11:23pm November 22, 2014

Dear Ron,

My back aches, my stomach aches, my butt aches, my head aches, and most of all my heart aches. But I didn’t write to you just so you could listen to me bellyaching from wherever you are beyond the grave.

I can’t find you. Or rather, I couldn’t find you. I looked everywhere, and you were gone. Just gone. As if you’d never been. I looked into the past, and I could see you there, but from your death on out, you’re gone, and you’re gone so thoroughly that I’m both saddened and gladdened by it. Sad because I can’t talk to you anymore. Glad because I know you took the right road after death. I know you went straight into Love, like we talked about so many times before.

Fey has been chasing gum wrappers around my new apartment. I wish you could see my new apartment. Maybe you can. I don’t know how things work on the other side. Right now she’s resting at my feet, somewhat perturbed by something I’m unaware of.

But I couldn’t find you. And I couldn’t find you. And I couldn’t find you. And then I read what Anna wrote about you existing in her heart. I know it’s a cliché but it’s true You do exist in my heart and always will in the hearts of everyone who has ever loved you. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Real love.

But for the child of a dead person, it’s even more than existing in my heart. You exist in the very shape that my body takes. You exist in the genetics, both ‘good’ and 'bad’, that you have passed on to me. You still remain one of the very few people who shares my repertoire of body language

There was a time when I shot a series of photographs of myself at different levels of that stupid 1-10 pain scale that doctors throw at you when they want an exact measure of how much it hurts. I was bound and determined to learn what I looked like at different levels, and pass that knowledge on to others. So I took picture after picture of myself at 6, 7, 8, and 9. I unfortunately had access to 9 beause of a badly-placed feeding tube. Other autistic people often were able to distinguish my pain levels pretty easily, even though doctors and nurses who claim to be well-trained in these things have claimed I was not in as much pain as I said I was in. Autistic people, hearing that, were infuriated, because they could see so clearly see unmistakable signs of pain in my face and eyes.

(I just fell asleep. Fey was chasing gum wrappers around the house again, and now she is traipsing around the bed looking uncomfortable about something. I did intend to fall asleep while writing. Writing myself to sleep is one of the ways that I manage to sleep at all, even after taking my more sleep-inducing meds.)

So anyway then you got cancer. And I started Skyping with you more. Back then were your better days when you could get up and walk around, and you could talk without tremendous effort. And you were lucid except for that one lapse when you didn’t know where you were and forgot you had cancer, forgot you’d been hospitalized for it once, etc. But for the most part those were your good days.

So on your “good” days, I saw you stand up and walk. And the effect was instantaneous and cutting and cruel: I could see exactly how much pain you were in, because your body shows pain the same way mine does. That worried me, because as you know we’re both on the autistic spectrum, and people don’t tend to take the pain of people on the spectrum seriously. They tend to underestimate it in us. Sometimes we learn to underestimate it in ourselves. But because it shows on our body differently, even if we are aware of every inch of it, people aren’t likely to understand or notice that we are in pain. I am glad you died without pain.

When I remembered that I found you mirrored in my responses to pain, I realized I had some things backwards. I kept thinking of things about you that reminded me of me. That was kind of self-centered. The reality is that these are things about me that should remind people of you. They came, through you, to me.

Here are some of them:

* Our unibrows
* Our hairiness
* Our small chins
* Our tendency to have a double chin even when thin
* Our cheekbones
* The general shape of our faces
* My hair that is almost as black as yours was when you were young
* Our overall body shape
* Our disproportionately big bellies
* Our disproportionately small hands and feet
* Our short arms
* Our short stubby fingers and toes
* Our mannerisms
* Our default facial expressions
* Our need for solitude, but intense love and compassion for people
* Our love of nature bordering on worship
* The way we both 'think like technicians’ as you put it.
* Our autism, and to some extent our particular variety of autism.
* The way we both rock without even realizing it, and if one of us is rocking, the other unconsciously picks it up.
* The way our lips unconsciously move in unison with words we are hearing, in silent echolalia.
* Our posture
* Our love of animals
* Our strong preference for rural living, despite having done a lot of urban and suburban living in our lives by necessity
* Our choices in clothing (in my case, one of my three or four main choices in clothing style): Jeans or overalls, Dad-shirts, suspenders or belts with nature scenes on the buckles, and, especially if something is Serious Business (like an important meeting), the wide-brimmed Dad-hat with feathers in it – the hat shows it’s important.
* Our tendency to not always say the right words, but to do the right things anyway.
* Our socially-conservative/tradtiionalist streak that surprises people given our politically liberal, progrsesive, or socialist streak (and in my case, a seeming but not actual contradiction between that conservative streak and aspects of my identity)
* What one woman described as “this big burly man with so much compassion in his eyes for a helpless baby squirrel” – which includes our disregard for gender roles
* Our tendency to prefer older technology over newer technology
* Our tendency to prefer fixing things over buying new one
* Your love of radio, my love of the Internet, different generations, same geekiness
* Our sensory sensitivities and tendency to overload and shut down
* Chain reaction meltdowns, need I say more?
* A fiery temper that first you learned to control, then taught me to control mine
* Being good with our hands
* Being better at actions than words, even though we’re both more than capable writers
* Being hard for strangers to get to know
* Our tendency to just know things, without knowing how we know them or why we know them or how it’s even possible that we know them
* Our bluntness
* Our seeming rude to people who don’t know us well
* Our nervous laughter
* Our tics and stims
* Our preference for things to be quiet, orderly, and routine

I could fill pages with the things that live on inside of me, that I got from you. Some of it i got genetically, some of it I learned from you, but whichever it is, it lives on in me. You used to call me a chip off the old blockhead. You’d address letters to Chip, and sign them The Old Blockhead. But the reality, especially after reading your memoirs I have come to understand, is that Shane, Jeremy, and I are all chips off the old blockhead, we’re just chips off of different parts of the old blockhead.

It’s similar to Anne’s cats. She has three cats she trapped when they were feral kittens, one of whom the mother gave up voluntarily (I’ve told you that story before, I won’t repeat it again here, but it was amazing). The mother is Coal. The kittens, now grown cats, are Coraline, Brodie, and Shadow. I know her cats pretty well through her pictures, videos, and video chats we’ve done (Shadow likes to chat with me – and only me). I especially know the way each of them has particular personality traits and the way they move shows those traits. I saw a 30-second video of Coal, and in those 30 seconds, I could see the mannerisms and talents and personality traits of each of her three kittens. I was impressed.

You are like Coal that way. Even if Coal dies, she will live on in her kittens. And she’s had a lot of kittens, because she refuses to get trapped and spayed. She knows what a trap is, and the only time she ever went into one was to lead Shadow in so Anne could take him home to his littermates.

I feel I am lucky that I got so much from you and from Anna. People always firmly tell me that I resemble one of you or the other, but not the other one. And it’s funny because it’s like they are only looking at one set of traits, because if they were objective about it they would see that I am a part of both of you. But I do think I get more of my overall body type from you.

They say that the dead live on in our hearts, but I feel like you live on in more than my heart. It’s not just love that you live on in – though you now live in all Love, everywhere. It’s also my personality, my body, my very physicality that you live on in. And that makes me feel so solid and real and grounded that I love you even more.

My mom read you three of my tanka poems at your burial.

Spectrolite Eulogy

spectrolite looks brown
but shines rainbow colors when
the light hits it right.

you were plain brown rock with
hidden colors no one saw.

Goodbye Father

I dropped a rock
into the world’s deepest lake
turned and walked away

until I dropped that rock
never had I said goodbye

Love and the Ocean

just one drop of rain
fell into the wide ocean
dissolved into the sea

Ron dissolved into Love
where Love is, so too is Ron

The one that hit me the hardest, writing it, was Goodbye Father. Because that’s exactly what it felt like: Dropping a rock into a bottomless lake and then walking away, never to return. I wrote you a goodbye letter, and sent it to my mother telling her to read it to you. I knew I would never see you again. I knew I would never talk to you on Skype again.

Anna said that when she read it to you, your eyes popped open and you tried to smile, the most response she’d gotten out of you all day long. That made my day and broke my heart at the same time. It reminded me too much of Kathy Mattea’s “Where’ve You Been?” which was based on something that happened between real people. Do you remember how I used to cry every time that came on the radio? And then try not to look like I was crying?

Anyway, sending that latter felt so final. It felt like the kind of thing you can only do once, you don’t get a second chance, so you have to say things right. I think I said things right, to get the response I did.

I’m glad you got to die with Anna holding your hand and guiding you through the whole process. I’m glad you got to die at home. I’m glad you got to pick out that pine box as your coffin. I’m glad you got to pick your burial site. So many things could have gone wrong with your death, but considering it was a death, it went pretty well, I think. I hope you think so to

I love you. I miss you.

Love, Mel