days when you first grasped language, you were a teacher. I used to want to call up the Dalai Lama and say, "hey you guys can quit looking for the next one. I know who and where he is. He's this ratty haired little two year-old strapped into the backseat of my car." You packed a lot of mud on that shine before you left, but I want you to know that you never stopped teaching. And it continues. That's all I need to believe. I know you can't hear this, but it does me good to say it. The man that that called this morning is one among so many that feel compelled to tell me that you changed them. You know that it is true for your father, for your brother and for me, but there are so many more. We all take that change out into the world and pass it on in our own way and whatever effect we have on people changes them, too; and so your short life continues to ripple out on this plane forever.


----------



## herbavore

People holding up their words for Caleb at his memorial.


----------



## effie

That's such a beautiful idea.. and it looks so like the picture of us all setting of skylanterns on the beach for Dave.

As for the above post - ripples and ripples...


----------



## herbavore

Final Notions
           by Adrienne Rich

It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple 

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought
As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take your flesh, it will not be simple 

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
You are taking parts of us into places never planned
You are going far away with pieces of our lives


It will be short, it will take all your breath
It will not be simple, it will become your will



Too many are joining you here, Caleb.


----------



## Albion

herbavore said:


> Final Notions
> by Adrienne Rich
> 
> It will not be simple, it will not take long
> It will take little time, it will take all your thought
> It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
> It will be short, it will not be simple
> 
> It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
> It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought
> As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
> It will take your flesh, it will not be simple
> 
> You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
> You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
> You are taking parts of us into places never planned
> You are going far away with pieces of our lives
> 
> 
> It will be short, it will take all your breath
> It will not be simple, it will become your will
> 
> 
> 
> Too many are joining you here, Caleb.



You are a remarkable person, herbavore. I am aware of your story and how you came to be part of the bluelight community: It's humbling to see how someone can channel the emotion of tragedy into kindness, openness and unending compassion for others. Especially since such emotions are so overpoweringly destructive if left untamed. Recently I've been getting the sense of a strong community spirit developing. I feel that there are real lives saved here every day, and that the community provides real, genuine support for people who really need it. Not only are people helping you, herbavore, but you in turn are helping other people. It's totally heart-warming!

RIP Ektamine
RIP Evad
RIP Tally
RIP Melange
RIP Tobola

RIP all past members of this community. I never knew any of you as well as many others here did, but it is clear that from the wounds of your death, the bluelight community heals into a tighter and more humane being that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

And that can't be a bad thing.


----------



## effie

Merry Christmas Caleb, and Merry Christmas to Jan and all your family.


----------



## herbavore

^effie





We missed your big stomping feet. We missed your jokes. We missed your strong coffee. We missed your presents for the cats. We missed your cynicism. We missed your affection. We missed your tousled blonde hair. We missed your crooked smile. We missed your gratitude. We missed your irritation. We missed your generosity. We miss your love so much.


----------



## Keaton

Much love to you guys, herby.


----------



## Keaton

Always remembering.


----------



## skillz~4~thrillz

^you've got that right! _always!_

missing you always,Caleb,even though I know you are still here...Your mom is the bomb! She is the gift you left for Bluelight. We love here with all the intensity that we love you! I still owe you a poem.

Love you,too,herbie...you are in my thoughts always!


....................skillz


----------



## effie

Caleb, you popped into my mind today. Saw your cartoon in EADD again earlier. Still makes me laugh out loud :D

You and Evad would have got on brilliantly.. as myself and your lovely mother do.

Never forget you


----------



## herbavore

^Somewhere I am sure this still exists. This sweet, gentle moment, and all that it contained, must surely be echoing out in waves forever somewhere. 

I have been thinking of you and your Dad so much these past weeks, wondering how you would be handling his cancer diagnosis, picturing how you would be showing him your love in those little male gestures of yours---tousling his hair when you walked by his chair in the living room, starting a conversation that you might not have much interest in but knew he would, starting some banter or another just to engage. Yesterday he and I talked about death; about the lack of fear we feel, about how differently we view it since you went first. I look at that picture up there and know that love never dies. It is the only thing I am sure of. What was created in the moment in that photo is in the air I breathe every day. It sustains me and dissolves all my fears for what lies ahead.


----------



## herbavore

Okay, I got brave for you, Buddy. Here goes:        http://soundcloud.com/herbavore/for-caleb


----------



## SinisterMuffin

Herbavore, you have so much strength and bravery.  I never got the chance to meet your son or speak with him, but I know he had a large influence on this site.  I know he had a greater impact on your life - the way you have made such a tragedy into something so positive and have learned so much from it, it is awe-inspiring.  I hope to one day be able to hold the inner strength that you exude.  You are amazing; so many on BL are just as lucky to know you as they/we were to know your son.


----------



## effie

herbavore said:


> Okay, I got brave for you, Buddy. Here goes:        http://soundcloud.com/herbavore/for-caleb



Herbavore that is AMAZING 

You are wonderful person, I echo everything SM said, as you know


----------



## herbavore

Remember how we would say, "Fuck Hallmark!" ? 

I love you today and every other day.


----------



## Samadhi

Herby, You have left me with tears running down my face; looking at the photo you posted - i have one *exactly* the same of my mum and I - and although we're still both on this earth, we are separated by ocean, which I hate. Reading your beautiful message to Caleb, it puts things in perspective; suddenly that ocean isn't so vast.

much, much love to you and yours


----------



## Albion

herbavore said:


> Okay, I got brave for you, Buddy. Here goes:        http://soundcloud.com/herbavore/for-caleb



This gave me goosebumps from start to finish...Really beautiful


----------



## Shambles

Fuck and multifuck again.

Ektamine?

Kiddin', yeah?

Fuck.

Peev till we die, huh?

Kinda hollow now tho.

Much 

Will toot a toot or ten for ya next run: from peevee me to... an elsewhere me


----------



## LSDMDMA&AMP

RIP mang,
issha boy llama, just sayin i remember you and remember readin some of ya posts, i hope you found peace at least wherever you are.


----------



## badfish45

Thank you for leaving your mother to Bluelight, as she is the best gift we had. 

I never knew you, but your mom was the very first friend I ever met on Bluelight. I can't sit on here and tell you how good of a person you were because I never knew you, but I look back on every post in this thread and all the wisdom your mother has given me since the departure of you from her life, and I know that all the wonderful things about you are true. With every word she spills from her heart it almost makes me sad that I never was able to know you, because all the things she tells about me make me hold envy for all the amazing things about you. The way your mind works and everything simply amazes me. I wish I could have been here to truly experience the warmth of your presence.


----------



## herbavore

Yesterday I put extra salt on some fries, suffered the disapproving looks at the table, and remembered how you would have probably even doubled that amount. I put some serrano chilies in the stew and thought how you would have gotten the Death Sauce out without even tasting it first, knowing it wouldn't be hot enough for you. I think about you all the time. I carry you around in my head and in my heart. In my head it is a constant movie; in my heart it is an ache. The movie is not a downer--I laugh every bit as much as I cry and sometimes I just think and ponder and wonder about things. I miss so much about you. Right now I am picturing that sardonic half smile you would get when I said things like this.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

I miss ektamine a lot too.


----------



## ebola?

Very kind an intelligent.  such a loss.


----------



## herbavore

Twenty one years ago you woke me up at 3 AM. I was not prepared for you, a month before you were due and upside down in the womb. I can still remember everything from that night. Waking up wet crying out, "Goddamnit! My water broke" in total disbelief and dismay; your Dad groggily asking what that meant and your brother's cheerful little answer from the next room, "That means Caleb is coming out!" Remember the story? How he hopped out of bed and began packing a little bag of toys to go to the hospital, including his harmonica so that he could play you a song?

I remember the call to the midwife. When I wailed that I did not want a C-section she took a firm voice with me and said, "This is not about what you imagined or might have wanted. This is how and when this baby wants to come and we are going to make sure that he gets here safe and sound. You need to let go of everything else and listen to him, now." Those words resonate around me in this dark room tonight. I remember the way I sank down into my body then, telling you, "OK little Caleb, here we go!" It is 21 years later, 3 AM, and it is just me in the dark here with you.

The trip to the hospital was short. Your Dad drove so carefully and slowly. I remember that the pools of light from the streetlights slid by like a dream. I remember the private nature of labor, when the first pain hit and I gasped and swam deep down inside myself to try to connect with you. And I remember that I decided to trust, and I know that made all the difference. It was a beautiful birth. Three hours, three pushes and you slipped bravely into the world your own way.

Twenty one years ago you floated safe in my body and I imagined you. I could not see you, nor hear you. I spoke to you but you could not answer. Tonight, I imagine you. I cannot see you or hear you. But I will try to trust again that you knew where you needed to go and that this terrible ache that I feel is my own painful journey, not yours. I like to think that you slipped as easily from this life as you did from my body. I bore the pain for you once and I can do it again.

Tonight I will wrap up my birthday present to you in all this milky moonlight spilling in the window, in tears of sorrow and of gratitude for all you gave me. This gift I am wrapping for you is my promise that I will not abandon joy. I will not spread more bitterness or anger or despair or apathy into the world that hurled so much of that at you in your short stay. I will honor your immense capacity for joy with mine. I will honor your courage with as much of my own as I can muster. I will honor your complexity by keeping an open mind, open heart and open eyes. I will honor even your despair, that little boat you sailed away in, trusting that it took you somewhere that your spirit knew it needed to go.  

I will never again say, "Happy Birthday, Caleb." But I can say this: I am happy to have held you for as long as I could. I am happy to have shared all there is to share between a mother and child: all the intimacy, the struggles, the miracle of carrying and of letting go. I will be carrying you and letting you go forever.


----------



## severely etarded

*herbavore:* My deepest sympathies go out to you and your son. He was an incredible asset to this community, and even though I didn't personally know him I can tell he was an asset to his friends and family too. I know it probably won't get any better now that he's gone, but I genuinely hope one day you and your son will meet again in eternal peace and harmony. I don't know what comes after life/death, but I can only hope one day we will all get a chance reunite with the loved ones we have lost along this fucked up journey we call "life".

Reading your post is very touching, to the point it has brought tears to my eyes. I genuinely can't imagine the unbearable pain of a mother losing her beloved son; that's just not how it's supposed to work! Sons are supposed to lose their mothers, NOT vice versa. The pain is unimaginable for me, but I can say I sympathize with you and admire your strength to come on here and honor your son. I admire the relationship you had for him, and wish there was something I could do to fix things for you besides make a lame-ass sympathy post here.

Your post has deeply touched me. I hate that such loving people have had to deal with such devastating loss.



Rest In Peace Caleb. I know we never spoke but I can tell you and your mom had a bond that can never be broken, and that you went way too early.

I need to go buy some weed now to try and forget about how unfair life is


----------



## herbavore

^  Thank you so much for your heartfelt sympathy---there is nothing lame about it. I grew up with a mother who said, "Who ever told you life was fair? Fairness is a human concept unrecognized by the rest of life."


----------



## effie

^ learning that life is unfair is one of the hardest lessons we ever learn, so your mum was smart, herb.  I'm not sure I have quite grasped the extent of the devastating unfairness yet but it does comfort me in a strange way. It removes the need for any blame, at least.

Happy belated birthday Caleb, and much love to your wonderful mother. May she continue to walk this path she has found herself on with grace, love and wisdom.


----------



## herbavore

^^


----------



## badfish45

^


----------



## Sepher

Ektamine, just found the infamous MPDV cartoon I've heard so much about that you did. I done did a LOL, you absolute nutter. :D Damn shadow people, they just won't leave you in peace!  RIP dude.

Herbavore, the song for Caleb was beautiful. Really moved me. I'll be thinking of you.  (((hugs)))


----------



## effie

^ the cartoon is amazing isn't it.

Much love to you herb, and ektamine


----------



## herbavore

Sepher said:


> Ektamine, just found the infamous MPDV cartoon I've heard so much about that you did. I done did a LOL, you absolute nutter. :D Damn shadow people, they just won't leave you in peace!  RIP dude.
> 
> Herbavore, the song for Caleb was beautiful. Really moved me. I'll be thinking of you.  (((hugs)))



Caleb was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He wasn't always that way. When he was little he was quite serious, but as he grew older he developed this comic side that was part dry wit, part outrageous nuttiness and 100% fearlessness about mocking _anything_. I have to say that there are not many tearful conversations around our house where at least one of us doesn't just start laughing thinking of something he said or did that no one else would ever do--like making a cartoon about stimulant psychosis and masturbation and actually making it funny.


----------



## badfish45

I thought that one was really funny  I saw it in the mdpv mega thread.


----------



## herbavore

http://youtu.be/Hw1TYUgFM1s

There are so many ways to think about death. I cannot embrace any one thing but I can embrace them all. As usual, you know more than I. How could it be that you went before me?


----------



## unfuckwitable

one year ago today (yesterday) - hard to believe. we salute you.


----------



## the toad

shine on you crazy daimond


----------



## herbavore

I dreaded this day so much; I didn't want to start saying, "a year ago my son died". Your amazing friend H. put together a memorial for you with a bunch of your friends. It was good to see them, to see them going on with their lives, working out their stuff, changing and growing, but it made it so hard because you were not there among them. Every now and then someone would say this would be so much more fun if Caleb were here. 





Seeing this boy hurts more than anything. It was a cryfest.





Messages of love for you:


----------



## herbavore

Just for you my beautiful boy. Thank you for coming to sit with me.


----------



## badfish45

What a beautiful memorial herbavore


----------



## coelophysis

Jan, I was never sure of the exact date.  So close to my fathers death anniversary.

I'm glad his friends reached out to you.


----------



## Albion

That looked like a suitably somber gathering, Jan. That shrine/memorial you made looks beautiful...I can't imagine what such a milestone is like to reach but it no doubt is a very sad date that probably won't get any less sad each time it comes around...The first chapter is over now, at least. I hope you're getting on well with life, I love your art (as you know) and I see the way this has affected the content and conext of your art. It's quite unique and it really is beautiful.


----------



## junglejuice

I never knew you but after this past weekend I realized that you were blessed with the most amazing mother ever. It takes a truly open mind to come on Bluelight after discovering it after the fact and join us without blame. Not only did she do that but she dove straight in to helping people with problems such as yours. She is a truly special individual and we are so fortunate to have her. So is your brother. Your death was a tragedy but after seeing the work that your mother puts in, I feel like she has helped at least more than one person back from the brink. I'm sorry you died of despair and I've felt the same way but I gotta say with all my problems, meeting your mother truly gave me a boost. 

R.I.P. Caleb... I wish I had known you


----------



## junglejuice

I just read back through this thread and I'm fuckin' crying.

 jan


----------



## the toad

I hink about him everyday it seems at some point or another... sometimes many times a day or hes stuck in my mind for some reason... its a goood thing cept for its not as good as the real ektamine... 

Ektamine is a teason i wanted to become a moderator... i have worked hard and put in real harm reduction wotk that got me my moderator position and im proud of that... but before losing ektamine... not a "close friend" at the time but a good one that i had just started to get to know who reminded me very much of myself....

 Long story short, i learned that being a "smart addict" isnt a valid excuse and learned to be open and honest with myself instead of justifying things as "not as bad as" or "but i know what im doing" orthe like...


----------



## herbavore

^much love back to you JJ and to you, Toad. I feel the same way I did when I first came here: all of you who knew my son for the person he truly was, were comforting to him while he was here; and by your fellowship and connection that you shared with him, you are now a major source of comfort to me. He deserved, as everyone does, respect and empathy and laughs and a place to be vulnerable and safe. Bluelight gave him that and i will be grateful to you all forever. You are my heroes and my solace and a very real connection to a person that I miss every day.

And now I have to post some very sad news for my family: the death of Herbie, my inspiration for my Bluelight name and one of Caleb's beloved rabbits. If ever there were a totem animal that appeared again and again in Caleb's life it is the rabbit. When he was not even a year old he fell in love with a big white bunny in a secondhand store. We named him Bun-bun. Bun-bun was Caleb's solace in life for his entire journey and he was cremated with him and so, in whatever way this transition out of the physical happens, he is with him still. Caleb and I wrote a book about Bun-bun when he was small and he wrote many rabbit stories and drew rabbits of all kinds when he was little. In turn, I painted rabbits for him and sewed many sets of clothes to hold the well-loved Bun-bun together.

The rabbit is an interesting totem. Rabbits are prey animals. They live with fear and die from fear. Death comes at them from predators in the sky and on the ground. Life for rabbits is destined to be very short. But rabbits embody such expressive joy. When Caleb despaired that we couldn't get another dog he brought home two rabbits. These two, Herbert and Mr. Jeeves, entertained him no end with their antics. They could go from a standstill to an unbelievably high pirouette of joy over seemingly nothing. If rabbits were a season they would be Spring. 

Herbert was comic relief for our family. Caleb called him a dumb-ass and I called him the Burro Blanco. He was huge and docile and liked to lie around like a dog. He was the straightman to Jeeve's dignity. When Caleb died we took over the care of his bunnies. Especially for my husband this task has been a daily meditation for his son, a place to pour the nurturing he once gave his son and a way to honor him. For all of us, the rabbits are a connection to Caleb. Now once more, we fold a piece of Caleb's life into the past and it hurts anew.













R.I.P. Caleb. R.I.P. Bun-Bun. R.I.P. Herbie.


----------



## herbavore

I haven't really been able to come here for a while. I don't know why. I play a trick when I come here. I pretend that you can hear me. Sometimes it is comforting and I don't even care that I don't believe you can. But sometimes it hurts too much to know that I am talking to myself. 

I heard something today. It was a scientist talking about a discovery they had made that cells from each developing fetus actually do cross the placenta and the DNA from that fetus, whether carried to term or not, becomes a part of the mother's DNA forever. These cells live in the skin, the blood, the organs and the bone marrow. Mothers that carried male children have y-chromosomes floating around in them. Science is always lagging behind what every mother knows. 

I remember when you thought you had been me. You were two. You said,"when I was the mommy you were in me and you were small and I was really, really big!" I think about that time so much, when you "remembered" being everything that caught your imagination. Science crawls along at a snail's pace showing us, with proofs and data and tests and studies what our bodies already know. Life is poetry. Life is more unseen than seen. We are each other in ways we can barely grasp. But you knew at two. 

It was an honor to share your life, buddy, and it still is. The cells of me that are you supposedly will persist in me for decades. Your body contained the DNA of not only your Dad and I but also your brother since I carried him first. We went with you then, after all, and you are here still in me. I guess in some very strange way that I can come talk to myself here and have it be more than just tricking myself but not really; because neither science nor fairy tales nor wishful thinking can get you to talk back. I just wish you could talk back. I think that's why sometimes I don't want to come here. 

still


----------



## Bill

^ Two very deep heartfelt and beautiful posts 

I don't know you very well, herbavore and I think I only maybe conversed with Caleb a couple times while he was here, but after reading this thread and seeing your posts and stuff around BL since last year I would just like to say you seem like a very genuine and compassionate person, plus a very loving and caring mother and I feel for you greatly, I couldn't imagine going through the loss you did

But I'm glad you're here with us and that you can gain some level of comfort by being apart of Bluelight 
RIP

Oh and since you and Caleb liked bunnies so much you should find a cool bunny rabbit picture and use it for your avatar, I think it'd be pretty cool and sort of like a little homage to your son as well :]


----------



## herbavore

Today this surfaced out of a box of old things. It is a letter Caleb dictated to his teacher in kindergarten when I was in the hospital. 






Dear Caleb,

I love you, too. I miss you, too. I miss hugging you, too. I feel really sad, too. 

love,

mom


----------



## badfish45

That's so sweet


----------



## herbavore

So last night there you were. I came out the back door and you were sitting in the brown chair with Billy Emma on your lap. You kind of flinched when you heard me, like you were bracing yourself for a conversation that you knew we had to have. I was speechless. Then you looked up and got that devilish grin of yours, pushed the cat off your lap and stood up and took two steps towards me. I managed to whisper, "please be you", and you laughed and said, "I can't figure out anybody better to be". That was the whole dream. All day, I have floated in that dream's embrace. You were you. You had a body. You even had your scent. You moved with all the same gestures, you spoke with the familiar irony. You looked me in the eye and held my gaze.


----------



## Sepher

Beautiful Jan.  They can be really powerful can't they. Vividly remember a time when I'd split with my first GF, was pretty suicidal over it, head a mess. Dreamt that I found my Dad waiting by the garden door, like he'd just come in from digging his plot, just hugged him so tight. I was 19-20 by this point, and seemed he was a giant, same relation in height as I'd been to him when I last saw him when I was 9. Don't know how long I stayed in his arms being soothed, when I woke it was like all the pain and turmoil was gone. He'd taken it away in the night and suddenly I was back to my self, the whole burden lifted. I've wished for it to happen again but never has. Think this was a one off. If he only had one visit he saved it for when it was needed most.


----------



## herbavore

That is such a incredible dream, Sepher. I didn't know your Dad died when you were so young; that must have been terrible for quite a few years at a very vulnerable time for a child, especially a son. I used to beg my Grandmother to come into my dreams after she died. I would look at her picture at night before I went to sleep and concentrate my mind on her hoping I could influence my dreams but it never worked. Then, years later she reached out from behind a doorway and grasped my hand as I was walking down the hall of some dream house. It was magic! Never happened again. I agree, I think it is a very rare gift indeed. 

Caleb and I used to argue about whether it is true that when you die you see people you were close to that have died before you. I argued that whatever made that happen, it was a pretty universal experience reported by people that had near-death experiences. He argued that it was just the physical mind deconstructing and that since those people represented comfort, that it was the mind's last ditch effort to grab onto some comforting idea to hang onto. I don't care if it is me conjuring it up or whether it is something much bigger and too complex to understand, I just want to experience it.


----------



## herbavore

I just miss you so much.


----------



## michael

herbavore said:


> Caleb and I used to argue about whether it is true that when you die you see people you were close to that have died before you. I argued that whatever made that happen, it was a pretty universal experience reported by people that had near-death experiences. He argued that it was just the physical mind deconstructing and that since those people represented comfort, that it was the mind's last ditch effort to grab onto some comforting idea to hang onto. I don't care if it is me conjuring it up or whether it is something much bigger and too complex to understand, I just want to experience it.



i have long held that there are questions in life that whatever the answer is, it doesn't really matter.


----------



## brutus

herbavore said:


> Caleb and I used to argue about whether it is true that when you die you see people you were close to that have died before you. I argued that whatever made that happen, it was a pretty universal experience reported by people that had near-death experiences. He argued that it was just the physical mind deconstructing and that since those people represented comfort, that it was the mind's last ditch effort to grab onto some comforting idea to hang onto. I don't care if it is me conjuring it up or whether it is something much bigger and too complex to understand, I just want to experience it.



I've died before for roughly five minutes due to an overdose. I didn't see anyone I was close to or anything remotely close to that, no light at the end of the tunnel.


----------



## herbavore

It is as if you have now turned and are walking away from us. What is happening? Why does this image come to stab at me every day? Tonight on my walk, I said out loud: _why are you just now leaving?_ Each stage of this grief wears a new face. I find one getting familiar and then I wake up and there is a new one. Each one of these hangs another transparent veil in front of you. Slowly, slowly your outline softens and begins to blur. Today it is as if I am able to hold all  the veils to the side. You are as sharp and clear and familiar as ever. But you are turned away and you are walking. Everything about this picture is bleached and barren. You do not look back. 

This is  a hard one. I don't like the face of this one one bit.


----------



## herbavore

We had to put Jeeves down tonight. Tomorrow we will bury him with Herbie. We wanted them to live forever because they were your rabbits, because they were you, because we all loved them together. Your Dad cried so hard.


----------



## stardust.hero

wiggi said:


> I've died before for roughly five minutes due to an overdose. I didn't see anyone I was close to or anything remotely close to that, no light at the end of the tunnel.



But then again you didn't actually die... What happens between the time you fall asleep and begin REM sleep? 5 minutes is not enough time IMO.


 I'm so sad Mr. Jeeves is gone . I love you Jan  

Bumping your post buddy, since I wasn't here when you posted it in NMI. I agree .



ektamine said:


> *Random Thought from ektamine:*
> 
> I wish humans cared more about these things:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Then this stuff:


----------



## herbavore

^Oh, stardust, thank you for doing that! I've always wanted to save that post here. You _are_ my hero.

A Plague of Sorrows, for you, Caleb.

http://soundcloud.com/herbavore/a-plague-of-sorrows-or-the-end


----------



## Sepher

How you all doing today Jan? Sounds like a really rough day or two you've had, must have been heartbreaking saying bye to Jeeves with all he represented. More than just a rabbit with the physical and emotional connection to Caleb, huh? Maybe more like a little store of memories and associations in wise old rabbit form? It must have been a real wrench for you and Mr Herb to have to let that go. Timing not exactly great in the light of your earlier post either. So sorry you had to go through that. Understand it's in no way a trivial loss. Hope you're both feeling better today. (((hugs)))


----------



## JBrandon

I never spoke to Caleb one on one. The other day I started reading all the PV threads in order after being intrigued by all the John McAffe nonsense.

I would laugh at Caleb's posts or agree with some point he made, and I must have read a couple hundred of his posts. - at least. Then I come to #7, find out he is gone, and felt shocked and saddened. 

It is incredible how words and thoughts from someone who is gone can linger on through time.

I hope he is at peace - he seemed like he had a good heart.


----------



## herbavore

He had a heart of pure gold.

Thanks for writing. It always means a lot to me.


----------



## herbavore

Tonight I met H. at the lighthouse to give her a box of your stuff. There wasn't a lot. You were not a material guy. I gave her all the saved tickets and fliers from raves and concerts, the hookah, the keyboard and all the sundry little pieces of shells and rocks, your two lava lavas from Samoa and the Bob Marley flag. I gave her the notebook from that first class you took in college, your ethics class. I read your notes and cried to see how clear and thorough they were. I gave her the sheet music from the composing class. She was such a good friend to you. I know that she will know how to find a good home for all the little pieces of your life with all those that loved you. 

She couldn't spin her fire poi because someone stole hers but I took a picture of this guy for you and when I got home and uploaded it I saw that it looks so much like your profile. I thought about how you felt the last couple of years walking around with such grace when you felt that your head was in a sea of fire. On the way home I stopped on Beach Hill in front of your apartment and thought I would just cry it out there. It's almost a full moon and there was a light fog. All the neon signs looked soft and beautiful and I could hear the waves breaking from inside my car. I thought about how someday soon this funky old building will be gone. Tonight I feel like it remembers you. I feel old and half-way gone myself. Remember how we laughed at the El View Inn sign? I miss you so much. There's no stopping the tears tonight. We just had another earthquake. That's two small ones in a month. Tonight I just wish it would rip right open.


----------



## herbavore

http://youtu.be/xPL3O7NmgpI


----------



## footscrazy

^ Beautiful herbavore. I love that 2nd picture.


----------



## herbavore

I loved how you loved Halloween and got into dreaming up costumes. Two of my favorites:


----------



## spork

^Those are awesome costumes.  Thanks for sharing, herby and thank you for joining us here. Caleb would have been so proud of you.


----------



## Sepher

Hahaha the face he's pulling in the first just completely makes it! Just bang on in character with the face and pose just perfect for the outfit. That's great. Second one, is he, well, is he wearing a skirt? It looks like he's wearing a skirt. He really was going all out for the cheerleading squad huh? Pfffft! How were his star jumps and walkovers?


----------



## herbavore

Yep, that's a skirt. With the wig he made a pretty convincing girl.


----------



## herbavore

I miss you so much. Today is a hard day.


----------



## stardust.hero




----------



## Captain.Heroin

herbavore said:


> I miss you so much. Today is a hard day.


----------



## herbavore

Thankful for everything you were, all you taught us, all you brought out in us. It was too short. We all missed you so much.


----------



## herbavore

http://youtu.be/5DUCKGyojpE


----------



## Captain.Heroin

*hugs*


----------



## herbavore

It is interesting to me that the rabbits I make for you always happen in December by the ocean. I guess they need an empty beach. There were lots of gulls, pelicans, crows, sand crabs and me. And the wind. Maybe that's where the rabbits come from. You whispering to me. I was happy making it, like a kid playing in the sand all by herself. But then I wanted to show it to you because I knew you would say it was cool and mean it and that turned to crying. It always meant so much to me when you liked one of my creations. It all has to come from me now. I am the keeper of all that existed between us.


----------



## crOOk

Haven't been very active on here and just now did I realize he is not amongst us anymore. R.I.P and thank you for the reminder to the ephemeral nature of our material existance. I'm sure you've felt right at home upon entering hyperspace.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

herbavore said:


> It is interesting to me that the rabbits I make for you always happen in December by the ocean. I guess they need an empty beach. There were lots of gulls, pelicans, crows, sand crabs and me. And the wind. Maybe that's where the rabbits come from. You whispering to me. I was happy making it, like a kid playing in the sand all by herself. But then I wanted to show it to you because I knew you would say it was cool and mean it and that turned to crying. It always meant so much to me when you liked one of my creations. It all has to come from me now. I am the keeper of all that existed between us.



^ that is beautiful herby


----------



## herbavore

^ and^^

Today what I am missing the most, among all the other constant little zaps of remembrance that land on my skin like embers, is your intelligence. I honestly do not know if even you understood what a beautiful landscape your mind was. From the beginning of speech, when your sentences were grammatically lacking, your ideas were astounding.


----------



## unfuckwitable

happy new year ektamine - bring in the new year good & proper for us up there!

@herbavore
keep your head up - our thoughts & prayers are ALWAYS w/ you.


----------



## JBrandon

This thread is a tragic and painful reminder that none of us is an island. It is also a beautiful reminder of how strong a parent's love can be. Every time I see it, I tell my Mom I love her.


----------



## cj

^^^ I do the same thing with my mom. This thread nearly brings me too tears and I didnt even know ektamine. 

Herbavore thank you for sharing yourself on this site the work you do in TDS is inspiring. BL would not be the same without you. 

Much love


----------



## herbavore

^ and ^^ Thank you so much, you guys. Had a bit of a setback this past week when I had a long drive by myself. Found myself sobbing, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over again. I know I will crawl back out of this hole of guilt but right now it is hitting me hard.


----------



## higherconciousness

What!? Can't believe this happen.  I obviuosly didn't know ektamine, but as I was scrolling through some different threads, I'd purposely try to look for the ektamine posts, as I knew they were always informative, funny, and heartfelt.  Actually, just yesterday one of his post on the MDPV thread helped prevent me from doing something unadvisable.  Sorry to those who were closest  
Much Love


----------



## Captain.Heroin

herbavore said:


> ^ and ^^ Thank you so much, you guys. Had a bit of a setback this past week when I had a long drive by myself. Found myself sobbing, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over again. I know I will crawl back out of this hole of guilt but right now it is hitting me hard.



I can imagine how you feel herby.  

Much peace and  to your entire family.  

I wish my mom was as cool, and accepting and open minded as you.


----------



## stardust.hero

herbavore said:


>



This is insane. I love driftwood and collecting it and making things. It's hard enough to make a circle around a mirror or a few artsy pieces to make a centerpiece. This is so beautiful.


----------



## herbavore

I never know what is going to make me cry. Today it was the prayer flags. It was windy. They were clattering and snapping like a drum solo. Everything else stopped and stood back respectfully like musicians in a jazz quartet do when one voice just has to sing alone. I pulled my jacket around me and sat there watching them and then I was sobbing. So I was the sax and you were the drums and it was a lonely, lonely, lonely duet we were playing. Those flags are starting to tear and fade. I never minded a sad song, in fact I love them. Music gives a voice to this aching. Someday I will not be here to feel this. The sky will not break into pieces through the bare branches of these winterdead trees and I won't be listening to the wind or searching for you in my dreams. I will be wherever you are. I suppose that should feel like some kind of comfort but it doesn't. There just is no comfort, that's the thing. There are all these little bubble moments of happiness that float up all shiny and irridescent and light. But there is no comfort.

Last night I bought a book of poems by Robert Bly based on flipping open the book to this page and seeing this stanza:

Perhaps our life is made of struts
And paper, like those early
Wright brothers planes. Neighbors
Run along holding the wingtips.

I'm sorry that we were not able to hold you up longer or run a little faster. A few more tries and you would have been aloft; I'm sure of it.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((()))))))))))))))))))))))))))) Dammit, Caleb.


----------



## Sepher

First thread I read this morning, as usual when I see it's been bumped and I'm crying like a girl. You express your sadness so beautifully, almost poetically, it's impossible not to feel it with you, and then there is that last line. Just heartbreaking. The entire world could tell you none of this is your fault, you did all that could be done, and I hope you would believe it, but it wouldn't stop the if onlys, would it? 

Much love to you my friend. 

(((((( Herb ))))))


----------



## herbavore

^Thank you so much, Sepher. Though on the level I was writing about there is no comfort, there is certainly comfort to be had when a friend follows you into the dark and just says, "I'm behind you."  Thank you for that. It is a huge gift.


----------



## effie

^ It's bigger than people realise.. one of the hardest things to learn is that ultimately you grieve alone and no one can help you.. but I'm so glad I learnt the power of people being there with you even if they can't do any of it for you, especially people who realise that and stay anyway. I'd be so lost without them.

Jan.  I was just coming in to post "Dammit Dave!" in his thread, only perhaps not expressed as politely hah.. That poem too.. if we could have just kept him and supported him a little longer, the darker days were past, it was going to be okay.. _ffs_ if only.. but we both know the truth behind going down thought-paths like that. We love our boys so very much and we did take care of them and we in _no way_ failed them. I'm trying to train myself to realise that "what if"s are like some kind of dark labyrinth; we could lose ourselves forever and in the end, they are all meaningless anyway. But.... dammit. Dammit Caleb and Dave, how can this be the reality now. Sometimes I just need to yell that because I still don't understand and I never will.

I'm sorry Jan, I really hope you don't mind me posting this here.. was going to transfer it to Dave's wall but it seemed better here..

Jan 
Caleb


----------



## herbavore

^ I  not only do not mind but I am touched that we end up so many times on the same little islands of grief waving to each other. It's uncanny that we both had the words, Dammit! in our minds at the same time.

I know that you are right about that labyrinth. I guess i will always have to walk it. It's worst when I see his baby pictures or those from when he was a kid. I was charged with his protection by nature, by the trust he had in me that every child places in a mother, and by my own almost cell-level love and need to protect my children. It doesn't make sense when they grow up, in fact it is what makes for a healthy relationship with your children when you can cease to treat them as if they need your protection. But it is an instinct that won't go away so easily, not to mention that since Caleb was so very helpless at times in his addiction, it resurfaced more than ever. That's why I almost feel at peace with my circle through this labyrinth. I don't do it constantly, and then it seems to come in waves, but it has a surprising way of never really lessening in intensity.

Sometimes i have the fantasy that Caleb and I are both long past this life. We are looking back at our living human selves, mother and son, and we are ageless and genderless and without culture or personality or ego or any of the human specifics of time and place and we simply say: "look how much we loved each other. Look at the love we created that is still us."

RosieDaveCalebme


----------



## hthr007

Jan 

I never met Caleb- but I feel like I know him by reading this tread. 

My heart goes out to you and your family 110%.


----------



## herbavore

^thank you.


Your brother turned 25 on Saturday. I know he was thinking of you. We all were.


----------



## herbavore

I will always remember what you said when you were two. When you "remembered" being everything that you saw that caught your attention. You said, "When I was you, I was big and you were small. I was the mommy but you didn't have any name yet." I asked you if it felt funny to have someone inside you and you said, "No because you were always sleeping."

So I made you a valentine. It is a book cover. The book doesn't have any pages yet but it will. 





Oh, and because it must be said every single Valentines day, because I miss hearing you say this so much: fuck Hallmark.


----------



## spork

^I love this, Jan along with all the ways you remember Caleb. The way you've grieved for him has made me re-think the way I grieve for those that I have lost and has allowed me to appreciate the good memories a lot more. Thank you so much for that.


----------



## areros18

herbavore said:


> I will always remember what you said when you were two. When you "remembered" being everything that you saw that caught your attention. You said, "When I was you, I was big and you were small. I was the mommy but you didn't have any name yet." I asked you if it felt funny to have someone inside you and you said, "No because you were always sleeping."
> 
> So I made you a valentine. It is a book cover. The book doesn't have any pages yet but it will.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Oh, and because it must be said every single Valentines day, because I miss hearing you say this so much: fuck Hallmark.




this is possibly the most beautiful things i have ever seen with my eyes and felt with my soul.


----------



## herbavore

Yesterday, I was driving home from some errands, up the hill and just hit the blinker to turn onto our street when I looked over at the bus stop and there you were. There you were. Your haircut, your eyes, your carriage. My heart leapt and I felt everything around me disappear--all the traffic, the radio, everything. And then I saw that it was your brother, waiting unexpectedly there for a bus. And so in this strange nano-second of time I went from out of body back into the real world ("don't block traffic, give a big smile honk and wave to your living son") and I managed to drive the two blocks to home where the storm of tears and cries could unleash. This smiling to protect others is a dangerous act. I don't do it often. I see it for what it is: soul killing. I try to cry when I need to cry but for your brother who himself tries to be so strong, I have to do it. What if I had looked as stricken as I felt and there he was on his way to work? He is so stoic and it kills me to think he is that way to protect not only us but his own terrified heart. Oh, I wish you hadn't left him. Remember how hard he tried to protect you? To protect all of us? 

I think of how your young heart healed on a such a profound level when you lived in the desert. It wasn't enough at the time but it was tangible and powerful. I think I need my own desert. I think your brother and your Dad do, too. We are still stumbling around crazily down here without you. We miss you in unbearable ways, each one of us, and yet we go on. Later that afternoon a car drove past with RIP Calibong painted on the back window. It must have been Hayli.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

Much


----------



## Seeking Where?

Oh, herbavore, it is so hard to read your ongoing pain, and I would so wish I could ease it, even a little.  But I know in my heart that what you experience will also be our fate - mine and Motherwolf's.  We both cry and cry, are occasionally delusional, sure that Reuben will trip down the stone stairs or walk through the door.  But if it helps you at all to know, your courage and your example have been a lifeline to both of us.  The very fact that you have found a way to continue to live, to care, to help - that means so much.  You do such honour to Caleb by helping others to keep breathing.  God bless.  I will be thinking of you.


----------



## Seeking Where?

I once asked a person, "Where do you find the strength to carry on?" And the person responded, "Life is a heavy burden to carry . . . but I do find strength in the ashes." "In the ashes?" I asked. "Yes," said the person. "You see, each of us is on a journey. A difficult journey. And during this journey, we may feel that we are alone. But in the process of our journey, we must build a fire – a fire for light, for warmth, and for food. When our fingers scrape the ground, hoping to find the coals of another's fire, what we often find are ashes. And in those ashes, which will not give us light or warmth, there may be sadness, but there is also testimony. Because these ashes tell us that somebody else has been in the night. Somebody else has bent to build a fire. And somebody else has carried on. And sometimes that can be enough." (Adapted from Noah ben Shea, Jacob the Baker [New York: Ballantine Books, 1989], pp. 108-113)     Thanks for being there for us, herbavore.


----------



## skillz~4~thrillz

Miss you Caleb! 
But I LOVE YOU MORE!!!!
you are always with me.
Thank you!

ALL my love...........................skillz


----------



## Sepher

Seeking Where? said:


> I once asked a person, "Where do you find the strength to carry on?" And the person responded, "Life is a heavy burden to carry . . . but I do find strength in the ashes." "In the ashes?" I asked. "Yes," said the person. "You see, each of us is on a journey. A difficult journey. And during this journey, we may feel that we are alone. But in the process of our journey, we must build a fire – a fire for light, for warmth, and for food. When our fingers scrape the ground, hoping to find the coals of another's fire, what we often find are ashes. And in those ashes, which will not give us light or warmth, there may be sadness, but there is also testimony. Because these ashes tell us that somebody else has been in the night. Somebody else has bent to build a fire. And somebody else has carried on. And sometimes that can be enough." (Adapted from Noah ben Shea, Jacob the Baker [New York: Ballantine Books, 1989], pp. 108-113)     Thanks for being there for us, herbavore.



This is beautiful. Wonderful stuff. 

Herbavore:  Seeking Where?:  Motherwolf:  Effie:


----------



## herbavore

It is May again and today is your birthday. The world is blooming and unfurling for the second time without you. Amongst the blooms are the purple poppies, the ones that reseed themselves freely every year. They seem to have a mind of their own concerning where they will come up from year to year. This spring, they have chosen to grow right outside my bedroom window and so I wake to them each day and I enter this dream anew. I think of how often we stood looking at the same thing, you and I, blind to what the other saw. I got these seeds before you were born. A man once said to me, "You know those are opium poppies, don't you?" and I shrugged. 

They were beautiful and unusual color to me. To you they were flowers first and then, with time, a drug. They are only flowers to themselves, just flowers.







Now I stand looking at this veil between the worlds. I stand on one side, you float on the other. What does life look like now? The poppies unfurl as question marks before they raise their round heads and open into airy cups that hold the trembling wind. In their sap there is oblivion, release, peace, death for those who seek it. In their frilly, pale green foliage and translucent lavender petals there is beauty for those who seek it. The poppies themselves simply flow around the wheel of the seasons, regenerating, thriving,dying; unmindful of our interpretations, our desperate needs and small comforts, without vanities or appetites of their own. 

You were forever changing the way that I look at things.That was as much a delight for me as it was at times a torture. Now, the poppies bloom into Mays that no longer hold you but they hold a toxicology report that says morphine in a fatal dose. Should I see the poppies differently? I choose to see what I always saw, what i still insist stubbornly on wishing had been enough for you: delicate cups of violet and lavender that fill with each breeze, overflowing with beauty brief and fragile as breath. I know that you too, were yourself. How you saw yourself and how I saw you are mostly fiction. The fact of you, of your beauty and your brief and fragile life, is anchored just as surely in the wheel of time; and though I cannot see you any more than I can see the air, it is the shivering petals of the poppy that say, "Look. I am here. Here is where I have always been, where I will always be."





I will forever be thankful that you were born. It was a privilege to walk as far as we could walk together. I am thankful for all the new ways of seeing you continue to give me. I miss your presence: your sounds, your scent, your living being. Those are gone and yet your wisdom and your way of seeing remain. Happy birthday, Caleb.


----------



## herbavore

May 7, 2013:


----------



## villian

RIP Caleb. We weren't the best of friends but I enjoyed bullshitting with you in threads and over PM. 

Know you will never be forgotten, and although your death was a terrible blow to the world it influenced your mother to join Bluelight and help save/change countless lives. Your death was not in vain. 

Much love and respect


----------



## herbavore




----------



## villian

While me may not have you physically anymore, you will never be gone.


----------



## Help?!?!

Eket seemed like an amazing person, its really to bad we never talked. We didn't post to often in the same places but I had read many of his posts throughout the years, I got here a bit earlier but he was another from my generation and I absolutely hate to see the users I "grew up with" on BL leave this plane for the other side. I haven't posted in this thread for many reasons but at least with one loss we gained a beautiful elegant new user, its terrible the way it had to happen but Eket was very lucky to have such dedicated mother. I've always felt like he was one of the ones that fit perfectly in line with Hunter S. Thompson's quote, "Too weird to live, too rare to die!". I hope so much that he found the peace we all strive to seek..... One of the worst things is remembering that I hadn't seen any posts from him in sometime, then the thread came, you always hope they were just breaking from BL and would be back as an even better user with even more evolved posts....but unfortunately this is the nature of this scene.........


----------



## severely etarded

Such a beautiful soul, gone too soon 

What I'd do to bring him back just to make his mom happy. I've been trying to invent the time machine for some time now, and it just never works 

I'm just banging my head against the wall, wishing I just never existed to begin with 

R.I.P. Caleb. Life is a painful place, just wish I could make it better for everyone. Your mom loved you so much


----------



## Diloadid

severely etarded said:


> Life is a painful place...



Qft. RIP


----------



## herbavore

Two years ago today you made a decision. You made a decision to try to relax, or to change your consciousness or to push, yet again, the limitations of your body, or to find out what lay beyond your fears. These were not unfamiliar decisions for you.

 Did you let go of the world or did the world let go of you?  Which came first? I believe that the will to live can involve dying as the will to die is often the strongest affirmation of the will to live, a view you shared with me. Everything can be turned inside out; it may look different and yet remain itself. 

Did all of your despair gather and build until it toppled, shattering into millions of bubbles of joy on some other shore? Or was it actually your joy that rose like a dark upwelling of opacity until it caught the light and held it trembling aloft for the duration of a breath or a wingbeat or a cry before folding back into opacity? 


For 730 days and 729 nights I have asked to know these things and for the same amount of time I have resolved to accept never to know. All I know is that there is only one person that I want to have this conversation with and that is what I cannot have. To give up the burdens of the mind and live in the heart is to understand that there is no arrival. The insistence on answers, the limitations of narratives causes a kind of blindness. Sometimes, I choose to be blind. I beat my fists against this wall of stone demanding that it fall away. Other times, I let my hands fall open and simply lay my head against the coolness of stone until I find my breath again. 

 Two years ago you made a decision. I long to talk to you about what you were thinking, what you were feeling, why you changed into your board shorts but I know that I have a tendency to clutter the air with words. The best conversations we ever had were had sitting on either side of a fire under the stars, wordless conversations where we offered each other our silences, our grace, and our ease in each others company.


----------



## cj

Hugs


----------



## severely etarded

Jan - I relate to your son, he was only a year younger than I ? At the same time today I have had the worst psychedelic trip I have ever been through ( multiple hits of real and fake lsd, 5meo pill) I thought I was actually going to die from the mystery substance I ingested ( I tested but could not find conclusive data) edata will receive this sample when I get the $

I also feared my mother going through what you had to endure :-(


----------



## Pagey

herbavore   
Thinking of you & your family.


----------



## Swimmingdancer

My thoughts are with you herby. You and your son have touched so many people. I love you 

I don't know what else to say right now; the words seem hollow somehow. I wish I could give you a hug.


----------



## stardust.hero

Ektamine  I miss you buddy.


----------



## Bill

Herby's posts always manage to make me tear up
RIP Caleb


----------



## Sepher

Oh, two years already? Sorry I missed this yesterday. Thinking of you, love ya Jan.  x


----------



## ad lib

Jan, you're in my thoughts. 


xx


----------



## Seeking Where?

Dear, dear Jan, 

I have only recently returned to this site and read your latest post.  Again, you manage to find words for things with which I am still struggling.  That you help others may feel like cold comfort at times, but I can only say that it means so, so much to Motherwolf and to me.  Please take care of yourself, and know that your words continue to make a huge difference.  You bring us blessing in a world that can feel devoid of it at times.  

I continue to hold you in my thoughts and prayers.


----------



## herbavore

I really, really miss you.


----------



## herbavore

*
Here are the words:

blessing, teacher, family, old-soul, verve, strength, brave, questioning, tender, loud, stormy, familiar, barefoot, hot, powerful, spontaneous, infinite,warmth, candle, intrepid, complex, unknown, beloved, rabbit, imagine, debater, tender, enigma, seeker, handsome, hilarious, gift, shouting, universe, eyes, stardust, first, fired-up, smile, expansion,eternal, phenomenal, authentic, soulful, courageous, loved, sweet, Bun-Bun incarnate, anticipatory, grinning, energetic,deep, fearless, devoted,energy, treasured, friend, forever, affectionate, stubborn, sensitive, unique, Cakie, thumb, warm, wild, gifted, spirited, troubled,mystery, giver, true,inspiration, other-wordly, inspired,unmovable, sharing, adventurous, himself!, potential, light, espresso, existential, precious, compassionate, argumentative, generous, opinionated,wave, fire, alive.*

And as always, words fail us.


----------



## nekointheclouds

You are the most creativly loving mother a child could ever ask for, Herbavor. Ektamine was blessed to have you in his life.  

Ektamine, I am still convinced the advice you gave me while I was addicted to MDPV is what helped me survive the addiction so unscathed. You helped me stay healthy enough to make it through my student teaching with out totally ruining my career. And now I will not waste a moment of my life.

You will always be in my thoughts and prayers.


----------



## brutus

herbavore, I would be honored to have you as my mother. A lot of parents would have blamed Bluelight for their son's death, but you are a rare breed.

I never knew your son, but I'm sure he was a great man since he came from your womb. 

Rest in Peace


----------



## stardust.hero

A place I hate visiting but you are here.


----------



## herbavore

^ He is here because we are here. Thank you for your love, Stardust. For me, sure, but mostly for him. It means so much to me. 

Loving someone in their absence is so different than loving them in their presence but it is still love and it transcends the separation--that I am sure of. You have a big, open heart. Take good care of it.


----------



## herbavore

Words from a friend today:



Nothing is "deep'. Trauma, death, affliction, wounds. 

They all happen on the skin of consciousness.

Deep down, its eternal, immortal, universal, infinite.


----------



## stardust.hero

Is that you in the picture Jan?


----------



## herbavore

^only in my alternate life


----------



## Seeking Where?

You have been much on my mind, Jan, as I know you are preparing for your trip.  I hope that whatever you do and wherever you go, blessing will follow you. 

I hope that I may someday reach the place that you sometimes touch - that place where past, present and future are one, where this life and whatever is beyond it mingle.  

Today is a sad and hard day, for reasons I do not know - shot with longing and loneliness and an ache too acute to be described as dull, though too pervasive to be sharp.    

The sun is shining, the purple and white flowers in my garden nod gracefully in a gentle breeze, and none of this touches me.  My eyes stream with tears without ceasing.  

The only sweetness I know is remembering Reuben.  I want so much to do more than remember him.  I want to let him live again, with me, through me - even instead of me - though it is not in my power.  Perhaps the love touches him wherever he is, I hope so.


----------



## herbavore

^ I do believe that the love reaches through.


----------



## stardust.hero

Where  



herbavore said:


> ^ I do believe that the love reaches through.



You'd be the only person I'd believe if I were to believe. And if you say it's true then it is.


----------



## Bill

I get chills when you talk about your son Herby
The immense love definitely reaches through this medium to the next, some how...


----------



## cj

I always find myself reading this thread and thinking about my mom. I try not to be as wreckless as i used to be but the thought of my moms grieve if something was to happen makes me sad. My heart hurts for you jan but yet the stregnth you have shown since then is nothing short of heroic. Your an inspiration to me! I hope this message finds you healthy and in good spirits. I also hope you are able to find a measure of peace eventually.
Plur. Drew


----------



## herbavore

^and that makes me happy, Drew. ((()))





Watched the sun come up down on the dock. I thought about how two years ago I brought some of your ashes here, poured them in the shape of a rabbit into the water and watched them disappear. By now you are everywhere. The Tualatin took you into the Willamette which handed you to the mighty Columbia which set you out to sea. Perhaps you went north on the Alaska currents towards the Bering Straits or perhaps you took the California current down to the North Equatorial current and then headed straight for Samoa. You were so happy on this lazy little river. My mind plays all the old reels: stuffing your arms into those little plastic floaties, melon and sandwiches on the dock, the smell of hot wood and sunscreen, splash wars and canoe rides, the rope swing, herons and the sound of your voice calling me, "Mom! Watch this!" , "Mom, come in! It's not cold!", "Mom, try to take my picture when I let go of the rope swing.". How many times I watched you jump off the steep, muddy bank, swinging higher and higher up to that instant of letting go.


----------



## stardust.hero

Caleb couldn't have been blessed by a better mother Jan. He was one lucky guy to experience what you gave him. And I'm sure you received the same back from him. Those memories never die . 

Someone once told me that souls travel together into whatever it is beyond this. I like to believe that.


----------



## effie




----------



## herbavore

> “Tree” by Jane Hirshfield
> 
> It is foolish
> to let a young redwood
> grow next to a house.
> 
> Even in this
> one lifetime
> you will have to choose.
> 
> That great calm being,
> this clutter of soup pots and books -
> 
> Already the branch-tips brush at the window.
> Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.



Whenever I read this poem now, I think of you. I think of this choice. It is after all a choice that we all make in small ways every day--to subscribe fully or partially or not at all to the mundane or to subscribe fully, partially or not at all to "immensity", to the bigger picture. 

For years I have nested and loved it. Creating a home for our family was something I loved on every level. You looked out the window from that home and you saw more than the street. You seemed to see the wind that no one else was seeing as early as I can remember. Who can say what is a bad choice or a good one? I often accused you of making bad choices. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. I have been humbled enough to see my own choices and yours as simply what we thought was best at the time. Perhaps we were making choices based on the reference point of the soup pots or perhaps the redwood tree--they can't be good for both at the same time--or maybe they can, but they would certainly appear differently. 

Lately, immensity has been calling me. I'm sure that your voice is part of that. Here is a picture of your Great-Great-Grandma Talberg when she had no home herself and packed that little suitcase every few months to stay with one or the other of her children so as not to overburden any of them for too long. She was not that much older than I am now, though her hard life makes her look much older. I think of what it must have been like for her to give up a home of her own. In her case, it was poverty that forced her hand. My hand is being nudged by something larger. I am not giving up my home, just lessening its pull on me by leaving for a while.





 I want to stand in the unfamiliar by myself. I want the loneliness and the acuity of feeling that comes with that. I want to sit and listen to the wind that knows neither borders nor language nor culture. I know that you yearned for that, too. I have been packing and unpacking my pack trying to hone everything for 4 months down into 50 litres of space. There are clothes and toiletries and rain-gear and a first-aid kit; there are art supplies and writing supplies and a camera. And there is the little pouch that contains some of the ashes left when you left your body and left this world and joined the immensity that was always your second home.

I don't know what I will do with these ashes yet. I will know when I get there. I know why I am taking them, though. I am taking them to embrace you, to honor your desires to travel in this world that you barely got to see; but I am also taking them to let them go. I love you so much Caleb, as much in your absence as in your presence.


----------



## the toad

Was in santa cruz yesterday, so beautiful. Thought of u guys


----------



## Seeking Where?

I've been off Bluelight for awhile, Jan, but your words here reminded me of a poem that I wanted to share with you.  I don't think the following is about embracing pain; I think it is about embracing life with ALL that means, including loss.  When you go, wherever you go, love goes with you because that love IS you....

The Meeting Missed, Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

If I am not to meet you again in this life then I want to feel that I have missed the meeting, don’t let me forget, let me feel the pain of it in my dreams and while awake.

As the time passes in the black dust of the body, and I get fat with money, I want to feel that I have gotten nothing out of it all – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the slivers of pain in my dreams and while awake.

When I walk up the steps, exhausted and tense after a long trip, or when I climb into some lonely bed, I want to feel that the long trip is still ahead of me – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the pain in my legs both while asleep and while awake.

When my house is all cleaned, and drinks are set here and there, and I hear people laughing, I want to feel that I haven’t invited you to my house – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the pain of that grief both while asleep and while awake.


----------



## herbavore

^Yes and how eloquently stated. The desire to feel everything, not to numb or deny pain, neither to self-punish nor refuse to allow joy, is the full experience of grief. Really it is the full experience of life.


----------



## severely etarded

I wish my words were as eloquent as yours but im a bit drunk atm struggling to type


----------



## herbavore

Caleb, in 3 days I leave the city for the rainforest and I will be taking some of your ashes with me. Jane sént me this prose poem about a woman taking her belovéd's ashes out into a lake and leaving them there. It comes close for me. I know that these are ashes and that you have long since joined all there is but I will copy it here for you anyway--well, for myself really--or for the bond of love we shared as mother and son that is still so strong within me.

"When he left, and when he was finally gone, when he thought that he was nothing on this earth, though there was no "he" and no "thought" and he believed that he would join the vast armies of the dead that he had heard about, but nothing flew up from his breast and nothing raised up from him. then the woman held him in a wooden box, and he heard her say that it was heavy, so heavy, that it was mostly crushed bone among the black ashes. her hands were strong,They were always busy and he had always admired them, but they were both beyond that now. She shook him gently from the box at some point. It was what they had known as "morning". She shook him into a paper sack and put a smooth stone from the beach into it. Their minds had been alike in some ways. There was a good weight to the stone. He knew it. they had picked it out together. It was the size of her heart. Then she carried him. She walked the path out through the woods to the pond. When they reached the shore, she stepped into the water, which was like the night sky, black and shining, and she walked out to where the water was near her shoulders, and her breath blew and shuddered. Then she let him go. It was everything they had hoped for in those times when they had hoped. He went down. He settled.He might have lain immured in the sack for weeks. It was a surprise. he loved the cold water and he loved it more as it ate of the sack until it no longer was, as he no longer was, and without a way to tell it clearly, he slowly became the pond, spreading with the slowest, quietest eddies.So slow. he could not say where he had been, or what. But when the ice came, he was the ice and at the same time he saw up through its grey ceiling, and he saw more grey. Snow came then, a dusty white, like clouds, and then it thickened and he was everywhere under a black quilt, moving , as nothing moved. When the summer sun came he was in the fish and the fish were in him. When the lillies rose, white and impure, he was in their throats and they made a broken kind of singing. when the stars drifted over, the frogs roared. Then there was a kind of laughter. This is all a way of speaking when there truly is no speaking. he didn't know where the others were, but it would be wrong to think that anything was the same, that there were desires or feelings, or even "others". After a while everything and nothing were just  sounds the living made., he barely knew them. If there were speech he would say just one thing: Your realm above the glassed eye of this silent water is just a dream.This other place, this forever, this forgetting--this,_ always_, was the only world." ((Frank X. Gaspar)

You are everywhere and it is I who is still inside the dream. It is important _to me_ to lay your ashes in the rivers and the rainforest and the desert. It is for me. I am studying so hard to try to get all the verb tenses right in Spanish. This one is easy. Tú ya regresó. Yo estoy todavía regresando.


----------



## cj

Have a safe trip Jan! I really hope you find whatever you are looking for!


----------



## herbavore

Last week I was in the amazonian rainforest in Ecuador. Every day I went out with a small group of travelers and our guide, Eduardo, who taught us about the local plants, the Quichua uses for bark and leaves and vines, as well as about the animals and birds, fish and reptiles. I don think there is anyplace on earth that blurs the line between life and death like a tropical rainforest. Everywhere is decay and in that decay new life springs up in a matter of hours. I asked Eduardo if he would accompany me into the jungle, just the two of us, so that I could spread some of Calebś ashes and he said of course. That night he proposed that we go by canoe to a place that he thought would be good. There was a half-moon and a jet-black sky full of stars. The moonlight cast dim shadows over the bow of the canoe in front of me and the only sounds were the insects and frogs and Eduardoś paddle dipping into the black water. We paddled in silence for awhile and then he brought the canoe to shore and tied it up and we walked into the jungle. I thought that maybe he was taking me to an especially old tree or a spot that held special significance for the indigenous people but instead we came upon another lagoon with a canoe exactly like the one he had tied up.

 It will be impossible to describe the overwhelming beauty of this place but I have to try. Above was the clear night sky, full of stars and and the bright waxing moon and all around the lagoon and in the trees that grew from their own little islands out in the water, fireflies twinkled in the foliage. But the most amazing thing by far was the lacy ring of phosphorescence that glowed at the edge of the lagoon. He told me that this was a place that the fireflies came to lay their eggs and that the larva were phosphorescent, too. The black sky of stars was perfectly mirrored in the black water and it really looked like the stars were sifting through the trees and falling to earth. He paddled around for quite a while, occasionally sweeping his torch over the surface of the water looking for alligators. He said the lagoon had two kinds of caimans ranging from 6 meters to 2 meters long. Three times the flashlight found the red eyes but as we tried to paddle closer they always went underwater. We circled the small lagoon like this for what felt like an eternity outside of time. Still the only sounds were the insects and frogs and the gentle dipping and pull of Eduardoś paddle in the inky water and occasionally the call of an owl--so different from the ones at home.

 After a while, when I had been silently talking to you, Caleb, I asked Eduardo if we could just drift. We floated without speaking held between two worlds on the thin membrane of the water--above us the whole sparkling universe, beneath us alligators and piranha, anacondas and giant turtles. I felt so strongly that you were all of it--from the stars above us to the huge creatures beneath us, you were there, you were all of it. We floated in the the canoe that seemed to be changing shape as we drifted in and out of moon shadows. I poured your ashes into my hands and held them above the water. I spoke your name and prayed that the beauty of this place call out to you, that you would hold this place and this place would hold you and then I let your ashes drop into the water. The amazing thing was that they did not sink; for the longest time they hung like a shifting cloud just below the surface of the dark water. Finally I looked up at the sky and when I looked back they were gone. Eduardo sensed that it was time to go and so he paddled in silence back to the shore and we retied the canoe and traced our steps back to the canoe that would take us back to Yarina. I did not shed one tear. There was no sadness in this. It felt dreamlike and even now I cannot believe what i saw. There will be other places and yet I cannot believe that any will ever compare to the powerful magic of that place. This is what I came for: to know not where, but what, you are. I am carrying that knowledge now.


----------



## kytnism

and that is beautiful 

a mother and childs naturalistic bond is not one that can simply be shown in depth, photographs, words, nor expressed to others (no matter how greatly you are dying to share it). its just felt and is deep inside of you. im so happy you found the experience out of this self sacrificing and preserving journey you were hoping to and that you were able to connect with your son once again. it sounds wonderful, spiritually cleansing, and well worth it, and above all else as calebs proud mother; you deserve it.

light and love sweet herbi. be safe on your travels from herein. 

...kytnism...


----------



## herbavore

For almost four months now I have been wandering. Lifted out of my life, gratefully, and set back into my body in a foreign land, a foreign language, hoping to create the space and unstructured time to do some things that I did not get to do before you left. I had wanted to sit with your body longer.  I had wanted to wash your body, say goodbye in that ancient way, give you all my best wishes for your journey, wait with you while you left. Everything happened too fast. Police time. Coroner's time. Cultural time. Too fast, all of it, and your father and I in a fog, unable to resist. I could not reverse time, go back, but I thought if I could just sit still in my mind, I could take the remorse out of that part of the loss at least.

So I took myself away. I gave myself months where I knew no one and no one knew me. I gave myself no schedule, no expectations, nothing at all to hang onto, floating free. Foreign signs, foreign meanings, foreign food, foreign news, foreign humor, foreign innuendo, foreign geography, foreign climate. I went as high as I could get and let the clouds that walk around the Andes lift me up and carry me along. I learned to talk to them. I talked to rocks. I talked to rivers and I talked to birds. Always, I talked to you. Sometimes I felt you there, but leaving. Sometimes I felt you there in a new way.Sometimes I felt you were really and truly gone. Always I have felt your absence in my life and I still do, the presence of it, the weight. The shape of that absence changes, like everything does.There is nothing like keeping company with clouds and rivers and wind to unlearn the old vocabulary of death. 

I walked for hours; I walked where they told me I should walk and where they said I should not.I smiled at people and they smiled back. I hiked up and up and when I got to the top of the highest ridge I could see from where I had started, there was another ridge and another higher still. On the equator you can do this for a long time without snow. I was usually lost, but it never mattered. Once I lost my reading glasses in a river while I was bent over looking for stones. I could not read the trail map that I used to get into the woods, nor could I read the few small signs. I had gotten so used to walking and wandering and not knowing that I never got scared, just kept at it until I was out of the forest and in a town. When I got to the town, women were sitting out in front of their houses and the sun was going down. There was such beauty in their relaxing, in their greetings and questions. You cannot be lost when you are wandering. I thought about how this applied to your life, what you must have seen when you took that drastic turn, where you ended up, how you were transformed.

Some days I woke up into a sadness so profound that I could only walk out into the world and keep walking, hours and hours, until all the life around me pulled me into some kind of rough embrace. Other days, I would wake and feel that great sky of solitude I floated in, the peace of it, the room I had to write to you or just to think about you, about me, about what is and is not and what is outside of that concept. Always there are the clouds here. You can be in them, under them, over them. The most amazing thing is to be over one layer and under another, and the two of them moving in different directions. I have never thought of clouds as beings. Now I do. 

It is almost time to go home. I am trying to get accustomed to that thought. My concept of home has changed. I feel at home wandering. I did get to sit with you, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps it could never be enough.


----------



## Transcendence

Jan, I don't know you and we've never really met. I want to say thank you for helping me, both directly and indirectly with coping with things in my life more than any doctor or "real life" friend has. I hope someday I can develop the strength to turn my pain into something as productive and positive and beautiful as you have. I hope you understand how important you are to so many people here.

The picture of your Great grandmother reminded me of the comfort I sometimes find in looking at those old photos of my own ancestors. The pain and sadness and joy they felt was just as real and it all passed and life went on and joy and pain reincarnated ad infinitum. It's scary but also comforting and helps me put things in perspective during times when I want to scream at the walls that fall in towards me and rip apart space and just fall away. Living is scary and it's so much more than I can understand. We'll fade away too, maybe tomorrow or maybe 60 years from now. in the meantime the choice is to wander gently upon the earth or to desperately hold onto place and collect {pain, misery, money, possessions, ego}/


----------



## Captain.Heroin

herbavore said:


> For almost four months now I have been wandering. Lifted out of my life, gratefully, and set back into my body in a foreign land, a foreign language, hoping to create the space and unstructured time to do some things that I did not get to do before you left. I had wanted to sit with your body longer.  I had wanted to wash your body, say goodbye in that ancient way, give you all my best wishes for your journey, wait with you while you left. Everything happened too fast. Police time. Coroner's time. Cultural time. Too fast, all of it, and your father and I in a fog, unable to resist. I could not reverse time, go back, but I thought if I could just sit still in my mind, I could take the remorse out of that part of the loss at least.
> 
> So I took myself away. I gave myself months where I knew no one and no one knew me. I gave myself no schedule, no expectations, nothing at all to hang onto, floating free. Foreign signs, foreign meanings, foreign food, foreign news, foreign humor, foreign innuendo, foreign geography, foreign climate. I went as high as I could get and let the clouds that walk around the Andes lift me up and carry me along. I learned to talk to them. I talked to rocks. I talked to rivers and I talked to birds. Always, I talked to you. Sometimes I felt you there, but leaving. Sometimes I felt you there in a new way.Sometimes I felt you were really and truly gone. Always I have felt your absence in my life and I still do, the presence of it, the weight. The shape of that absence changes, like everything does.There is nothing like keeping company with clouds and rivers and wind to unlearn the old vocabulary of death.
> 
> I walked for hours; I walked where they told me I should walk and where they said I should not.I smiled at people and they smiled back. I hiked up and up and when I got to the top of the highest ridge I could see from where I had started, there was another ridge and another higher still. On the equator you can do this for a long time without snow. I was usually lost, but it never mattered. Once I lost my reading glasses in a river while I was bent over looking for stones. I could not read the trail map that I used to get into the woods, nor could I read the few small signs. I had gotten so used to walking and wandering and not knowing that I never got scared, just kept at it until I was out of the forest and in a town. When I got to the town, women were sitting out in front of their houses and the sun was going down. There was such beauty in their relaxing, in their greetings and questions. You cannot be lost when you are wandering. I thought about how this applied to your life, what you must have seen when you took that drastic turn, where you ended up, how you were transformed.
> 
> Some days I woke up into a sadness so profound that I could only walk out into the world and keep walking, hours and hours, until all the life around me pulled me into some kind of rough embrace. Other days, I would wake and feel that great sky of solitude I floated in, the peace of it, the room I had to write to you or just to think about you, about me, about what is and is not and what is outside of that concept. Always there are the clouds here. You can be in them, under them, over them. The most amazing thing is to be over one layer and under another, and the two of them moving in different directions. I have never thought of clouds as beings. Now I do.
> 
> It is almost time to go home. I am trying to get accustomed to that thought. My concept of home has changed. I feel at home wandering. I did get to sit with you, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps it could never be enough.



Much love 

I'm wishing you and your family the best.  You are simply an amazing person


----------



## junglejuice

Jan


----------



## herbavore

Transcendence said:


> Jan, I don't know you and we've never really met. I want to say thank you for helping me, both directly and indirectly with coping with things in my life more than any doctor or "real life" friend has. I hope someday I can develop the strength to turn my pain into something as productive and positive and beautiful as you have. I hope you understand how important you are to so many people here.
> 
> The picture of your Great grandmother reminded me of the comfort I sometimes find in looking at those old photos of my own ancestors. The pain and sadness and joy they felt was just as real and it all passed and life went on and joy and pain reincarnated ad infinitum. It's scary but also comforting and helps me put things in perspective during times when I want to scream at the walls that fall in towards me and rip apart space and just fall away. Living is scary and it's so much more than I can understand. We'll fade away too, maybe tomorrow or maybe 60 years from now. in the meantime the choice is to wander gently upon the earth or to desperately hold onto place and collect {pain, misery, money, possessions, ego}/



You have helped me, too, though you probably don't know it. Listening to the way another parent experiences the death of their child, the going forward with their own lives, whethert for themselves or their family or simply because they do not know how to die themselves, affects me profoundly because each different experience, whether I have experienced it exactly or not, speaks to me. The experience of picking up your son's ashes put words to the baffling, surreal experience of that for me. Your struggle to find your way is my struggle to find mine as is the struggle of Where_wolf's mother and all the other mothers and fathers who have found Bluelight through their sons or daughters. 

I love what you say about the choice. Losing a son or a daughter makes everything else seem irrelevant, weightless, meaningless. There is a complete re-set and the trappings of accumulation are the first to go. I am down here in Perú watching the frenzy of christmas amp up around me--the same false promises of happiness and love if you just give the right present, or receive it; the same ridiculous excess that is being pushed on people who have no way of actually buying into it but will suffer for trying as they will suffer for feeling that they have not succeeded., I am in a desert where trash never disappears, just gets layered into the sand and soil, caught on the rocks and formed into drifts wherever there is something to bank against. this is the same desert that held ancient cultures long before the Incas even existed and yesterday I saw the perfectly mummified body of a priestess with her tattooed skin on her arms covered with stars, birds and the sun and I have seen all the amazing things that have survived, the pottery, the textiles, the adornments and geogliphs and ruins. It is in our blood, in our DNA I think to want to hold on, to want to preserve and it is our legacy to leave behind the detritus of our culture and time.

 It is hard to compare the incredible ceramic art of the containers of thousands of years ago with the plastic water bottles gathering like locusts on the earth but there you have it. The old hierarchies and the new are not so different--always some of us are deemed important and most of us expendable.Only to each other do we matter at all. Our sons, for us, mattered more than anything, the birthright of every child born is to matter more than anything.

 As I sit watching the ridiculous ads on the blaring TV in the mercado this morning, the ads where long-legged beauties in tight dresses emerge from giant gift boxes holding wrapped gifts in their hands, and everyone around them explodes into an orgy of love and happiness simply by touching the mythical white box with the big red bow, as I take in all the falseness of that swallowing up culture after culture, I am thankful that I gave my son all I had to give: he mattered more than anything to me. I know that your son mattered more than anything to you. Hold onto that. No matter how badly you feel about mistakes you made as a parent, things you wish you had done differently, words you wish you had said or could take back, the truth that your child mattered more than anything is the only truth you need. 

To wander gently on the earth is a lovely way to live. It takes so little really. Maybe such loss makes it easier to step outside all that need and wanting. I wish you expansive, swollen moments of peace amidst the inevitable moments of pain. 

herby

And to CH and jj, and all those here that hold me in their great big kind hearts, thank you and I hope you know that I hold you in mine as well.


----------



## JBrandon

I can only check this thread every few months because of the emotional reaction I get from your posts Herb. As a father it is my most feared tragedy made real; the insight you share cuts to my core and I try to take whatever lessons I can as a parent from you. Every time I come back here it is a reminder to cherish and accept and love in the moment. Thank you.


----------



## herbavore

Bluelight is black. For one day.

 I miss you. You are more than a name in this damn shrine. So was every other name in here. Sometimes I feel sick thinking about all of it. Tonight is one of those nights.


----------



## Help?!?!

Very understandable, but I see this as a monument to how well respected and enjoyed he was by many people. The posts, the memories he made with people, and the help he provided will live on through this site as well as this shrine. I personally would find that a far greater honor than some grave stone or a Facebook page. Not many people get monuments in their honor even if this isn't some flashy statue with a well worded quote, it is a marker of what he truly was though. Once again in my mind that's better than some statue or whatever other people are remembered by...

Anyways I'm sending positive vibrations your way and hoping a semblance of peace as well as the great strength your known for will quickly return to you!


----------



## stardust.hero

herbavore said:


> Bluelight is black. For one day.
> 
> I miss you. You are more than a name in this damn shrine. So was every other name in here. Sometimes I feel sick thinking about all of it. Tonight is one of those nights.



I remember you today Caleb . I'm here because of you.


----------



## neversickanymore

Life isn't the begining,  and death certainly not the end.. Please let this truth give comfort to those in between. 
~NSA

H


----------



## coelophysis

I miss you buddy.



Love to you, Jan


----------



## herbavore

Today I miss you beyond missing
beyond the pain of remembering, beyond 
the emptiness even that comes
 with forgetting.

Today, I am going beyond
missing you
to a softer place.

If there are any words for it they are like those snowless days,
 one or two flakes landing on your sleeve anyway.
Or maybe like a violence that has ended 
the way it leaves a deep well of quiet in the silent air,
or the way stars fall murmuring into the outstretched hands of black branches,
every single night,
whether or not we see them.


----------



## severely etarded




----------



## herbavore

This strange month that I used to love...May sits ominously buried halfway in my calendar like a tank sits on a hill just outside a city. About mid-April I start to feel the burden of May. You were not supposed to be born in May but when you were, it seemed fitting that you should come in all the profusion of flowers and new green. But May is a month no one should ever die in because it is too beautiful. Sometimes it seems so unreal that you were born in this house, helped to plant the trees and flowers, built the garden walls and walkways with me when you were just a kid. Your Lego guys and your train guys still turn up in the garden.I clean them off and set them back down to be overgrown and unearthed again a year or so from now.

 And of course the poppies are blooming. I always loved them, the mysterious way they would come up wherever they felt like it from one year to the next, at least as tall as me, taller than you for so many years. When it was suggested that this may have been the source of the fatal dose of morphine in your body I wondered if I could ever look at them again. In fact, I have an irrational belief that they, out of everything else in this garden that watched you learn to crawl, to walk and talk and get mad and get ecstatic, that watched you work hard, play hard, get crazy, laugh and throw things, build things, make fires, trim trees, relax, the poppies know what it is to go on living with so much sorrow. Flower, plant, medicine, drug, poison. We all carry everything, all possibility. If I want to believe that the poppies loved you, too, I will. I no longer feel the need to have things make sense.

So today, for what would have been your 23rd birthday, I will celebrate who you were while you were here: a lover of beauty, a mind that was on fire.


----------



## coelophysis

Jan you're in my thoughts 

And happy birthday to Caleb.  I miss you around here man.


----------



## Captain.Heroin




----------



## FrogWarrior

I didn't know your son but I wish he was still here too, reading what you said about the river brought tears to my eyes and I don't cry easily. Reminded me how profound the connection between mother and son can be.


----------



## Bill

^ Seriously qft

I've cried numerous times reading this thread before
It hits me even harder on another level now though because I recently lost my mother


----------



## herbavore

(((()))) Bill. Whenever you talk about your mom while she was alive, and now also in her absence from your life, I can feel the depth of love that exists between the two of you. The basis I'm sure is the trust you each had that you were loved for who you authentically are. When you are loved for who you are you are allowed to make mistakes, you are allowed to fail miserably and you are allowed to learn and grow--all the while knowing that human weakness and stumbling and false starts and wrong paths cannot weaken the faith this person has in you. You and your mom gave each other this gift and there is no greater gift we can give each other as human beings than to embrace each other as full human beings.


----------



## Transcendence

Thanks for all you've done for this community herb. I can only speak for myself but you've been there for me to talk to when I couldn't really talk to anyone else who could relate to the feelings I was and still am struggling with. You're very important to me and many, many others on here


----------



## severely etarded

Transcendence said:


> Thanks for all you've done for this community herb. I can only speak for myself but you've been there for me to talk to when I couldn't really talk to anyone else who could relate to the feelings I was and still am struggling with. You're very important to me and many, many others on here



+1 thank you Jan!


----------



## herbavore

The cursed day has passed and the cursed night as well. The 1095th day. This is how we count, compress our lives as we spin and spin in our slow swing around the sun. We count our sorrows and the days and nights that hold them. we count our breaths and our heartbeats. We count the hours of sleep and of wakefulness and in the morning we count the birds at the feeder; how many finches, how many sparrows? This year we count the drops of water coming from the tap. One minute running equals 1 gallon. You see how much I want to tell you? How insignificant it would all seem to you now.

When Grandma Diddie was alive she wrote letters to everyone she loved. She taught her sons to do the same and so I have letters from my Dad as well. They were long letters--3 to 4 pages front and back, her writing tiny and cramped, dad's elegant---describing the details of the day or week, nothing beyond. I used to wonder how it was that I continued to look forward to these letters that contained nothing but the minutea of daily activities with sentences like, "hung the clothes out and got them in before the storm" or "took the car in today. Saw Dave and got caught up about the kids". But I understand now because in your absence I want to send you these letters, too. To not share our days, the smallness of them, the profound intimacy of all they contain, is such a constant grief. I want to tell you about the weather, how the hours of the day were spent, all the earthly minutes, busy or idle, these simple acts of living strung together on the sturdy backs of the hours that line up to receive them like patient burros. We load them on minute, by minute, with phone calls and cooking, wiping down the counters, scraping plates and weeding the garden, licking envelopes or stopping to deadhead the rose bush on the way to the car. On the way to work I notice the progress of the work on the highway, new graffitti, the eucalyptus trees at the overpass that look stressed and brittle in the drought. My thoughts race ahead of me: what to prepare when I get to school, who has completed the project and who likely never will , the juggling of all those needs and the warm embrace of the children. But my mind is also in the past, the past that is always present, the night that you were torn from my life like a page torn from a book. My tear ducts are seemingly tied to the ignition of my car now. Turn the key, the tears start to flow. Sacred private space. My little metal bubble is a private world, in transit. So often, with my head full of what was left undone behind me and what awaits my attention ahead of me, the ache of your absence brings me back to the present, erasing all time except this moment. Everything erased except this one primal scream and no matter how I try to stop these words from forming I repeat the useless question against my will: why, Caleb, why?


----------



## alexvolume2

I was thinking about your son today and was looking for pictures and his infamous cartoon.  I don't know if you remember my post Herbavore, but I haven't forgotten how awesome you and Caleb are.  My mom's birthday happens to fall on May 30th and I think about the cycle of life and your son.


----------



## herbavore

I remember you.

Here is a picture, one I always loved of Caleb (in the foreground) taking part in a traditional kava ceremony in Western Samoa:


----------



## alexvolume2

That's a beautiful pic, herbavore.  I'm glad he appreciated different cultures.  So many people don't see the value in exploration of the mind and the physical world and he understood at a young age. Thank you.


----------



## herbavore

Three quotes from three paragraphs in succession In Murakami's Norwegian Woods:

"Death is nothing much. It's just death. I am happy here." (The dead speaking).

"Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life. By living our lives we nurture death. But that is only one of the truths we have to learn."

"No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow."


----------



## herbavore

In my dreams you come home. Sometimes you are a toddler and the sweetness of that breaks my heart but there is a comfort. Sometimes, you are a kid, and you are happy and that breaks my heart because even in my dream I know the future but I feel gratitude for remembering your joy. The worst was when you came as you were right before you died and I saw you looking in the window at night, your hands cupped around your face pressed against the yellow square of light from within the kitchen. In the dream, I was not inside the house. I was behind you and to see you that way, to see the yearning and the fear, meant that I, too, could not be in that warm glow of home. If you were outside, so was I. That dream stays with me more than the others. That dream holds all the pain.

I miss you, Caleb. I miss so much about you and our time together. I love you.


----------



## stardust.hero

Herby  Your feelings and words are so raw and true. Thy paint a picture of love, yearning and sadness. I wish I could take it all away.


----------



## Zerrr

FrogWarrior said:


> I didn't know your son but I wish he was still here too, reading what you said about the river brought tears to my eyes and I don't cry easily. Reminded me how profound the connection between mother and son can be.


----------



## herbavore

Recovery

And when at last grief has dried you out, nearly
weightless, like a little bone, one day,
no reason in particular, the world decides to tug:
twinge under the breastbone, the sudden thought
you might stand up, walk to the door and
keep on going… And in the seconds following,
like the silence following the boom under the river ice, it all
seems possible, the egg-smooth clarity of the new-awakened,
rising, to stand, and walk… But already
at the edges of the crack, sorrow
starts to ooze, the brown stain spreading
and you think: there is no end to it.

But in the breaking, something else is given—not
that glittering jumble, shrieking and churning in the blind
                                                   centre of the afternoon,
but something else—a scent,
like a door flung open, a sudden downpour
through which you can still see the sun, derelict
in the neighbour’s field, the wren’s bright eye in the thicket.
As though on that day in August, or even July,
when you were first thinking of autumn, you remembered also
the last day of spring, which had passed
without your noticing. Something that easy, let go
without a thought, untroubled by oblivion,
a bird, a smile.

Jan Zwicky


----------



## cj

^^^beautiful 

That's a cool picture of Caleb in Samoa. Where you on vacation there at the time?


----------



## herbavore

Caleb was in a very stupid program there but he loved Western Samoa and the Samoans. We did go there to meet him (as a family). It is an amazing island and a warm culture.


----------



## Jabberwocky

sending you my love herbavore thank you for all the help through the years


----------



## herbavore

Today I read a post on here by someone who is worrying about his brother. Crying now and can't stop. I feel so bad for your brother. Brothers hold memories together, help each other out and have each others backs. You were always my boys, plural. Now you are receding further and further into the past and your brother is pushing on into the future alone without you. I don't want your brother to be alone without family when Dad and I are gone but he will. All over this house two little blonde boys grin at me from picture frames, playing together, building things together, hiking, skateboarding, surfing, pushing each other, eating; sharing all the normal mundane moments of boyhood and adolescence and finally becoming men together. My favorite picture is one of the last of the two of you together, right before you went to rehab. You are sitting with Tyler on a bench in Santa Barbara where we took you to see him before you left. You have your dreads and and both of you are in what I used to call your uniforms--board shorts and tees. There is such an obvious easiness between you. Years of love and the assumption that there will be more years. Today my heart is breaking open again, not for me, not for you; for your brother, who wanted nothing but peace and safety for you, who always believed in your goodness and strength, who no doubt thought someday you would be old guys together, laughing about your antics and trials growing up.


----------



## monstanoodle

It speaks more volumes than could be written that this thread continues to be so interactive to this day.
It really makes me smile and have a warm melancholy inside me


----------



## LilikoiMoon

Herbavore,

Your strength has astounded me by just what you have written.  Even as a stranger, I can feel that connection you have to your son, and others here.

I read the Shrine for a few weeks before joining.  Caleb's life, his story really touched my soul. Almost every story has , but having children your son's age, it affects me in a way I can't explain. And feeling that connection after my own loss in 2002, no one could understand the death and rebirth of a mother's soul after the loss of a child. Yet it's beautiful you still have the support here.


----------



## herbavore

It's been a long time. I click on this thread and then I sit and stare. I can't write and I can't read it. Last night you came in a dream. First we embraced, then we fought. You had a bottle of alcohol that you kept swigging like some over-acted character in a bad western...swigging and then spitting out 'fuck you' to anything in your path that dared even move. You had the old anger, the hurt that did not know how to be spoken any other way. I woke up filled with your hurt, carrying it alongside my own.

 How many times can a heart break? The only answer that comes to me is, "that all depends on how long you live".

Later today I saw the new kid across the street walking home for the first time from middle school. I know it was his first time because his mom was in the yard and she told me. She was waiting anxiously but she didn't want him to know that. She said, "if you see him first, wave at me and I'll go in so he doesn't know; he'd be so embarrassed if he saw me waiting". I saw him come around the corner--that scared, uncomfortable boy-walk, long hair covering half his face. But when he saw his mom, he wasn't embarrassed. He lit up and gave her a hug. So ordinary. I want to tell you now how I never took one of those hugs for granted, especially at that age when I knew how much it cost you to risk one. Really. 

The thing about this thread is this. It's just me talking to me pretending to talk to you. I want _you_. I want whatever you would have to say back to me. I even want to hear you slam a door or yell like in the dream because that has a future, that goes on, that is alive. No matter what distance I travel away from that horrible day of your death, this is the loop time throws around me. You still aren't here. And I cannot stop wanting you back.


----------



## ebola?

I squandered, SQUANDERED my what would prove few sum interactions with Etkamine, acting overly dictatorially, ignoring his sharp and kind mind at the time.  However, his reaction (in replying within a particular thread of his) was built out of such careful concern for others that he cultivated very fruitful discussion, discussion that I might have otherwise squelched.  Our...universe...remains at a loss with his passing. . .

ebola


----------



## herbavore

Thanksgiving 2014: here with the family, where so many years ago I sat with my newly pregnant belly and the just announced mystery of you. We took turns guessing whether you would be boy or girl. Grandpa Tom was sure you would be a girl. Tonight, as always happens at family dinners, memories get brought out for burnishing in the retelling. When a particular memory held you the storyteller would stumble, ambushed by the forever strange and horrific fact that you were not there laughing with us. We are learning--all of us in our own ways--to accept that ambush and go on with the story, remembering you because we do and always will. This fabric that makes a family will always hold your thread. I was so thankful 24 years ago to be pregnant, thankful when you were born, thankful for every single day that you deepened and enriched my life with all you were and all that taught me. 

Your brother is in North Carolina cooking his first Thanksgiving meal on his own. I indulged myself in a fantasy of you still being alive and surprising him--the two of you grown and away from me, but together for a good visit with each other. I am remembering that last Thanksgiving when you suggested we go camping in the desert--turkey sandwiches in the bitter cold and that gorgeous hike to the palm oasis in the morning. Memories and fantasies and gratitude not so different from the smorgasbord of food laid on the table today. I am still sat here at the feast of life on earth, in this body and all that means. Once you were a boy that delighted in helping me gather the leaves and berries for the table. Now where? Now what? I hope it is an unimaginable feast of light.


----------



## herbavore

Last night I attended the film Dying to Know, about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass made in Timothy Leary's last days as he was dying from cancer. The film was about dying--what it is and isn't and how we live our whole lives grappling with the fear of that moment--and how to do that dance differently. I found myself thinking about the song lyric from Days Like This that says, "all I want to do is live my life honestly" and about how honesty, emotional honesty was so important to you. I thought about the reality that addiction made of you, and of all of us, liars. But you were always honest about how you felt about death and for that I thank you. It gives me comfort to know that death did not completely surprise you, young as you were--that you had conversations with death many times, that you felt secure enough in your own self to do that. 

Ram Dass said of grief that it is like someone has thrown down a ball that will keep bouncing through your life. It will go down but come back up again, down and up again. If I live long enough maybe the bounce will run its course as bouncing balls do and someday it will diminish in the highs and lows and simply roll to a stop at my feet. Unimaginable but doesn't your death itself remain unimaginable?


----------



## methyldreams

beautiful


----------



## herbavore

Missing you so much. Surrounded by family, everything beautiful and candle-lit, and inside I sit on my little island of grief, remembering and wanting.


----------



## crOOk

I'm so sorry herbavore. These must be difficult days for you. I have a daughter of 5 and just can't imagine the pain you are going through.


----------



## cj

You'll get through it herby your fucking strong as shit!


----------



## herbavore

In That Picture

Everything is as it was.
The house still hushed and innocent
the screams not yet housed in our loved bodies.
You, finding your thumb in sleep,
me, watching, singing
the lullaby just above a whisper
not yet ended.
The familiar inhale of breath for the chorus,
 "Do not think about tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go"
and those lyrics still possible,
_that, still possible_.

Your sweet breath,
the toy rabbit's body and your body
not yet burned in the crematorium.


----------



## yepyepwoah

herbavore said:


> Today I read a post on here by someone who is worrying about his brother. Crying now and can't stop. I feel so bad for your brother. Brothers hold memories together, help each other out and have each others backs. You were always my boys, plural. Now you are receding further and further into the past and your brother is pushing on into the future alone without you. I don't want your brother to be alone without family when Dad and I are gone but he will. All over this house two little blonde boys grin at me from picture frames, playing together, building things together, hiking, skateboarding, surfing, pushing each other, eating; sharing all the normal mundane moments of boyhood and adolescence and finally becoming men together. My favorite picture is one of the last of the two of you together, right before you went to rehab. You are sitting with Tyler on a bench in Santa Barbara where we took you to see him before you left. You have your dreads and and both of you are in what I used to call your uniforms--board shorts and tees. There is such an obvious easiness between you. Years of love and the assumption that there will be more years. Today my heart is breaking open again, not for me, not for you; for your brother, who wanted nothing but peace and safety for you, who always believed in your goodness and strength, who no doubt thought someday you would be old guys together, laughing about your antics and trials growing up.




Been reading all the threads in the shrine today. This post especially I think hurts. I never knew caleb, can't recall any of his post, although the name seems vaguely familiar.

Thinking how much it would hurt my mom and brother if I killed myself... Spent the weekend in the woods outside with my brother. Fucking off, just wandering around trying to get lost enjoying the peace and quiet. Playing baseball with pinecones and sticks (i'm almost 30), and sword fighting with more sticks while people look at us like "wtf"... If only this wasn't like all the time...

Thanks for the reminder that our/my actions accect others whether we want them to or not.


----------



## herbavore

Sounds like you have a wonderful relationship with your brother, yep, and I'm glad that you value and honor it. A sibling's death goes on reverberating through time with the same intensity that it reverberates through the lives of parents but in very unique and different ways.


----------



## herbavore

Death feels so close right now. Your Dad is suffering. We are in limbo--is he dying? Is he just going through another bad patch of symptoms and then he will get into the drug trial and actually get a few good years? Either way, we both feel it. Death makes us think of you. He says without your brother he would just give up. Always our two boys--one in this world, one gone from it. Each of you two pulling our hearts in different directions.

Today I took your Dad to the doctor and then took him home and started out to the store to get him some crushed ice which is about all he can eat/drink sometimes. Down the street I heard a screaming argument coming from a woman inside the car and a guy outside walking away and then coming back. He finally walked about 1/2 block and then he stopped and just froze in place, stooped like an old man, shoulders so rounded and head hanging so low that I thought he was overcome with crying. As I passed him I wanted so badly to stop, to put a hand on his shoulder. He was so young but he looked so beaten up by life. I went to the store and I got two protein shakes, a sandwich and a gift card. When I came back he was by the car in that same defeated posture. They were both so miserable and all I could think is, _there is so much suffering in this world_. _So many private hells_. They were pretty thrilled with the gift card and the shakes. Made me think of you all around--how close you were coming to those kids' life but also how kind you always were--how you would have done something similar had you still been around and seen them. Maybe that's why that boy affected me so much. I kept thinking how he was once somebody's happy little kid.

I miss you, buddy. Your Dad does,too. We say your name out loud a lot. I usually say Cakey or Caleb but Dad always says, "Smokey". What will I do when your Dad is gone? No one else on this earth knows how much I miss you, how sad and crazy and happy and better you made me. He knows because he feels the same. Grief is lonely enough but I can't imagine losing the one person that I only have to say your name to and he understands the inexpressible vast universe of emotion held in that name. He better get in that damn trial.


----------



## stardust.hero

I hope he gets in the trial Herby .


----------



## cj

Your in my thoughts herby


----------



## ScotchMist

You're a remarkable person Herby. Thinking of you


----------



## herbavore

Today you would have turned twenty four. Yesterday a friend's daughter stopped by to do some art with me. You went to kindergarten/first grade with her, though she was a year younger so the next time you two hung out was probably high school. She wanted to talk about the strange and terrifying and exhilarating time after university--when all the hard work and deadlines and reading and presentations are finally behind you, when adulthood is an immutable fact and you feel such enormous pressure and freedom all at the same time. I kept having to get up and go blow my nose, thankful for the cold I have that gave me a good excuse to do so. Finally I just admitted to her how much it hurt to see your contemporaries facing the new challenges that you will never face. We cried together a bit and let the art making take us back into easy conversation. She wanted to hear stories about you and she wanted to tell some of her own. It never fails that when I start to talk about you I end up laughing right through the tears. I have known, taught and loved so many children in my life. Even if you were not my son, you would have have captured my fascination and my heart with all that crazy intensity wrapped up with all that unbelievable softness and insight. You still remain one of the most amazing people I have ever known. To have our conversations cut short, your explorations and evolution here as my son and friend and teacher  truncated so suddenly and irrevocably,  is a loss so huge that it seems no matter how hard I try to expand myself to be able to encompass it, it remains impossible. 

On the night after you died I did so many strange and manic things, even briefly making the plan to just follow you. But eventually I ended up back in front of our house, completely wrung out and emptied, a dry shell of a woman sitting in a car watching the streetlights go off one by one. I thought that I had gone with you after all, that your death was the death of everything, not the least of which was my love for the world. But you were not finished giving me gifts, dear Caleb. Almost overnight I saw that I had never loved the world _enough_, that I had never fought hard enough through my own misperceptions to a deeper, more truthful, more difficult love. I would trade that lesson back for you in a heartbeat, but since that is only wishful thinking, I will be grateful for it.

When you boys were little you loved to give gifts as much as you liked to get them. You loved the secrecy and surprise element. You loved the wrapping--and what an art we made out of that! Potato prints and old blueprints, tissue paper and haystacks of ribbon. Every gift you have ever given me came in layers and layers of wrapping; the goal of this wrapping was never to make a beautiful package, it was to disguise the size and shape and true contents of the gift within. This one, too. It's almost as if I can see it, a little slip of paper with your handwritten words:"_love the world more, mom_" wrapped in complicated lumpy layers of struggle and addiction, desperation and argument, but also carefully layered flower petals, bunny grass, sea air and honest laughter--all you had to give, you are still giving. I will light 24 candles for you today and make a fire. I will love all of it, not for what I wish it would be, but for what it is.



P1000057 by herbavore


----------



## cj

Damn I nearly cried. I Think I have said this before but I never really understood a mothers love until you started posting here Herby. Its probably just projection on my part but it seems like you and Caleb have a similar relationship to me and my mom. We fight like dogs sometimes about my addiction. I rip her heart out with my words but at the end of the day we have a bond that is indestructible. 
The love you have for him truly does pour off the screen it's a beautiful thing. I dunno what exactly I'm trying to say other than you deciding to become an active member of this site has made a positive impact on my life and I'm positive I'm not the only one.


----------



## herbavore

Remembering those days after Tyler was in school and it was just you and me going through our days with your crazy adorable monologues on life, wearing Bun-Bun like a giant mitten wherever we went. So much going on in that mind of yours.....the innocence of those years when you let it all pour forth, before you turned so much of it on yourself. I can look at this and still smell the chlorine in your hair from swim lessons, still remember helping to guide your arms into the sleeves of that tee shirt, how thin the cotton was but how you loved it anyway, because Tyler had made it and worn it before you. This little version of you would have been lost to history whether you lived to old age or not; but a mother sees an adult child always through the complicated lens of the multiple pasts. Maybe that is one of the most important things that we do is to hold the knowledge of your nature intact despite all the divisions of the self that occur as you grow.


----------



## crOOk

It saddens me whenever I have this thread pop up in my inbox. I've never known him well enough to pretend I'd care about his death myself, but I have the greatest respect for you and how you manage to fight through this and somehow end up carrying on. All my love goes out to you. I may not have known your son, but I won't ever forget about your loss. Just thinking about your situation floods my eyes with tears.


----------



## severely etarded

crOOk said:


> It saddens me whenever I have this thread pop up in my inbox. I've never known him well enough to pretend I'd care about his death myself, but I have the greatest respect for you and how you manage to fight through this and somehow end up carrying on. All my love goes out to you. I may not have known your son, but I won't ever forget about your loss. Just thinking about your situation floods my eyes with tears.



+1 

feeling guilty about "celebrating" 25 years as an earthling. I honestly don't have the desire to live anymore but i promised so many people i would keep going until my time comes. I got stabbed on 4/20 and i can't understand why I'm still here. I hate living with a passion but it's the passion of others that keeps me living. I often wish I could end all pain and suffering in the world. I have so much respect for herbavore she has personally touched me in a way that nobody else in the world has. I just want to give her the biggest hug one day if i ever get a chance to visit California.


----------



## herbavore

Something Still

Something still remains
beyond the baby shoes boxed in the attic,
beyond the ashes weighed down by their own silence in another box,
beyond your name on someone’s car in traffic with the words, 
“never forget”,


Beyond these: something
 still.
Not frozen but paused
The way a wind may die
but leave a slight hum 
still quivering at the edges 
of a vast new silence.

Something still, impermanent
 but lasting long enough to illumine
faint beliefs 
like tiny stars
behind thin clouds.

or as dew leaves the earth each morning
hovering just above
 every leaf and field
a shimmer,  a fleeting animation,
excitement, 
death a process, 
an action,
a crude suspension bridge still shivering
long after the last hiker has disappeared across the river.

language: the difference between _an_ ending and _the_ ending

something still of _you_
here
unseen, 
only felt in stillness

time nothing more than Matisse’s circle of blue dancers
joining hands:
you once were,
always have been
still are, always
will be

something still, quieted in me, 
and in that stillness, the wisdom
of verb tenses, of articles, of words with more than one meaning 

how they lead me looping
further and further into a deep woods
parting branches and stepping over fallen logs
into this pale delicate  shaft of
awareness.
Nothing I can hold onto,
bring with me,
nothing to even touch.
But still something.





Four years. The flags are shredding to nothing. In the beginning they were loud when the wind came up--they snapped and crackled and kicked. Now the wind combs through them without a sound. In some ways the silence you left just grows with each passing year. It doesn't get easier but it changes. I remember that first week, how we would struggle so hard with all the questions--the why's, the what ifs. And then we would simply crumple under the emptiness of those questions and we would just howl, "I miss him!" And that is still true on my way to work, and it still true when I come home. It is true when I am surrounded by people and when I am alone. I miss you more and more because there have been more and more days and nights to miss you in; newer and unimagined ways that your absence is as palpable as my own heartbeat. It is a loneliness like no other.  Sometimes I convince myself that if I could only part these veils of grief, you would be there.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

rip


----------



## herbavore

It's never a surprise to me that rabbit makes an appearance in this place. Summer solstice, beautiful land at Earthrise, Women's Visionary Congress, 2015. It was just the rabbit and I at about 6am up on a hill. I had just walked the labyrinth and was watching a doe with her two skittish fawns disappear over a rise nearby. Rabbit and I looked at each other for a long time. I told him about you in a whisper, thanked him for his presence, cried, felt like it was a prayer. A woman at the conference told about an experience in which she was led to ask if she had in some cosmic sense chosen her birth mother and therefore her adoption. I have often been offered this belief from others--that we choose our families, sometimes even different roles in our families in different lifetimes, and I admit that it is intriguing. If you did choose me, I hope that you learned as much from that relationship as I am still learning. The only thing I ever wanted you to learn was that you are lovable. I hope you carry that knowledge in whatever incarnation you exist in now.


----------



## Imtryin

Dear Herbavore, 
i just put the pieces together on how you came to be on bluelight.  When I first read some of your posts, I thought you must be someone with years of recovery, and possibly a counsellor of some kind.  It was only a couple of days ago that I found out your story
i then read every post on this thread.  I will truly never be the same person.  Someone here said that you are the gift that your son left for bluelight.  I could not agree more with that.  I wonder how many lives you have touched.  Hundreds? Thousands?  Maybe even through your compassion and generosity of time that you give here, you are also touching people that do not even know that bluelight exists.  My 15 year old daughter has been affected by you and hopefully she will never need to know about this site.  

i have cried all the tears I can for one day, reading your posts.  It is amazing to me that you give so much of yourself and your wisdom, even knowing what your grief is.  My parents both died very recently, and prior to that, my brother died of an overdose.  My wonderful and amazing mother could never have done what you are doing.   I wish so much I could have read her your posts.  

Thank you so much for what you do, your older son is so lucky that you are his mom. Your whole family sounds great, but if you never make another post again, it is you that I wiil never forget.  

Peace


----------



## F1n1shed

herbavore said:


> It's never a surprise to me that rabbit makes an appearance in this place. Summer solstice, beautiful land at Earthrise, Women's Visionary Congress, 2015. It was just the rabbit and I at about 6am up on a hill. I had just walked the labyrinth and was watching a doe with her two skittish fawns disappear over a rise nearby. Rabbit and I looked at each other for a long time. I told him about you in a whisper, thanked him for his presence, cried, felt like it was a prayer. A woman at the conference told about an experience in which she was led to ask if she had in some cosmic sense chosen her birth mother and therefore her adoption. I have often been offered this belief from others--that we choose our families, sometimes even different roles in our families in different lifetimes, and I admit that it is intriguing. If you did choose me, I hope that you learned as much from that relationship as I am still learning. The only thing I ever wanted you to learn was that you are lovable. I hope you carry that knowledge in whatever incarnation you exist in now.


 Great stuff, who was Ektamine to you?

Anyone have information on EK? What was he abusing, or what took him out?


----------



## herbavore

Ektamine was, and still is, my son. He died (after a terrifying year of pretty hard abuse of MDPV )of a morphine overdose suspected to have been from poppy tea.


----------



## herbavore

So sad, so sad, so sad. It is summer and hot. Green, the world is green. Boys with surfboards fling themselves into blue water and come up paddling strong. Water sparkles and the sun starts to slant away from us. I am out here in the wind and sun, spinning, spinning, alive. But , like a cloud suddenly covering the sun I am seeing people in dark rooms, afraid to be there, afraid to leave. This day means nothing to them, nor does the season, the thinning light, the life humming like bees in every tree I pass. I don't know why they came to me right now. Maybe so I would think of you, a boy with a foot in both those worlds. So, OK. I'll go there. Me outside walking towards you in your apartment. Climbing the stairs. So many beautiful days collapsing into that little cupboard of darkness. Trying to coax you outside. Seeing that you had covered the windows. One world right outside the other.


----------



## Transcendence

The stories are so vivid in my head. This picture is ever present. Poppy tea made my son comfortable and also slowly killed him. The stimulants and psychedelics and external pressure caused scar after anxious scar that was self medicated with downers. I never wanted this for him. He was in so much pain and it was so apparent to me but it wasn't enough to help him. I was so powerless and weak. I thought he would persevere. The doctors did the best they could for him but he burned out in a quiet wilt. And I with him. He lost his breath. breathless for so long and then


----------



## herbavore

I know exactly what you are talking about. _We never wanted this for our sons. _ I do believe that you were powerless but you were not weak. Or maybe you were weak, but being strong would have made no difference. I remind myself every day of the fact that no one really has power over me, so why would I expect to have power over someone else? Influencer, guide, compass. That's what I wanted to be as a mother. Sometimes I succeeded fantastically and sometimes I failed miserably. It's so easy now to see only the failures and to give them power.


----------



## Transcendence

We have the memories. I have to remind myself that the gift of the life, no matter how tragic, still overpowers the pain of the loss. I've been told to forgive myself so many times, that it wasn't my fault. We all could have done more maybe, but the stories of so many other great parents like yourself who live on in similar circumstances are so similar in the end details. No one deserves this, but we are only human, with many of the same weaknesses of the people who were an intrinsic part of us. Could've, should've, would've. We didn't know, we didn't directly cause this, we are human. 

All I believe now, as I think you do as well, is that we can only do the best we can to help others. And you've done more than anyone I know. I've seen your work here and you've saved others the pain of this kind of cruel loss.


----------



## herbavore

I am cleaning out my closet. Unearthing things stuffed into the far recesses anywhere from last month to twenty four years ago. I came across so many little daggers to the heart. Here are a few:

The one shirt I saved and never washed.

The toxicology report and coroner's report, hidden because your Dad never could stand to read them.

A whole envelope of our collaborative rabbit drawings from the train trip back from Oregon when you were 6. You drew the underground warrens and I drew the rabbits. You drew the airplanes and helicopters firing at each other in the sky overhead. I added some trees with worried faces and tears.

My beginning Spanish notebooks. On one page, learning the verb agradecer I conjugated it with these phrases: "Agradezco que no te muriste el fin de semana pasado." Estoy agradecido que ya tu vives." At the top of the page there is a red check from the teacher whose name I have forgotten.

A box of random pictures of you and Tyler I had planned to make into a book about brothers. In every one of them you are smiling.

A birthday card from Jane that  says, ".....how beautifully you continue to paint even as you face the deep pain of a son you love and all the uncertainty you must hold." Was it ever uncertainty? I remember waking so many nights, sure that you were dead. Why then now is it still so impossible to believe it?


----------



## Erikmen

Herby, I'm so sorry and sad to hear about what happened to your son and listen to your memories. 
That's a beautiful picture you have. 
The one above I can see his hands and the one you carry in your heart.

I don't have enough words to make you feel better. 
I can only see that your son is alive in your heart and that's forever. I share the feeling of loss I have about my sister who passed away 3 years ago. She was beautiful inside out. She was the especial one. 
But she had been living like a vegetal and her loss is deeply felt by me. 

Sometimes we really question if that really happened and play in our minds over and over again so many situations we remember and what I could have been done differently or if I was present enough. 

People say God has His plans and I find it very difficult to accept as I still feel her energy, I still dream about her. And I hope that time helps us to deal with such a loss in better ways. 

I can see that you have a good heart and help a lot of people here. I truly hope you can deal with such love in a less painful way. 

My best wishes. 

Erik.


----------



## cj

Have you thought about making the book about brothers despite Caleb's passing? I know it would be painful but it might bring some more closure for tyler as well?


----------



## herbavore

Oh yes, definitely. It will only grow more meaningful with time. Tyler is a rather amazing person. He has dealt with his brother's death in ways that are mostly mysterious to me. I have often thought that he will have it come up more intensely once we are gone and also when and if he ever has children. He is a private person in many ways when it comes to his emotions and I've tried to respect that. Caleb, on the other hand, couldn't hide an emotion if you paid him.


----------



## herbavore

Thinking about how much you loved music, how much it meant to you, the day you described synesthesia to me on the way home from middle school, Led Zeppelin being yellow, "almost a taste", you said. Hoping maybe it is all music for you now, pure music.


----------



## Bagseed

hey herby! just a song for you:


----------



## herbavore

We go on down here. We go on having birthdays and growing older. Your brother has all the possible roads of his life stretched out in front of him and we are excited for him. We all go on loving each other, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes clumsily and even poorly. A cat has died, and two of the biggest trees. The neighborhood has kids in it again. Your Aunt Laureen died and broke your Dad's heart. The country is worse off than when you left it and so is the world. Even these words I am writing to you are data on a screen, collected somewhere, mined for who knows what. Selfie sticks exist now. And facebook sent me a message letting me know that my 62nd birthday is tomorrow. You would have railed loud and hard over that and then had a good laugh. I still laugh. I cry about equally. Most of the time I just feel a growing wonder at everything--the mess we've made and the perfection that still exists.

I saw the world's largest tree lying down in its only home, the forest of its birth. When it fell it registered 3 on the Richter scale. I walked along beside the still-solid body of that tree and felt the small, short span of my own life and of course that made me think of yours. Everything is in reverse. I carry your words, your stories, the memories of your smile, your walk, the funny or ridiculous or amazing things you said. It should be the other way. I would be gone and you would carry me forward. I would exist in your memories, memories that you could share or argue about with your brother. 

It is hard for me to get older without you getting older. It ignites a kind of rage in me when I'm forced to think about it by a birthday. It is because the years that you have been gone would have been the years in which you came fully into adulthood. I wanted to know Caleb the man; not just Caleb the boy. It seems a travesty to only be able to recall you as a boy, poised as you were on the cusp of something altogether different. Now you are life, not a life. Not the mysterious boy that jumped each night into the dark sea with no one watching. Who does that at 19? Surely a man I would loved to have known.


----------



## woamotive

Herbavore, I visit this thread on occasion. Each time I cry-it helps put life (and death) into perspective. I imagine you as 'my' mother and cannot bear for her to try to live w/o a child, lost to the claws of chemicals. That said, I find myself making the same horrible choice/s.

Your strength and your struggle move me and many.


----------



## herbavore

I wish you were here for your brother. He could use a brother right now.


----------



## herbavore

Young Men and their Music

Sometimes grief knifes through a moment
and the heart splits again,
reveals the old yearning
still breathing where I carry
your death.

It happens when serious young men play solos on the cello
or the violin, any string instrument really.
The way they lean down in their uncomfortable dark suits,
incline their heads
every muscle of their faces
 in private dialogue with the wooden body, 
the taut strings, the black mystery of the mouth,

as lovers sometimes speak, nose to nose,
pupil to pupil, without words. 

All I wanted was for you to love something that much
that it could anchor your soul to your body and your body to the present;
that the present would persist in being just the note before

the next note,
while you leaned further into the future of love,
all the notes to follow still held in the string
The bow still lifting.


----------



## herbavore

In three days you will not turn 25. Your father says, "I wonder where he would be at 25?" He thinks things would have gotten easier. I'm not sure. But what is this concept anyway? What is easy about life? Nothing that I value has come easily, even ease itself. If anything, it seems like life is a layering on of hurt and defensive response, more hurt, more hardening until finally that tiny sliver of awareness that has not been scarred over asserts the need to breathe and you begin the process of peeling back the layers. I would have loved to see you do that. I think you chose a different path. I think you took a shortcut through all that slow and tedious peeling. 

I have been dreaming about you quite a bit. In my dreams you might be any age. One night you are 3 and the next you are 19. You are always so thoroughly yourself that you are indeed resurrected and so the mornings are rough. In my dreams I have no awareness that you died. You are simply back with us, usually in the most mundane way--the activity of the dream is rarely focused on you but your presence is integral.I was telling Lori about this the other day and she asked if now that it had almost been 5 years, if things had gotten less raw? We were driving and it was not until she looked over at my face that she got her answer. The answer is no. The sadness lives right under my skin. The reality of your absence is a membrane around each moment. When we were in Turkey I burst into tears twice when poor unsuspecting strangers asked me how many children I had. I told your grandma that I suspect this will happen until the day I die.

The thing is....I don't mind the sadness. If there is anything I wish I could have taught you it is not to run from your sadness. Let it catch up with you. Walk with it always at your side. It is never the only reality but it needs to be heard. It's not nearly as terrifying as what you imagine it as when you are busy running from it. There is a soft side to sadness, a tenderness. Sadness is pure and without blame or anger or even regret. It is as pure an emotion as love itself.

Gina called and asked if she could come down for your birthday. Here you are with her before you'd even ever had a birthday:


----------



## Captain.Heroin

My thoughts are with you herby


----------



## Slain

:'(


----------



## herbavore

^ and ^^, thanks.





I'm glad I got to come to your party.


----------



## coelophysis

Great pics and deep posts Jan.. I'm always thinking of you and admiring you in my thoughts.
Is that a duo of Bun Buns that I see?


----------



## cj

thinking of you today Jan. The picture of Caleb dressed up as the cheerleader for Halloween always cracks me up. He owned that costume!


----------



## herbavore

Yeah, there were always a few stuffed bunnies that got to come along with Bun-Bun and that one in that picture I believe was Flopsy. But there was ever only one Bun-Bun and he was the essential soulmate. And, yes, he did own that cheerleader costume but I think my favorite is still the old man.


----------



## herbavore

> You think you cannot live anymore.You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the love (the parent or child or friend or lover who has died) who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
> 
> You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your own throbbing vein. How can you say he is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?



                                                                                            Elif Shafak from The Forty Rules of Love


----------



## Dedbeet

Hi, all... I was a friend of Ektamine's for ages.  First time I've been on BL for quite awhile... been out of the RC scene, but am looking to get back in... D.


----------



## herbavore

^Hey Dedbeet, welcome back.


----------



## Asclepius

herbavore said:


> So sad, so sad, so sad. It is summer and hot. Green, the world is green. Boys with surfboards fling themselves into blue water and come up paddling strong. Water sparkles and the sun starts to slant away from us. I am out here in the wind and sun, spinning, spinning, alive. But , like a cloud suddenly covering the sun I am seeing people in dark rooms, afraid to be there, afraid to leave. This day means nothing to them, nor does the season, the thinning light, the life humming like bees in every tree I pass. I don't know why they came to me right now. Maybe so I would think of you, a boy with a foot in both those worlds. So, OK. I'll go there. Me outside walking towards you in your apartment. Climbing the stairs. So many beautiful days collapsing into that little cupboard of darkness. Trying to coax you outside. Seeing that you had covered the windows. One world right outside the other.



You are an amazing human. Your beautiful, strength never ceases to floor me.


----------



## herbavore

A year before you died, one of my students died. He was at his own birthday party at the beach--the first day of his eleventh year. The kids found a sand cave in the cliffs and he went in first followed by his best friend. The cave collapsed and his lungs filled with sand. He was a boy that loved life, loved adventure, loved opening all the secret little doors of life to see what was there. His mother told me a few years ago that 5 years for a grieving parent seems to hold particular significance. I listen to her. She is very wise and she is miles ahead of me on the same path. She is the one who warned me in the very beginning that I would lose everything, starting with what I held most dear, what defined me to myself. She was right on that count, so I am feeling myself out this morning as I prepare for tomorrow. So strange that I mark these birthdays of your death but I need them; it feels good to make the fire, light the candles, sit with you without distraction, be silent. I've already written here about the inventory of losses the years have brought. I've written about the missing, how it goes on and on, carving its own Grand Canyon. 

The truth is that 5 years means there is no more confusion of time. It used to often feel like no time at all had passed since I found you with your airless lungs, your ruined body still so perfect in youth. Now, I am afloat in the great sea of my own forgetting. All the old questions have floated away. Good riddance. But there are more. They rise around me like beautiful translucent jelly fish, expanding and contracting like slow breaths. Where are you? What are you? What did you keep for the journey? What did you let go? 

Yesterday I read an article by Craig Childs about living within the understanding of how the world is always ending and always beginning. It is called The Skeleton Gets Up and Walks (a quote from Henri Miller: "The world dies over and over again but the skeleton always gets up and walks). It is timeless and timely....a field guide in a way for living with and through the 6th great extinction here on earth. As something ascends, something else falls away. This is the grand scale where everything from  thousands of species to entire civilizations have a birth, a life, a death. But weren't you that grand to me?  No one can imagine a world without polar bears, a world without elephants, a world in which no birds but the crows survive. I could not imagine a world without you and yet here I am. You used to try to get me to see the cosmic view, the one where this planet's hard birth or slow death or both were simply part of a miraculous swirling unnameable whole. And I used to try to get you to focus on the beauty of _now_, of small ordinary lives and daily breath. Its all the same thing, isn't it? Oh, Caleb, how I miss your conversation. What would the 25 year old have to say that the 20 year old had yet to conceive? 

And so this month of May has come again and now is ending; the month when you might have turned twenty five and instead are five years gone. As your absence swells, my own life quite tangibly wanes and I will take your absence with me when I go. There is some strange comfort there.


----------



## Transcendence

I'm with you.


----------



## Atmozfears

This made me burst out into tears. Oh boy. Don't know who the person was but for some reason this really hit me hard.... RIP


----------



## herbavore

^^@Transcendence:I know that you every word I write, dear friend that I have never met. Sometimes I feel our sons could have had so much more to say. Other times, that they just got tired, even of talking.


----------



## Swimmingdancer




----------



## herbavore

> What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?


                                                                             Father Damien, nee Agnes Vogel from the novel The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich


----------



## cj

Hugs


----------



## herbavore

Miss you so much in the summer. Remembering how much you loved the light, the warmth, the relaxed vibe, the bonfires and ocean waves, bbq's and our trips to the river.


----------



## aplumgirl

I've read this thread so many times. It makes me remember that life is to be treasured. 

It sounds like he did a lot in his young life, traveling, exploring the world and himself. 

I find the greatest testimony is his mother who turned her personal grief into an outpouring of love here at BL! 

What a legend!


----------



## herbavore

Last night a dream world opened up and ran for what seemed like hours. You and your brother were young but not little, maybe 7 and 10. You brought your whole self to the dream, the intense emotions, the silliness, your impatience and also your easy fascination with something new in your world. I don't remember what we were all doing except that it was so mundane; the sense of safety and peace and profound _rightness_ that I used to feel going about my chores hearing you two involved in your own worlds, growing, building, moving forward into your deepening selves every single minute. I experienced this dream with an awareness I never had living it: with the knowledge that this would end soon and that while your brother would continue to step through the phases of life into new realms of being, you would veer off somewhere unknown, away from being Caleb, that I would never again have the peaceful safe feeling of having you near. But even with this awareness, the feeling I had was an intense appreciation rather than grief. I think this dream must have come from some deep shift inside. I'd like to think, I'll have more of these, but who knows? The overall feeling that this dream brought was one of sheer wonder that we had unselfconsciously created such a universe; that those Lego and book and stuffed animal strewn days and nights were a miraculous little bubble of complex harmonies reverberating through space and time. 

For five years I have written about you and to you. I started a book last year to compile the poems, making each page first with paints. I had an urgency in my heart and in my mind and the words poured out. I feel a space opening up now, a wide chasm of emptiness where that urgency used to be and the pages and the poems and the paints seem irrelevant. Like everything else that your death has brought, this is uncharted territory and I don't know how to think about it, so I just feel. The feelings are: bewilderment, uncertainty, fear, resignation, a deeper sadness diluted with a deeper peace. That last bit is probably one of the strangest feelings possible. I read something the other day that said, "Questions don't want to be answered as much as they want to be held". That made so much sense to me and almost seems like my sole purpose now: to hold questions.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

It sounds like a beautiful book, herby


----------



## cj

Its ok to put projects aside when your not feeling it anymore. Listen to your feelings. But I guarantee you that book isn't irrelevant. Even if you never publish its what you needed  to do at the time.


----------



## herbavore

I have been avoiding this place, Little Man. Too much sorrow, too many inadequate words, too little strength.


----------



## herbavore

This morning, in the pale pink dawn, the old dog of your death looks weary. Three times he circles around his desire to sleep, curls into it, settles; then opens one eye, a slit so thin it is like a knife blade, trains it on me, sighs.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

,,


----------



## Jabberwocky

Caleb passed before my time here on Bluelight but reading through his shrine today was enough to make me cry. I like to think that during those five wonderful years I spent in Santa Cruz ('97 - '02) perhaps we crossed paths. It's a nice reminder to go ahead and smile more at the strangers I meet. Thank you for sharing your heart with us all Herby in this touching tribute to life.


----------



## herbavore

levelsBeyond said:


> Caleb passed before my time here on Bluelight but reading through his shrine today was enough to make me cry. I like to think that during those five wonderful years I spent in Santa Cruz ('97 - '02) perhaps we crossed paths. It's a nice reminder to go ahead and smile more at the strangers I meet. Thank you for sharing your heart with us all Herby in this touching tribute to life.



Thank you for your sweet message. I didn't know you had lived here. I imagine that if you did cross paths with Caleb in 1997, (he would have been six), you most certainly would have smiled. When Caleb was six he began to inexplicably dress like a little Mormon missionary. I bought all my kids clothes second hand and let them pick them out whenever possible. So you would have seen this hippie looking mom with this kid that had on a little white button down collar shirt tucked into his pants (where did he even get the idea for that look in this town? ) with his hair neatly parted on one side and slicked back with water so that no hair was ever out of place. He had some white tennies that he also took great care to keep clean. I was pretty fascinated by this look but by the time he was 8 it was a thing of the past. Had you seen him at 11 (2002) you would have seen the classic little surfer 'grom' with his long blonde hair flying as he few around town on his skateboard or headed out into the waves on his first surfboard. Thanks for bringing those memories to the surface.


----------



## herbavore

Rest in eternal love and gratitude, cat with the most unlikely name. We debated the name together, agreed it was ridiculous but somehow it fit. Goodbye, Mouse, most loyal friend to all of us--no family favorites for this one. I wonder which crazy nickname you would greet her with, Caleb? Kalashnikov? Mushka? Or just Mousarina? Whatever name it would be, I hope you are there to meet her.


----------



## cj

Loosing family pets is so sad . My family's beloved dog died last week and it was really heartbreaking.

Mouse is a pretty great name for a cat though.... your family certainly seems to have a healthy sense of irony.


----------



## herbavore

^I'm sorry about your dog, cj. How old?

Caleb, I had a great dream about you last night. I love these dreams but they come so infrequently. I try to will them to no avail. The white sage plant in your garden has grown full enough to harvest some. Going to make a smudge for you on Christmas, remember how you loved the lights, remember Grandpa Tom harmonizing to the songs and how you loved to hear that. I miss you so much and that does hurt, but I love you even more and that never hurts.


----------



## cj

My dog Luke was 11. He had a good life it just hurt because through all the trials and tribulations by family has been through with my addiction he was always there for a lick or gentle nudge. We got him when I was 16 so he was a connection to that part of my life when everything was fun and the future was a great mystery to be solved. Before heroin wrecked all that.

I hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday herby! Ill be thinking about you.


----------



## herbavore

cj said:


> My dog Luke was 11. He had a good life it just hurt because through all the trials and tribulations by family has been through with my addiction he was always there for a lick or gentle nudge. We got him when I was 16 so he was a connection to that part of my life when everything was fun and the future was a great mystery to be solved. Before heroin wrecked all that.
> 
> I hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday herby! Ill be thinking about you.





The future is _still_ a great mystery to be explored. I'll be thinking of you, too, cj. You are a beautiful soul and nothing, not even heroin, can change that.


----------



## herbavore

One more without you. We all missed you but we had a lovely holiday, full of laughter and good meals and lots of friends. I made you and me two special cookies to share.









I'm going back to Ecuador in an hour or so. It will be hard to remember how broken I was when I was there last. I love you so much. I know you will be there, as you were before.


----------



## spacejunk

Herby


----------



## cj

Safe travels


----------



## Transcendence

Thinking of you Herby. I hope you find some peace in Ecuador. I sent you a PM a week or 2 ago after Axl, but I know your inbox is always swamped. Stay safe my friend


----------



## herbavore

^ Back safe and more sound. Thank you to all my friends here that look out for me--I love you. And I don't say that lightly.

In honor of Bluelight's tragic losses and my own son's existence, a brief moment between his three rabbits, may they all rest in peace:


----------



## cj

Glad your trip went off safely. Glad to have you back on the site as well.


----------



## Jabberwocky

Nothing I can type here can explain the way I feel after glancing through this again. 


This is a very special place.


----------



## cj

toothpastedog said:


> Nothing I can type here can explain the way I feel after glancing through this again.
> 
> 
> This is a very special place.



Well said.


----------



## herbavore

*A Prayer in Spring*

                 Robert Frost


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.


----------



## herbavore

26 years ago today. Carrot cake and Chinese take out in your honor. Stories, Dad's, your brother's, mine. And as always, the "I wonder what.....?"


----------



## cj




----------



## herbavore

Today I wrote an email to thank a poet who had written these words describing poems he wrote after the death of his mother:





> "Is it ever finished, our argument with death? Our dispossession? There is, I think, no way to complete it. It becomes our work no matter how we approach it. Our work, in the face of this unalterable fact, is the always ever bringing back of remembering."



But each memory is a death in and of itself. A memory, it turns out, is simply a retelling of the last retelling which was a retelling of the last and on and on...we all know how that goes, trained in childhood by the game telephone. You whisper a sentence in someone's ear (in this case, your own) and they in turn whisper what they heard to the next person and by the time it winds its way back to you, it is a new sentence altogether. And so I ask you, boy of my flesh and my imagination, what do I still hold? And what of that is true? Strangely, the most overlooked sense of our five senses is the strongest in the end. I know your scent. It appears not to be a memory but perhaps deeper--a recognition of any mammal of her own offspring. 

When I was house-sitting for Auntie Marla I slept in her room. Across from her bed she has her "ghosts" on a shelf: a picture of our Dad in his signature blue shorts and orange shirt, a painting that someone did of Linda's eyes and her photo of you that she calls, "The little god." Yes, I remember that you and your brother were like little gods set down among us. Your hair in that photo is luminous, so blonde it is almost white. Your eyes are piercing blue, before they mysteriously turned green, and you have the little compressed smile that you so often had, as if you had to hold all that mirth inside and just let a trickle out, for fear of what would happen if that much joy was released at once into the world. And of course there was always the irony in it--as if the absurdity of absolutely everything was already apparent to you at 3. Your chubby hands on the tricycle handlebars are full of purpose. You were always full of purpose. What the photo cannot hold is your voice back then--the clarity and purity of it. Sometimes I wish I had been one of those mothers that obsessively filmed and recorded your every move. I am so hungry for these pathetic representations and the memories they evoke. But then I think, no, they would be like a house full of too much stuff: momentarily satisfying but ultimately empty and burdensome. Because they are not you. I only still and forever want you. Not the memories, not the photos or my own stories, not the shrines or the garden, not anything that I can touch or see or hear now, all the illusions of my own making. I want what cannot be. I want the you that was separate from me.


----------



## cj




----------



## herbavore

Your brother is coming home! Just briefly--it's a visit--but I'm so happy. I am making his bed, which has been the guest bed, up with fresh sheets, dusting, fixing the broken shade in the window--all the joyful preparations. And completely out of the blue, after 6 years of living with the immutable fact of your absence, I think of calling you and saying, "For his first night home do you think we should order Thai food or do you want Chinese?" Crazy. I feel crazy. One minute I'm on solid ground, working hard to accept that your death has now become more familiar than your life and then, these strange occurrences, like breakthrough pain,or, like Grandma said: phantom pain of a severed limb. How is the limb gone from the body but not from the pathways of the brain? How are you in the past and then suddenly, right here in the present?


----------



## herbavore

I wonder if I would panic so much about your brother if I had not lost you. I hate to panic. I hate to burden him with knowing that I panic. I haven't heard from him for one day in Turkey and already my mind is cooking up horrible scenarios--they've thrown him in jail on some trumped up charge because they found out he was working with the refugees; he's been beaten up by muggers and is lying in a hospital with no ID; he's been kidnapped. It's ridiculous. I hate these kinds of mothers. I don't want to be one and find myself not only unable to stop feeling like this but find that it is growing in strength. Ugh.8p


----------



## cj

I think your worry is completely justifiable. Turkey is a dangerous place for an American to be right now. I'm glad it ended up being ok though. He sounds like an amazing guy to be  going over there helping people! He gets it from his mom


----------



## sigmond

herbavore said:


> Today I wrote an email to thank a poet who had written these words describing poems he wrote after the death of his mother:
> 
> But each memory is a death in and of itself. A memory, it turns out, is simply a retelling of the last retelling which was a retelling of the last and on and on...we all know how that goes, trained in childhood by the game telephone. You whisper a sentence in someone's ear (in this case, your own) and they in turn whisper what they heard to the next person and by the time it winds its way back to you, it is a new sentence altogether. And so I ask you, boy of my flesh and my imagination, what do I still hold? And what of that is true? Strangely, the most overlooked sense of our five senses is the strongest in the end. I know your scent. It appears not to be a memory but perhaps deeper--a recognition of any mammal of her own offspring.
> 
> When I was house-sitting for Auntie Marla I slept in her room. Across from her bed she has her "ghosts" on a shelf: a picture of our Dad in his signature blue shorts and orange shirt, a painting that someone did of Linda's eyes and her photo of you that she calls, "The little god." Yes, I remember that you and your brother were like little gods set down among us. Your hair in that photo is luminous, so blonde it is almost white. Your eyes are piercing blue, before they mysteriously turned green, and you have the little compressed smile that you so often had, as if you had to hold all that mirth inside and just let a trickle out, for fear of what would happen if that much joy was released at once into the world. And of course there was always the irony in it--as if the absurdity of absolutely everything was already apparent to you at 3. Your chubby hands on the tricycle handlebars are full of purpose. You were always full of purpose. What the photo cannot hold is your voice back then--the clarity and purity of it. Sometimes I wish I had been one of those mothers that obsessively filmed and recorded your every move. I am so hungry for these pathetic representations and the memories they evoke. But then I think, no, they would be like a house full of too much stuff: momentarily satisfying but ultimately empty and burdensome. Because they are not you. I only still and forever want you. Not the memories, not the photos or my own stories, not the shrines or the garden, not anything that I can touch or see or hear now, all the illusions of my own making. I want what cannot be. I want the you that was separate from me.



radiant child. this thread should be a book.


----------



## herbavore

> The Place
> By Paul Zimmer
> 
> Once in your life you pass
> Through a place so pure
> It becomes tainted even
> By your regard, a space
> Of trees and air where
> Dusk comes as perfect ripeness.
> Here the only sounds are
> Sighs of rain and snow,
> Small rustlings of plants
> As they unwrap in twilight.
> This is where you will go
> At last when coldness comes.
> It is something you realize
> When you first see it,
> But instantly forget.
> At the end of your life
> You remember and dwell in
> Its faultless light forever.



This was in my inbox this morning. It made me wonder about your 'place'. At first the river came to mind: green trees reflected on glassy water, everything green, an entire palette of greens from citrine to deepest jade, with only a strip of blue sky up above in between where the trees line the riverbanks. But then I thought, no, surely it was the first wave you ever caught in the cold Pacific. It was the opposite of the river that day, cornflower blue sky, saphire blue ocean, crisp whitecaps, wheat colored sand. I remember watching you paddle out, watching you get smaller and smaller, knowing that I would never be anything other than an observer of your unfolding life. It was hard to hang onto that knowledge and I'm still sorry for the lapses and the hurt they caused. But I like to think of your complete absorption into the vastness of life, your brief experience with the heaven of it all. When you finally came back in, so cold you could not speak through your chattering teeth, you were so full of joy, the joy of _belonging_, that I am still surprised that the ocean could not save you. But the ocean is far wiser than me, having no concept whatsoever of saving. If your soul remembers a body, I picture it remembering itself just slipping inside the curl of a wave, the graceful lean, the grounded feet, outstretched hands touching water on both sides.


----------



## herbavore

Thanks for the dream-visit. Come back soon.


----------



## CFC

herbavore said:


> Thanks for the dream-visit. Come back soon.



I love these - I like spending time with my Dad when he visits


----------



## herbavore

On my birthday, setting the table for four, I shook my head at my error and removed a plate. Set it back in the cupboard with a deep sigh, but no tears. Then I counted out four forks and knives. Laughed at myself; said, "I'm old!" and put the fourth fork and knife back in the drawer. When we were ladling the food onto our plates, I told your brother, "I fell into a time warp and set the table for four. Maybe your brother is here." He said, "I feel him a lot lately Especially up at Scaroni's."

He's been going up to Scaroni's and he said he will always feel like that is your place--the two of you--all the trouble you could have gotten into but didn't, all the adventures and craziness (the statute of limitations for telling mom expired apparently--damn I would have mad at you guys for that!). 

So we wonder, are you here with us? Did you want a place at the table or did you just want to say happy birthday, mom? Or did I just set a table I have set for almost twenty years, rather than the one's I have set since then? Whatever it was, I saved the tears for New Year's Eve and the fire with white sage from your garden and all the greens from Christmas--all the dead and dying things, the beauty withering but more to be released; the smoke like a ghostdancer swirling up to the swollen moon playing hide and seek behind thinning clouds. Tonight, for the true first night of the year, there will be an extreme perigee moon. It is impossible to think about death without thinking about space. Release from the infinitesimal to the infinite. Darkness, unseen realms, a lack of gravity, unseen worlds, emptiness. Lots of ancient cultures tell us that souls exist, that they have issues to work out, they stick around to do so and there are rules to be followed for the living. I get it about the soul. You couldn't _make _me stop believing in that. It's the only thing in the world I have any faith in--the true meaning of faith (belief without any proof whatsoever). The rest of it can lie back down in history as far as I'm concerned. It's a distraction. It can be a way to focus on acceptance as in Day of the Dead but I cannot wrap my head around it literally. I don't have to set the table for you. You were welcomed into my body one cell at a time, my son. My body was your home. And now it is your home again. If I sit at the table you are there. When I cry, it is our tears running down my cheeks. The only difference now is that you are not bound to my body. If you wanted to be dancing with the sage smoke in the air, you could. That makes me happy. Cry-happy. 

I cannot wish you a Happy New Year. Outside of time, outside of all I yet know, what is a year; what is a wish? And though I can read back through this thread and see how many times, how many ways I have asked this one question, I am asking again: where are you? We are inextricable you and I. You are written on my bones as I was written on yours. Your bones are ash and mine have started their slow and graceful descent into a landing I cannot imagine but can feel, almost like a magnetic pull. I have a chorus of dead grandmothers begging me to accept what I was raised with--that you will be waiting with them for me to arrive. I also have a chorus of dead grandfathers saying otherwise. I'll stick to my uncertain middle I guess, it's as much a fact as my nose or the or the crooked little finger that came down from Grandpa Tom. 

Before I go, I wanted to tell you about my birthday, how I woke in almost unbearable joy. How it was tethered to nothing--nothing precipitated it and nothing could undo it. It filled me all day and for two more days it stayed, like a migratory bird stopping in the garden for a few days, then flying on. Did you know that joy can be almost as unbearable as unhappiness? I think you did. I think you got to feel that--that's pretty much as human as it gets. I'm glad for that. I love you. And it's 2018 on earth.


----------



## Captain.Heroin

It's impossible to read words in this thread without feeling undescribably sad.  I'll try again later.


----------



## cj

beautiful


----------



## herbavore

I wish I could believe that you could watch over your big brother. I listen to people that have such deeply held, literal beliefs about existence after death. It makes no sense to me except as a yearning and yet I feel almost a jealousy for those people--like my cousins who lost their son. They believe that he is with them all the time and that he exists in a heaven populated by all the other relatives that have passed on. They believe that dying for them will simply be passing through that same door to a reunion, where everything is perfect and everyone is perfect. I think one cannot wish oneself into belief but how I wish I could.


----------



## JahSEEuS




----------



## Smarting

I?m new here and this is my first post. I am blown away by the mindfulness and grace and love demonstrated by you, Herbavore. Your commitment to Caleb both in life and in death is remarkable. And the continued engagement of this community in uplifting his memory and the spirits of his mother is powerful. I pray that you are able to find contentment and a sense of peace as the days pass, H. Although we are strangers, my heart is with yours as you walk this strange and rambling path


----------



## herbavore

^Thank you so much and welcome to Bluelight. I find contentment and peace more and more, and often, I find it right here on Bluelight. We humans can do terrible things to the world around us, to each other and to ourselves but we can also express a grace of spirit that never ceases to amaze me.


----------



## herbavore

> “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”
> Stephen Hawking



Maybe you can ask him about that.


----------



## herbavore

HYMN TO TIME
    by Ursula K. Le Guin

    Time says “Let there be”
    every moment and instantly
    there is space and the radiance
    of each bright galaxy.

    And eyes beholding radiance.
    And the gnats’ flickering dance.
    And the seas’ expanse.
    And death, and chance.

    Time makes room
    for going and coming home
    and in time’s womb
    begins all ending.

    Time is being and being
    time, it is all one thing,
    the shining, the seeing,
    the dark abounding.


----------



## Xorkoth

I love Ursula K. LeGuin. 

I never knew your son herby, but I know his mother so I'm sure he was great.  I'm continually inspired by your strength.


----------



## Jabberwocky

Wish I been able to meet you.


----------



## herbavore

Seven years. Now your presence is so unbelievably light, your absence still dilating out.


----------



## herbavore

reflections, 7 years.

We are in the "parentheses" days, between the first leaves and the end papers of the book, between your birth-date and your death-date, between the beginning quotation marks and the closing quotation marks, an irregular number of squares on the calendar between May 7 and May 30. Is it rare for people to die in the month they were born? All I know is that these days that open their eyes on May 7 and close them again on May 30th just seem to grow in holiness year by year. I know you would get it. You liked the traditions, the sacred markers along the path of the year. 

Your face is so clear to me right now. I'm looking into your soft green eyes and this is new. I wonder if you could ever know how hard that is to do, to look you fully in your living eyes, 7 years after I closed your lifeless eyes myself. But what a blessing. I did not ever know that a person, least of all me, could ever open this much. That pain reaches a point where it is no longer pain, the heart is no longer breaking open but flowering open. Seeing your face so clearly, living eyes meeting mine has not happened to me before except in dreams. No one can say what time will bring.


----------



## herbavore

So many of your friends are moving away, making these big changes in their lives. You made the biggest change of all. No Portland or South Carolina or France for you.


----------



## Buspersons Holiday

Your words are so beautiful & jolt me into realisation that every harsh word in frustration & intolerance to my man-child is a word wasted

I'm so sorry for your loss & grateful that you can articulate it in ways that have helped so many over the years


----------



## herbavore

When you died your Dad and I each secretly had the same feeling: one of us should go with you. How can you let your youngest child go off into the greatest unknown there is all by himself? When we used to walk as a family in the neighborhood--you, your Dad, your brother and I--we were always herded and held together by our dog Inky. If one of you got fussy or too tired, one of us peeled off for home while the other continued with only one kid in tow. That drove Inky crazy. He would hysterically bark at us and try to herd us back together and it tore him up to have to choose who to go with. So I guess we were like Inky when you died. Of course it was completely irrational, so much so that we never even admitted these feelings to each other until years later when such a thing could be safely revealed without causing alarm. But now your Dad has left the pack and so did Inky long ago. I hope you are all together. It would give me such comfort to believe that but I will have to be satisfied with the comfort I derive from picturing it, belief or no belief.

Your father was beyond all else an honorable man. He was maddeningly OCD, quirky beyond quirky, opinionated as hell and arguing with him could make you empathize greatly with a Palestinian facing an Israeli tank. But underneath that was a man who could come back to an argument in his own head and reconsider and his apologies were always genuine and courageous. He was playful and witty and he wanted nothing more than a simple life: a business he could run on his own terms, kids and animals to love and nurture and plenty of peregrinations into nature. He grieved for you differently than I, but no less. I know that if you and Inky and Grandpa Ray and Grandma Jean and Aunt Laureen were there to guide his spirit then he left this life with as much joy as sorrow. I'll be here for your brother. You take care of your Dad.





http://www.scmemorial.com/obituaries/Brian-Bauldry/#!/Obituary


----------



## cj

so much love for you jan. He must have been a beautiful soul.

Words fail what I want to convey. But you have been in my thoughts and will continue to be.

Much love
Drew


----------



## Larimar

Herb so sorry to read you have now lost your husband ?. I'm glad you have some peace knowing your son is not alone ?


----------



## spacejunk

Love you Herby


----------



## Larimar

Just read the obit ; what a beautifully written life piece . He lived an extraordinary life ?. Best wishes to you Jan . , hope you are doing okay and surrounded by loved ones ?


----------



## Xorkoth

Jan


----------



## Captain.Heroin

That was beautiful and touched my heart Herby.


----------



## Nixiam

Poetic, but such a heart ache 

all of the love herby


----------



## Transcendence

You're frequently in my thoughts Jan


----------



## CFC




----------



## herbavore

I woke up this morning from one of those dreams where we were all still a family. Just going about some mundane business of the day in close proximity to each other, completely clueless that this would not go on forever, casual conversation, little familial irritations floating harmlessly on the deep waters of love . You boys were not little kids but still young enough not to be young men either. The thing is, you are never aware of how devastatingly beautiful a family really is until you are looking back at it. I wish some divine orchestrator was up there after all and that It would look down upon me and say, "What would it hurt to give her at least one of these dreams every single night until she dies?" 

I made a soup for dinner two nights ago and bought a new good bread to try. We looked in the pantry for a bottle of red wine to open to go with it and there was only one. Tyler said, "This is a blend, that means Dad must have bought it 'cause that was his thing, remember? 
Should we drink it or save it for a special occasion because this would be the last bottle of wine we have that he bought?"

And I thought, "What could be more special than this? This sad and beautiful night in which we two sit across from each other over good food, remembering you and your Dad together but each of us also alone, remembering you privately in our own unique griefs. Feeling the lump rising in the throat and swallowing it down, raising the glasses to you and to ourselves and to all the world's sadness."


----------



## herbavore

IMG_7497 by herbavore, on Flickr


----------



## herbavore

Hey, beautiful boy. I trust you and your Dad are loving being part of the great flow. Your brother and I are struggling down here on poor old planet earth but we are holding tight to each other for now. Your brother figured out a 100 mile backpacking trip through the county, which was pretty impressive--you would have liked going along on that. I stayed home and fed the cat and prayed he wouldn't be eaten by a mountain lion. Grandma is turning 90 and just took on yet another volunteer job, also impressive; she still picks up every penny she sees on the street and says, "Thank you, Caleb."--her private ritual. As for me I guess its somewhat impressive that I still cry from being overwhelmed by beauty and moments of joy as well as from sadness. I miss your Dad so much. I miss you. I miss the family of four, the perfect symmetry of it, what we each brought to the whole. I've been hanging out with the big trees a lot. Sometimes sapiens are too much to bear without a little support from the elders.


----------



## herbavore

Another year has passed and this year you would turn 29 if you were here. Hard to imagine that you did not get to experience your twenties at all, though I can't say the decade brought much to inspire hopefulness. The world is suffering. It makes my own grief feel small. 

The neighborhood has exploded with crows over the last two years; thousands of them fill the skies. The songbirds are barely holding on. I read somewhere that there are now 10 humans for each crow but they are catching up, both of us overpopulating together. I miss birdsong. I miss you.


----------



## neversickanymore

^

*NSFW*:


----------



## Asclepius

^ Lovely Tribute 

Herb


----------



## Hylight




----------



## Xorkoth

Herby  ❤


----------



## Captain.Heroin

herbavore said:


> Another year has passed and this year you would turn 29 if you were here. Hard to imagine that you did not get to experience your twenties at all, though I can't say the decade brought much to inspire hopefulness. The world is suffering. It makes my own grief feel small.
> 
> The neighborhood has exploded with crows over the last two years; thousands of them fill the skies. The songbirds are barely holding on. I read somewhere that there are now 10 humans for each crow but they are catching up, both of us overpopulating together. I miss birdsong. I miss you.


I love you herby. The world indeed seems to be grieving and full of losses. I lost 6 loved ones this last year. 

It is so tragic to think about so much of life he missed out on. I know many of us go on and will never forget his awesome presence with the time we knew him. He would have been a great young man.


----------



## cj

When i was young i thought 20 was old. Now at 31 I look at 20 year olds as babies.

You still inspire me Herby


----------



## herbavore

I


I took this one week before Santa Cruz enacted the lockdown for COVID-19. I was with your brother. We felt like we were in a dreamscape, too beautiful to be believed. 

 At your memorial we read the poem Kindness aloud. I thought that I would never understand that poem more deeply than I did the night I found your body. I chose the poem for two reasons: first, to honor your innate kindness but secondly because this one line articulated a grief so vast that the only way through it was to acknowledge that it was inseparable from the grief and suffering of all beings and to dedicate my remaining life to that knowledge. "You must speak to { sorrow} till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows _and you see the size of the cloth_."
But that line keeps coming back to haunt me, humble me anew. We see the size of the cloth. Standing alone in our gardens or inside our homes looking out the window, we see the size of the cloth.


----------



## herbavore

You barely come in dreams anymore. How can this be? Maybe because I'm getting old and my brain is on the downhill slide. Already I find myself unable to think of a very common word from time to time. But when you are in a dream now you are always about 10 or 11. There's a mystery.
Grief doesn't stab me the way it used to. Instead it simply resides in me like a very still pool. When i disturb it, like right now writing these words, the tears are right there but it is a melancholy and not an agony.

I'm on a forum for people that have lost children and my heart breaks anew each time a parent writes their first post, knowing the minutes and hours and weeks and years of pain still ahead--how they don't even realize it yet but Absence has just stepped into their lives forever. At first, the presence of their living child is all-consuming but slowly and agonizingly, as I have written about on this thread, even that is dragged away and Absence itself becomes a presence. You can hate it and rail against it or you can cherish it and carry it with you as long as you live. I don't think I chose the latter; rather, it chose me.

I will say this: scent-memory is still strong. I guess it must be the animal part of mothering. I can still conjure your scent as a baby, as a kid, as a teen and young man.
I so wish that I could sit across a table from you and hold your hands in mine while we talked. You could tell me about what became of you once you left your body behind and I could tell you all my petty news from earthly life. Still plugging away down here, hands in the earth, terrified of what's going on one minute and soaking as much as I can up gratefully the next. I've already gotten 3+ times as many years as you got and it still feels short. "Love you, like you, best pal", Smokey.
                                                                                                                                                                                         mom


----------



## mokele

Not so big Cap. I can read from a mile away. 
Never seen a post from him but we all have a date with destiny. Maybe a good place to say we should all stick more together as a community as we are a ostracized (sp. )
Bunch and bicker a bit less as we are more or less in same boat.


----------



## herbavore

I'm doing a brutal cleaning.

I always dated the time in this house by your age, born exactly one month after we moved in, so by now that is 30 years. Thirty years and four family members worth of stuff. Stuff from your father's childhood, stuff from my own which includes stuff from my grandmother's childhood and my Dad's and then you two boys. A house stuffed with stuff and all of it laden with so many emotions. Mementos from travels and treasured gifts from friends, old love letters, backpacks and toy trains. Your first sets of clothes. All the artwork from you two as preschoolers and all your writing from your very first attempts at writing your own names to school reports and stories, your old toys, your Easter baskets, Dad's artwork after the war, camping gear. I am going through all of it and trying to loosen its hold on my heart.

Reading your early little-boy writing and seeing your old paintings has been particularly dense with emotion. I photographed it and then out to recycling went a whole box of papers and even the paintings. Whenever I would start to lose my resolve to keep going I would remind myself that I no longer have you in my life but you are still in my heart. I will never forget your stories, never forget the paintings of what your little-boy heart loved.

I am standing right at the border of old age; I am starting to count as many dear ones gone as still living. I don't want to walk into this last landscape laden down with stuff; I want to walk in freely swinging my arms and kicking my feet up, with my heart full to bursting with all love I have received in this life. Thank you for your great big deep love. Thank you for giving me the way you saw the world. No stuff in this world could ever come close to that in the hierarchy of treasures.





Bun-Bun and Pele the cat by Caleb, age 4.


----------



## RedRum OG

herbavore said:


> I'm doing a brutal cleaning.
> 
> I always dated the time in this house by your age, born exactly one month after we moved in, so by now that is 30 years. Thirty years and four family members worth of stuff. Stuff from your father's childhood, stuff from my own which includes stuff from my grandmother's childhood and my Dad's and then you two boys. A house stuffed with stuff and all of it laden with so many emotions. Mementos from travels and treasured gifts from friends, old love letters, backpacks and toy trains. Your first sets of clothes. All the artwork from you two as preschoolers and all your writing from your very first attempts at writing your own names to school reports and stories, your old toys, your Easter baskets, Dad's artwork after the war, camping gear. I am going through all of it and trying to loosen its hold on my heart.
> 
> Reading your early little-boy writing and seeing your old paintings has been particularly dense with emotion. I photographed it and then out to recycling went a whole box of papers and even the paintings. Whenever I would start to lose my resolve to keep going I would remind myself that I no longer have you in my life but you are still in my heart. I will never forget your stories, never forget the paintings of what your little-boy heart loved.
> 
> I am standing right at the border of old age; I am starting to count as many dear ones gone as still living. I don't want to walk into this last landscape laden down with stuff; I want to walk in freely swinging my arms and kicking my feet up, with my heart full to bursting with all love I have received in this life. Thank you for your great big deep love. Thank you for giving me the way you saw the world. No stuff in this world could ever come close to that in the hierarchy of treasures.
> 
> If i ever figure out how to post a photo here now I will post one of your old paintings.


There are few things in life harder than clearing out mementos from someone special who died. Good luck.


----------



## herbavore

Thanks, OG. Hard but also freeing. We fight acceptance at every turn but when we finally let it in there is a peace there.


----------



## herbavore

Hey, little buddy. I had a nice dream visit from your Dad the other night. You were there around the edges; seeming happy and content but kind of hanging back so Brian and I could have space. Your Dad and I knew--in that dream way of unspoken knowing--that we were in two different worlds and we were just kind of musing and marveling at that when he started asking questions about what it is like living through all this ( climate collapse, the fires, cultural implosion, political meltdown, pandemic) and it felt so strange  (and impossible!) to try to explain it all. We ended up just looking at each other smiling and letting the words fade away. It was as if we were acknowledging that we were simply no longer on the same plane at all and there was no way to bridge that gap but also no need to try. I was really happy that you were there and that you seemed so at peace. So often I dream of you as a little kid or a middle-school age and it was nice to see you just the age you were when you left with that great little quiet smile of yours.


----------



## herbavore

Twenty  years, ten years ago.
Why do these numbers mean anything? Hours and days and weeks and months and years roll by like a river, continuous, all of one piece, a life. We impose measures on a life. We divide it into infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, but in the end, it’s like trying to divide water. 

I subtract the number of years you have been gone and I am left with exactly half your life. Ten. Ten years after you were ten, you were gone. I don’t know how to begin to even think about that except that the even-ness of those numbers is a stark and startling equation. 

To me you are a shooting star. I can still remember the first time I saw a shooting star when I was a kid. It was probably at the farm in South Dakota or at Spirit Lake because I remember how black the night-sky was and how the stars were so thick they looked like snowflakes in a blizzard. It felt like everyone around me was shouting, “ There’s one!”;  and even though I had missed it, I would pretend to see it because they were so excited and I wanted to be included. And then I saw one! The sky was saturated with stars, glittering, magical, profound. But seeing that one star blazing at lightening speed across the sky made me feel so privileged, so blessed to have caught sight of it. That is how I see your life and that is how I see your presence in my life. You blazed through faster than any of us could follow, fueled by all your fires: deep love, outright rage, terror and courage beyond comprehension. I think your fire is still burning somewhere—not in any way I can understand or even envision; but I feel that is true.

I think you learned a lot while you were here, but it beat you up a lot, that learning. In your honor I’m still struggling to learn and it can be pretty rough on me, too. But you taught me a lot about courage and about fear— mostly that they exist in equal measure in a person. Those who do not struggle with their own minds  will know neither that level of terror, nor the level of courage it takes to live with it. Walking up to the edge of living over and over, jumping alone into black water, night after black night, must have been your way of trying to stare that terror down. I hope all that courage you developed while you were here just continues to grow and carry you along, and that the fears all fell away lightly, like leaves letting go of a branch.

 I’ve no doubt that your Dad’s love is flowing right along with you. A love that fierce would never be contained by one brief human lifetime. At thirteen you said that your soul had a home somewhere, but not here. I argued that you had only seen a fraction of “here”, that there was no way for you to judge from a place of such limited knowledge what the earth and life had to offer your soul. That exchange between us has come back to me so many times over these past ten years. In the beginning I used to feel so much pain, so much regret about those prescient words of yours and my self-sure response. Now, I think, “Look who has seen only a fraction and look who has seen infinity?” The irony of it always recalls a particular smile of yours.

No matter what words I have said, or words I have written, trying to tell you my thoughts during these ten years, it always comes back to “ I miss you”. I just stack these other words up and load them on the little burrow of my heart as we trudge along behind you. I’ve got your amazing brother beside me, the earth keeps astounding me with her beauty, there is still so much to laugh at, so much to cry for, so much to wonder about, so much to learn. I am telling you this because I want you to know that the days that hold my pain of missing you, pain that can still shatter my heart over and over again, are still days that I treasure; and that treasuring puts my shattered heart back together every single time it breaks. I know that my waters and your brother’s waters are both flowing to the river you and Dad are already in, the one you saw so early on, the one you couldn’t wait to dive into. I’m taking my time, guided by the forces of the stars, the wind, the tides but also by the little cottontail skittering frantically back into the underbrush on the path in front of me, fast as shooting star. “Lucky”, I think to myself, “So lucky to see that.”


----------



## Cosmic Charlie




----------



## SpaceWanderer

Shooting star is a good image. 
Do you find that your son's generation and younger are more likely to feel this world isn’t their home?  
My intuition is they (anybody born after 1960 or so) are treated very differently and end up feeling unwelcome in this world compared to older generations. 
I speak for myself. I felt I didn't belong here by age 13 as well. By then I had a death wish. Understatement. 
Of course I had seen only a tiny silver of the world at 13, but decades later I am even more certain of how awfully right I was by that age. 
Any child can go online, watch tv, or read it at the library and quickly become aware of the condition of the environment, jobs, the socioeconomic divide, politics, culture, even architecture  (urban blight/suburban sprawl/post-modernist abominations that plague cityscapes worldwide--a matter of opinion I know ) and the fact that people cannot disagree with one another on the slightest of political issues without fighting.
Any child can look at the expression on most adults faces and see something reminescent of that painting by Edvard Munch. Especially now with the world’s bizarre reaction to covid. 

My generation has better access to information.  Those born after Nixon at a young age figured out that neither the government nor adults in general could be trusted very far. Whether we read about it or some how sensed it in the culture, we know something has gone horribly wrong. 
To back this up, look at the collapsing birth rate in all countries with relatively high levels of education. Nobody has enough confidence in the world to bring a new life into it.
I speak for myself, but I wonder how common it is to have these perceptions starting at a young age.


----------



## herbavore

Hi Space Wanderer. I think your question has a lot of merit, and yes, I do believe that each successive generation is being born into a much more fraught existence.Having come of age myself in the age of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, not to mention the early prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky (who wrote the report delivered to President Johnson in 1965). When they delivered that report I was twelve so obviously I was not aware of warnings to a president, but there was already the sense that humans had irrevocably fouled our own, and every other living creature's, nest. Nuclear war and nuclear annihilation were both my childhood nightmares and waking fear. Because of that and because of the government corruption and lies that led to the war in Viet Nam, I became an activist at an early age. Everything from environmental degradation to imperialism, racism, colonialism and war is embedded in capitalism, but it is important to go even further back in our human history to understand the real roots. Long before the development of any political system at all we humans began to lose perspective on our interconnectedness in nature. Perhaps it was when we developed tools to hunt with and became predators of animals we had been the prey of. Perhaps it was simply when our social groups got too large and we began to vie for hunting territory. Whatever the origins for our species, we have been paying for that loss of perspective ever since.

Now here we are in the 6th Great Extinction, with more countries at war than ever before, not to mention the endless wars (on drugs, on terror, on the poor, on black people). We face as well the threat of runaway technology and further distance ourselves from other people as well as our own selves through social media, targeted advertising and a life lived through publicly posted images at crucial ages of psychological development. Ironically it was my son that used to encourage me to step back and see this miserable state of affairs from a more geologic perspective. As Craig Child's wrote in Apocalyptic Earth, "Someday we, along with all of our plastic ,will be a thin ribbon of grey in the earth's mantle." With this in mind, I double down on what I can do while I am here: strengthen the bonds with people around me, enjoy fully the best of humanity--the music we make, the humor we create, the poetry we write, the bonds we can and do make with other species. But most of all I get out in nature and that is what I think I meant when I was speaking to my son about his despair so many years ago.

I live in one of the wintering stops for the migrating monarch butterflies as they move from Canada to Mexico. When I first moved here they were in the tens of thousands and now there are several hundred. The monarchs will not survive and that is a fact. But they grace my garden with their magic and I greet them with both joy and sorrow. That is the task facing every single human being alive today--how to hold the despair that is an inevitable part of being awake and the joy that is the privilege we still have to appreciate what is good around us. Recently I read that a brand new fungus (meaning previously unseen in that part of the world) has been quietly getting to work underground where the  fires ravaged over 25 million acres in Australia. I like to think of that fungus as the earth's  T-cells fighting the human virus.

And finally, I want to say to you that I am thankful  for you for taking the time to converse and for being the same kind of sensitive, intelligent and perceptive human being my own son was. All we can do is to make the small piece of life around us more kind, more supportive of those we share this time and place with. I am glad you are alive and if there is ever anything that I, as an old, pessimistic, often despairing cynic, yet strangely and against all odds frequently happy person can do to help you out, please do not hesitate to call on me.


----------



## herbavore

*The Second Music*
by Annie Lighthart

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it

touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,

the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,

becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.

I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.


----------



## herbavore

Today would have been your 31st year--definitely a man, the boy left far behind.
 Everything has changed so much. It's only me and your little cat now and she is starting to wind down. Hard to believe you were only 15 when you insisted we add her to the feline herd. When I think of how different this house felt when we were a noisy family with dogs and cats and rabbits, the doors always hanging open and you boys and your friends crowding into the kitchen I can hardly believe it is the same structure. Now it stays clean and it is so, so quiet.

A year after you died, when I thought the grief would rip me apart and I fled to South America to cry for four months, I never could have imagined where I would be today. I needed to be away from your Dad, away from your brother and all of our friends and neighbors; I needed the space to understand the scope of my own despair and desolation, to come to terms with how to manage it, how to go back to them. Now your brother is far away, your Dad is gone, your friends have grown up and gone on with their lives and I have all the time and space a mortal life can hold.

  So this is what I want to tell you: memories lose their shape, fade, bleed into each other and become not memories but mockeries of memories. That sounds horrible and brutal because it is. And it only continues, never stops. But here is the beautiful part-- and I think what it must be is the shadow of the thing you have already experienced in totality, it is a blessed letting go of every single solitary thing except what is eternal and _that_ is the presence of love. I can no longer recall your laugh (though I am still hanging on to your smile), I cannot conjure your scent or the sound of your voice (unless reminded by vivid dreams) but I feel my heart aching and rejoicing and dying and being unimaginably alive every time I think of you. In other words, I experience a little tiny glimmer of what you must surely have felt as every single cell in your earthly body shut down and you became your magnificent soul unhindered by human cares . So this is what I have to grow old with and it is both very lonely and very lovely at the same time.

Please surround your big brother with healing light so that he may be safe and find all the love he so deserves.


----------



## n3ophy7e

herbavore said:


> Today would have been your 31st year--definitely a man, the boy left far behind.
> Everything has changed so much. It's only me and your little cat now and she is starting to wind down. Hard to believe you were only 15 when you insisted we add her to the feline herd. When I think of how different this house felt when we were a noisy family with dogs and cats and rabbits, the doors always hanging open and you boys and your friends crowding into the kitchen I can hardly believe it is the same structure. Now it stays clean and it is so, so quiet.
> 
> A year after you died, when I thought the grief would rip me apart and I fled to South America to cry for four months, I never could have imagined where I would be today. I needed to be away from your Dad, away from your brother and all of our friends and neighbors; I needed the space to understand the scope of my own despair and desolation, to come to terms with how to manage it, how to go back to them. Now your brother is far away, your Dad is gone, your friends have grown up and gone on with their lives and I have all the time and space a mortal life can hold.
> 
> So this is what I want to tell you: memories lose their shape, fade, bleed into each other and become not memories but mockeries of memories. That sounds horrible and brutal because it is. And it only continues, never stops. But here is the beautiful part-- and I think what it must be is the shadow of the thing you have already experienced in totality, it is a blessed letting go of every single solitary thing except what is eternal and _that_ is the presence of love. I can no longer recall your laugh (though I am still hanging on to your smile), I cannot conjure your scent or the sound of your voice (unless reminded by vivid dreams) but I feel my heart aching and rejoicing and dying and being unimaginably alive every time I think of you. In other words, I experience a little tiny glimmer of what you must surely have felt as every single cell in your earthly body shut down and you became your magnificent soul unhindered by . So this is what I have to grow old with and it is both very lonely and very lovely at the same time.
> 
> Please surround your big brother with healing light so that he may be safe and find all the love he so deserves.


Absolutely beautiful as always, my love. Solemn, but beautiful. Thinking of you and sending you all my love  

Happy 31st birthday Caleb, wherever you may be, keep watching over your amazing mother


----------



## badfish45

herbavore said:


> Today would have been your 31st year--definitely a man, the boy left far behind.
> Everything has changed so much. It's only me and your little cat now and she is starting to wind down. Hard to believe you were only 15 when you insisted we add her to the feline herd. When I think of how different this house felt when we were a noisy family with dogs and cats and rabbits, the doors always hanging open and you boys and your friends crowding into the kitchen I can hardly believe it is the same structure. Now it stays clean and it is so, so quiet.
> 
> A year after you died, when I thought the grief would rip me apart and I fled to South America to cry for four months, I never could have imagined where I would be today. I needed to be away from your Dad, away from your brother and all of our friends and neighbors; I needed the space to understand the scope of my own despair and desolation, to come to terms with how to manage it, how to go back to them. Now your brother is far away, your Dad is gone, your friends have grown up and gone on with their lives and I have all the time and space a mortal life can hold.
> 
> So this is what I want to tell you: memories lose their shape, fade, bleed into each other and become not memories but mockeries of memories. That sounds horrible and brutal because it is. And it only continues, never stops. But here is the beautiful part-- and I think what it must be is the shadow of the thing you have already experienced in totality, it is a blessed letting go of every single solitary thing except what is eternal and _that_ is the presence of love. I can no longer recall your laugh (though I am still hanging on to your smile), I cannot conjure your scent or the sound of your voice (unless reminded by vivid dreams) but I feel my heart aching and rejoicing and dying and being unimaginably alive every time I think of you. In other words, I experience a little tiny glimmer of what you must surely have felt as every single cell in your earthly body shut down and you became your magnificent soul unhindered by human cares . So this is what I have to grow old with and it is both very lonely and very lovely at the same time.
> 
> Please surround your big brother with healing light so that he may be safe and find all the love he so deserves.


Lovely ❤


----------

