Out of Step: A Diary To My Dead Son

By Suellen Zima

He had been too dead for 8 years! Was there any way to repair their damaged relationship now? His mother desperately wanted to try. She began to write a diary to her dead son. Slowly, subtly, things began to change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626755260

Suellen Zima

Suellen Zima emigrated to Israel in 1983 at the age of 40. A fascinating visit to China in 1988 set her on a nomadic path, teaching in other parts of Asia and returning often to a constantly changing China. She now lives in southern California. Visit http://www.ZimaTravels.com and Follow the Senior Hummingbird as she wanders, wonders, and writes.

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9781626755260

May 15, 2011

You’ve been dead for eight years. Being with you has ended; the need for being with you hasn’t. Is it possible to repair our damaged relationship?

You died so early – too early to experience more of the vast variety that life offers, too early for us to know one another as grown-ups, too early for us to truly forgive one another, too early for our relationship as mother and son to heal enough.

I’m not writing to you now to soften my grief at your death. The eight years since your death so close to your 35th birthday have done that. Why do I feel the urge to write to you at all? Perhaps the recent Mother’s Day holiday reminded me that I missed both of your calls on the last Mother’s Day you were alive. Perhaps I am writing you to assuage my lingering guilt for having abandoned you when you were twelve.

You never forgave me for breaking up our family. Two of your accusations have stuck with me all these years – You shouldn’t have adopted me if you were going to get divorced. When I said anywhere I was could be home, you replied quickly and angrily, California is home and you left California. For so many years, I felt you had abandoned me because you chose to stay with your dad in California.

But re-hashing the hard times of our relationship when you refused to have contact with me is not why I’m writing to you now. I’m grateful that you initiated contact when you knew you were dying. I saw a movie tonight that was soupy, romantic, and sentimental, but I liked the premise that there are MAYBE levels of consciousness that can reach beyond alive and dead. Besides, for those years I lived on the other side of the world from you, our communication was by letter.

Since you are dead, we can’t hurt each other anymore. Of course, nor can we express our caring and love in any meaningful way. Yet, I loved the movie Atonement because the writer’s premise was that she could atone for her bad deed by writing a story with a different ending than the real one. Similarly, perhaps I can atone for not having stayed by your side all through your growing up years by establishing a new kind of relationship now. I just need to enter a state of suspended disbelief to reach you.

It would, of course, be easier if I believed in parapsychology, astrology, theology. But I don’t. So, I am writing to you as just me, not your birth mother, but the only mother you really knew.

May 16, 2011

There is a new movie out called Poetry in which the main character, Yun Jung-hee, copes with a difficult life by writing poetry. Can poetry, or writing in general, help one cope with difficulties? The answer of poets, writers, and artists would resoundingly say yes. If that’s so, then what can my writing to you accomplish? Can it bring me comfort that you spent so many years rejecting me? Can it lessen my guilt for destroying our family? Can it help me get to know you better in death than I did in life? Can it help me get to know myself better? I don’t know. I’m just responding to an urge.

I never regretted choosing to be a mother by adoption. However unhappy your life was as my son, your prospects for a happy life were slim to none before we adopted you. Being your mother meant more to me than creating another life. I still sometimes think of your biological mother and I’m glad she only has her imagination to fill in the long gap of your life. I assume she still thinks of you, marks your birthday, and wonders about your life. It’s doubtful that she thinks of you as ashes on my closet shelf.

Being your mother was a great joy in my life, but it wasn’t enough to sustain me when the restlessness inside me took over. People who believe that the bond between a real mother and child is much stronger than one by adoption think our linkage was fragile at best. But I believe I would have become bored with my life as it was regardless of how I became a mother. Nor would a different child have held me in that life any longer.

Although a psychologist friend of mine is positive that homosexuality is always a result of nurture rather than nature, I believe that being gay was who you were and you couldn’t have changed that. What drove me out of my cozy marriage and motherhood was not biological like your gayness most likely was, but something I could not have denied indefinitely. We each became what we needed to become. But the wife and mother I was was NOT the mother and wife I had envisioned being. Therein will forever lie within me guilt and disappointment.

That said, I loved the life I made for myself after the divorce. I had intended for you to come with me for at least the rest of your childhood years, but you chose to stay with stability, reliability, and financial comfort – in other words, your dad. It was a good choice, and I eventually came to understand your needs more than my own. You did not abandon me as I believed for years. Your choice to remain with your dad also gave me more freedom to explore all those unopened rooms inside me. Perhaps your choice was the best one for both of us.

If I had had a crystal ball to tell me you would grow to shut me out of your life totally and then die before your 35th birthday, would I have stuck it out another ten years to wait until you were an adult? I can only surmise no, because I truly don’t believe that my having stayed another ten years would have substantially changed your life. Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe I’m trying to make my decision to leave more palatable to me. But what’s very clear is that the best years of my life could never have been the same if I’d waited another ten years.

May 18, 2011

A belch is most likely never pleasant to have or to hear, but it makes me think sadly of you. I’ve been unsuccessfully fighting a strange (bacterial??) gastro-intestinal problem for a few weeks now. Belching is a part of my symptoms. Each time I belch, I have an uncomfortable memory of the last time you visited me. It was still a year before you died, but you were very ill indeed. You couldn’t eat a meal without belching loudly and repeatedly. My belching is nowhere as loud or persistent, but it makes me remember how you suffered.

I have always been medication-phobic. Apparently, you never were. I heard you took many over-the-counter drugs when you were a teenager. That’s why your dad took the car away from you. And, from that horrible night I spent in the emergency room with you at the hospital near my home, I know you took other recreational drugs. You were on many drugs then, but not recreational ones. When a young man was brought into the ER for overdosing on some drug he mixed with alcohol, I remember your weak voice saying, He is an idiot. I’d never even heard of that drug, but you knew about it.

At some points before you re-connected to me, you stopped taking your drugs to control your HIV infection because of the very uncomfortable side effects. After your HIV became AIDS, you took more drugs than I can even imagine. I shuddered when you said you were taking 40 pills a day during the time you visited me. I, who have such a difficult time even letting one antibiotic pill cross my lips into my mouth and down my throat, could not even think about 40 pills a day. You were a guinea pig, and most of the drugs you took did you more harm than good. No Magic Johnson miracles for you!

I didn’t know you well as an adult. Perhaps I never knew you well. But, concerning putting drugs into our bodies, we were worlds apart.

May 24, 2011

I didn’t know you were artistic until after you were dead. Although I knew from your childhood that you had a very active, almost tenacious imagination, you hid your artistic side from me along with many other parts of you. When I went to the apartment you never invited me to before your death, I was able to see your creative side in the clever decorations made from street trash, and the series of carefully arranged vignettes throughout your apartment.

Through your dad, I had continued to send you letters for the years you refused to give me your address. I wasn’t at all sure you had read those letters until, there on your desk waiting for me to find them, were the last few years of letters I’d written to you – envelopes opened.

Many items had been taken off the neighborhood Castro Street corners and re-worked into unusual home furnishings. On one bathroom wall was a collection of doorknobs. An old style school desk, popular during my early childhood rather than yours, graced one corner.

There in your kitchen, perfectly placed, was the small wooden bottle with a tiny tweezers attached that you had seen in my home when you visited that year before you died. I flashed back to that night when the ambulance took you away to a different hospital that could handle your condition better than our local hospital. As they wheeled you into the ambulance, you felt it was important to tell me how much you wanted that small memento from our trip to Egypt.

I found some old photos in your room that I couldn’t quite make out until I remembered a job you had being a window dresser. Perhaps you didn’t want me to know about the artistic side to you because you hated my artist boyfriend you mistakenly blamed for causing the divorce.

But, if I didn’t get to know the creative side of you, you also never got to see my creativity. Would you have appreciated it? I can only have questions that will forever remain unanswered. Although I wish you had read the book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, I wrote a couple of years after your death about my almost two decades traveling the world, I suspect you would hate it because I chose that life over the life I had with you and your dad. But I’m very proud of that book – not only the writing of it, which won a First Place in Non-fiction award and got me into the National League of American Pen Women, but because of all the amazing experiences I had to write about.

Would you read my blog now if you could? Would you care? Would you want to take home the little ceramics pieces I am learning to make?

Whatever creativity we shared, it could not have been through blood. In fact, we shared so little – mostly only 10 years of your childhood and my growing restlessness.

May 27, 2011

How you loved living near Castro Street in San Francisco! As I walked around the busy streets that weekend your dad and I went up to clean out your apartment, I could see why you loved living there. Even though I had visited you when you lived in a gay area of Los Angeles, even I could feel the difference in the attractive, bustling gay world of Castro Street.

I saw it again tonight watching the movie, Milk. The library in our retirement community is a good place to find old films that somehow escaped my view over the last years. I only vaguely remembered the story of Harvey Milk because most of the drama occurred while I was self-absorbed in my own drama of the divorce. And, how could I watch it without thinking of you, knowing now that your gay lifestyle would kill you in your prime?

There were many signs when you were a child that you might grow up gay. In answer to my question of whether it would be difficult for the foster mother to lose you, the social worker commented that she was anxious to find an adoptive home for you because your foster mother so obviously preferred baby girls. And a foster baby girl had come into the home about the same time as you did. If the main caretaker of the first 15 months of your life made it so obvious to a social worker who visited at the most monthly that she preferred baby girls, how obvious must it have been to your infant brain that little girls were better than baby boys.

As an educated upper class mother who did not want to put stereotypes into your head, I did not get overly worried when my mother-in-law put a skirt on you because she loved to see you twirling around in it. After that, you always wanted to play dress up with a swirly skirt. I was not successful when I suggested you turn it into a Superman cape. And then you loved long hair more than your curly hair when you ripped out the hair of your Raggedy Andy doll to look more like Raggedy Ann.

When I studied for my Master’s in Social Work degree years later, I could see that you fit other characteristics of toddlers who are going to be gay. You were quite beautiful with big eyes and long lashes. You had such an active and persistent imagination that the doctor suggested limiting input rather than expanding stimulation.

As a young child, you ran funny, and never liked rough housing with other boys or playing team sports. You always had both girl and boy friends and never went through the 10 year old girl-hating stage. But you were tall and strong, well coordinated, and incredibly balanced, especially when you took up competitive ice skating. Although boys didn’t usually get into competitive figure skating until their teen years, you spent hours on the ice with mostly pre-pubescent girls who tend to skate seriously earlier.

I used to think I was the baby girl was what you told me when I reminded you of a poster of a black baby girl and a white baby boy that used to hang in your bedroom as a child. The pieces really started coming together when your father wrote me while I was living in Israel that there were a couple of young adult men who were paying a lot of attention to you. About the time one wanted to take you on a trip