

### Our Dark Knight

### Bissera Kostova

Copyright 2012 Bissera Kostova

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by Andre Istria

Photograph of Yassen Andreev 2010 copyright Gair Wissenbach

### For Yassen

"... remember this, that man can part with no life properly, save with that little part of life, which he now lives: and that which he lives, is no other, than that which at every instance he parts with. That then which is of the longest duration, and that which is of the shortest, come both to one effect." ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all who encouraged me to write this book. You know who you are.

" _Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."_

" _The hardest part about being Batman is waking up every day and BEING Batman."_

The hardest thing about being Batman's mother is surviving him.

The call came on a Friday evening, late. Late enough that my husband felt justified at yelling at the unknown caller. Granted he didn't need a reason to yell at what he thought was a telemarketer, but it took him an unreasonably long time to take in what the man was saying: "It's about Yassen..." From then on it was a very short instance before I heard him wailing "oh, no..." and I knew, even before I picked up the extension and listened for a while before entering the conversation. Just before that I picked up a paper towel and wiped a spot on the kitchen floor, where dust and a few hairs normally gather. Yes, this was after I knew, or thought I knew. I did it on purpose, I think, to remember this moment by its absurdity. Or maybe it was a precious moment of delay before I would know for certain. Or because it was just as good a thing to do as any. And not because that's where I would momentarily slump, listening into the receiver before I spoke up. Then the man repeated himself, explaining he was from the coroner's office. He went on explaining things slowly, like how he tried to find out my number from Facebook, but it wasn't there, then he had to find the directory listing, which is why his call was coming so late. I interrupted him to say this all didn't matter. He agreed. He was obviously stalling, waiting for us to gather our wits and I called him on it. He admitted he hated this part of his job. Our son had been dead since late morning probably, found in the afternoon of that day, last seen alive in the early morning hours by his roommates, last spoken to by me the previous afternoon. Died in his sleep. Cause yet to be determined.

I should also mention that our house phone line was of terrible quality and it took all my attention to write down through the crackling what the man was patiently dictating – namely, where and when the body could be picked up after the autopsy – Alameda county coroner's office. He spelled out the county. I needed that. And he made sure I understood it would cost money. He also made it sound like he would be there to meet us, but that wasn't the case – they didn't even need us to identify the body – it was all handled through the funeral home, which we set out to find the next morning.

For a long time I had imagined just such a call. What I couldn't imagine is what came next. In my imagination I would just black out and die right after. But of course, you can't do that after a death. Even if you're suicidal, you'd have to put it off. There's just too much to do after a death.

Not right away though. At first there is nothing to do. I tried to hug my husband, who sobbed briefly, but he was wrapped up in his own pain and didn't respond. Then he smashed a glass into the floor. Typical. It was a favorite – a deep blue one. Now there is only one left of the set. I went to my room and tried with all my will to keep breathing. Breathing is automatic, but it doesn't feel like it when you have such a heavy weight pressing on your chest and your stomach feels like you swallowed a rock. There was no wailing on my part, no fainting. I was fully conscious and I tried to understand what was happening, but it was too enormous. My brain would rebel and for moments at a time throughout the night I would forget and be startled anew by the pain when it hit me over and over again. After his initial shock my husband tried to comfort me and insisted we lie down together, even though we normally sleep in separate rooms. I tried but I could breathe even less in his presence so I sneaked back into my room, where the pain in my stomach only let me sleep in fits and starts. It was a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. It was a brand new world. A world where your worst nightmare is the reality and sleep the only escape, if you can get it.

Before that I called my brother. I had to tell someone. It felt suffocating to think that no one knew and everybody thought the world was still the same. I had to share the awful secret. He wailed, too. It would be one of many conversations over the next few days, where I would end up helplessly waiting on the person at the other end, who was silenced by the enormity of the task of comforting me to whom the worst has happened. To this day I feel people inspecting me – this specimen to whom the worst has happened and yet she still walks and talks and goes about life, even though the worst has happened. How does she do it? Before I went back to work, my kind and well-meaning boss called to ask me if I was sure I could do that so soon, and to ask how people should approach me. "I'm still the same person," I told him, taken aback that I should require special handling. I am and I'm not. Though my worst nightmare is now a reality, I've lived with the nightmare since the day he was born. Nothing is wrong now that wasn't wrong before in my mind. Now it's just my life. And yes, I'm basically the same person – I relate to people in the same way, I joke and even laugh. But a part of me has died. The part that believed that my worst fear could never come true, because I loved him so much and that should have been enough to prevent this happening. That naïve part of me is dead. One of my comforts is that my son will never know this. Yes, he might have suspected it, but he will never KNOW it, because he didn't know he was dying. You see, it was an accident. So said the coroner's report. But that came weeks later. First job was to retrieve the remains. From the other side of the country.

### *******

Next morning I spoke to his roommate, who found him. He didn't tell me anything new. He started saying what a wonderful person my son was. "Stop, please stop," I said. Soon I would need to hear this, but right then I couldn't bear it.

In the morning I also sent a message to his friend, who was supposed to meet him in five days in Detroit. I didn't know him personally, but I identified myself as Yassen's mom and he called me right away. There was noise in the background and he made me repeat what I said. He sounded almost angry when he understood. The trip to Detroit was supposed to be a new beginning. They were going to build a gym together. He had a business plan. Yassen had sent it to me a few weeks before and I had praised it. The trip was to scope out the area and 'grease palms.' Yassen told me this in humorous disbelief – he wasn't sure himself what it meant, but he was enthusiastic about the trip. Even though he hated flying. So much so that only ten weeks before that he had taken a train to California. For three days. The last conversation we had, on Thursday just before five o'clock – I was in the pantry at work and remember it was almost time to go home – was about the trip and how much money he would need me to send him. We had just had a fight over money three weeks before and I was trying to keep the conversation casual and business-like. There was still tension over the fight. I was hurt over it. I wanted to break out of the coolness and say as we often used to end our conversations in the past: "Love you." I didn't like to say it every time, because it would lose meaning if it was said by rote. But I wanted to say it then. And I didn't.

That reminds me of a period Yassen had as a child, when he would exhibit something like obsessive compulsive disorder. One of its manifestations was that we had to say to one another before he went to sleep "see you in the morning." Except sometimes we would have to say it multiple times and I would get impatient. I remember one time in particular – Yassen's father had gone home to bury his own father, who died suddenly of a massive coronary and I was sleeping on the unused bottom bunk of Yassen's bed rather than in my own, because we were in the middle of painting the other room – when this exchange went on for too long and I finally refused to say it back. And he just went quiet. And I felt so bad that I had let him down. And I wanted to say it then, but I couldn't. Or thought I couldn't. My regrets are all ones of omission.

### *******

When you lose a child your whole life becomes the province of regret. You start thinking back to what you could have done differently, and of course, it's everything. "Maybe I didn't hold you enough as a baby," I said to him fairly recently. I often think that. I was so determined to do things right, despite being only twenty and still in college, that I think I went overboard in letting him self-soothe, or in other words, cry himself to sleep. I was going by an old copy of Dr. Spock that my parents had bought when I was little. I hear he modified that advice later. What I really was afraid of was that I would treat him as a doll. Because all I wanted to do was hold him, I was afraid I would 'spoil' him. What an idiot. Unfortunately, this attitude would persist in other ways. Because I was afraid to let him go as he grew up, I would close my eyes and do it anyway.

Parental regret is something Joan Didion talks about in her memoir about her daughter's death, which I started reading when I decided to write this. I wanted to make sure I know how it's done, because I haven't read non-fiction much at all. I never saw the point of it. I always thought that I would write a novel, but I just didn't have the imagination for it. I found when I tried that I just wanted to write obsessively about love and loss, and what had happened to me quite literally. And that doesn't make for very good fiction. But now love and loss are the only things I have. This is what I was meant to write. I would never have thought before to write about him. I expected him to do that himself. In fact, one of the reasons I gave myself a pass on becoming a writer is because I expected him to be a better one. Because to the aptitude for words I had, he added the courage to live. He had many fears, but he never allowed himself to live by fear. He was Batman.

### *******

Why Batman? There are stacks and stacks of comics under my bed now, which he left behind before he moved to California. In our last fight, the one about money, I asked him accusingly how he could spend 60 dollars a week at the comic books store, when he was supposed to be on a budget. He answered: _"Sometimes I buy lots of comic books because they let me feel like a little kid for a few hours."_ So he must have felt good as a kid? Can I cling to that certainty?

Now that his life is complete, he lives on in my mind in all of his various stages. As a parent you're constantly missing your child's previous versions – the baby, the toddler, the child, the awkward, but sweet adolescent – who continually get swallowed up by the adult he never quite becomes in your eyes. I remember a line from an Updike novel I read in my teens, which said that children grow up disappointingly to be just other people. Perhaps, but I never got there. Or maybe Updike was just full of it. Although I rephrased that in our last fight, telling him that parents are just other people – that he expected entirely too much of me. Yes, to my shame, I abdicated my power. If only I had lived up to his trust in me. I, who had lived only for the purpose of smoothing his way, of making it alright for him, this life, which was so lacking in every way. He blamed me in that last fight for bringing him into this world. And I couldn't argue with that. I felt my dismal failure, since I couldn't change the world to make it a more welcoming place for him, to make him better equipped to face it.

That fight was not unique, but it did go deeper than any before, and I'd never felt such powerlessness. I didn't even feel outraged at his groundless accusations that I had never done anything for him but throw money at him. I was just so hurt that he didn't see that his pain was my pain. It was also unusual in that he apologized right afterwards, in depth and in writing: " _I'm sorry if the things I said hurt you, I didn't mean them to be hurtful I'm just having a really hard time right now and I feel really alone and I'm overtrained and I have a fever and I'm just tired and kind of frightened. You are a good mommy and I wouldn't trade you for anything, I love you very much and do find your achievements very inspirational I only wish I knew how you did it._ "

### *******

For weeks before I got the coroner's report I wondered, was his death on purpose? Even though there was no note, no evidence of that, I thought that he would be that clever, to make it look like an accident. I even read a setup into the preparations for his trip. That he involved me in them, so I would think he didn't mean to die. Or maybe he didn't mean to, but he felt he would? What was the meaning of that apology? Did it mean that he saw the error of blaming anyone else for his failings? Was that too much for him to take? Is that what killed him?

The word premonition has come to my mind many times since his death. In things he wrote, even a song he recorded, Crow Jane, death figures prominently. About a year before he died he sent me a song called Born on a Train, whose lyrics include the lines "I've been making promises I know I'll never keep. One of these days I'm gonna leave you in your sleep." I asked him if he was trying to tell me something. He just wrote " _Yeah. It's an awesome song. No like?_ " But the apology was different – it was like he didn't want to leave me thinking he really meant those hurtful things he said. I just texted him: "I love you more than anything." I wish I had said more, but any doubts I had expressed before about my parenting had been dismissed by him. Once when I said I didn't know where I'd gone astray in raising him he responded: _"You see the problem here, that gone astray bit. As if there are ways that people are supposed to live their lives._ " He said that when I talked like that it made him feel like he's damaged goods. He emphasized that he believed that you can't control what happens to you but you can control how you react to it. He had assured me before that the things he did wrong in his adolescence were things he wanted to do. He wanted to be bad, as he put it once. But in that last fight, the most heartbreaking thing he said when I told him that he had always asked me to trust him and I did, to that he responded – " _I was a child!_ "

### *******

Was he ever a child? Maybe that was my mistake – that I didn't feel like he was one. I hadn't really known other children, so I just took it in stride when he started speaking before he was a year and a half old. That was ironic, because I think my mother was slightly worried since I'm not a big talker, and I took care of him almost exclusively in his early years, that he wouldn't learn how to speak. But I did talk to him, and not in baby talk. I also started reading to him before he was a year old. So he started speaking like an adult, with proper grammar and an impressive vocabulary. That I did right.

A friend recently reminded me that during a party we were having at home, when it was time for him to go to bed, I still went and read to him. Those are some of my fondest memories. I would read him Winnie-the-Pooh, or Just So stories and he would laugh so hard – as we say in Bulgarian, he would be flooded by laughter – that he would inevitably start hiccupping. One of his favorites was a funny scene in Neverending Story, with some characters called the wailers – I'm not sure about that, I'm translating from the Bulgarian again. 'Wail' was part of his vocabulary before age two. I also took him to see the movie at that time, even though the minimum age was 3 to enter the theater, but nobody suspected he was less. He sat on my lap and at a particularly noisy scene with a giant turtle, he whispered in my ear: _"Mommy, I'm so afraid."_ No screaming, or crying, just that whisper.

He didn't have much interaction with other kids, except briefly on the playground, and he was an only child and grandchild, so he spent most of his time among adults, and felt as if he was our equal.

I have a recording of him on tape from before he was two and his precision with words and the logical connections he makes are just amazing. For example, he didn't know the name for swimmer, and he started saying he's swimming, so he's a pilot (the words sound similar in Bulgarian). When I told him that pilots swim only if things go wrong, he took that in stride and said he's a sailor and he has a boat. When his father asked him to sing him a song, he said in somewhat of a grammatical feat in Bulgarian – you sing it to me.

When he turned two, at his birthday party I overheard a group of older kids, who had just met him, challenge him by asking him what grade he's in. He had never heard of grades, or school, but he would never admit defeat and after he thought for a moment he said: "second," I assume because he knew he was turning two. They were like, get out of here, but the fact that they would even ask him that spoke volumes – they just couldn't accept him as a baby of two. He wore glasses at the time – antique little round glasses that his father had swiped from wardrobe on a movie set – and they made him look disconcertingly mature, like a little professor. I had also dressed him up in a quaint set of finds from the communist era stores – a plaid shirt with a hard collar, a V-neck gray sweater, pleated navy pants and leather loafers with tassels. There are no photos of that birthday, but I remember all this very clearly. There are very few things in my life I can say that about. Many friends have brought up his preternatural maturity and eloquence at that age. He was memorable.

### *******

In the days after he died I found out that he remained so to those who knew him. The number of messages and Facebook posts that spoke of his unique qualities took me by surprise. For a long time we had lived apart and even before that he had kept his friends away from us. I never knew they felt that way about him. I don't think it was just eulogizing and it helped me enormously to think that despite the path he took in life, which often left him lonely, he had touched so many people and according to them inspired and changed them. This all started after I posted on his Facebook page, because I realized that word had gotten out after I spoke to his friend in Philadelphia.

But before that I had a few more phone calls to make. One was to my boss – I had to tell him I wouldn't be coming back to work soon. I wasn't able to speak to anyone remotely sympathetic without crying, but I managed to get through that phone call and to convey enough factual information that I later saw he relayed to all my colleagues. Died in his sleep, suspected sports injury, going to California. He said "take all the time you need."

Trying to be efficient I also called to cancel Yassen's ticket to Detroit. That phone call didn't go so well, as when the woman on the line started explaining that the ticket was not refundable, but could be reused, I had to tell her there was no one to use it. She did not take that in stride. I realized I was in no shape to be talking to people casually and I was sorry I made that phone call. The airline did issue a refund, however, and I added that money to a donation I made later on to the future gym project that Yassen was to have been part of.

Other people I spoke to were not as sensitive as the travel agent, however, and even bordered on the callous. I had to call back the coroner's office and several funeral homes before we settled on one. Before that I researched what to ask for. 'Direct cremation' it's called. It means there is no ceremony, just getting the body and incinerating it. I didn't for a moment think of doing anything else, like transporting the corpse anywhere. Just the thought of his six-foot-six body squeezed into a box on a plane was unfathomable. Plus he hated flying.

### *******

But we still had to fly over there. It took me several tries at the computer that day, staring at dates and prices that swam before my eyes making me give up in despair, but I finally booked a flight, hotel and car rental that seemed to make sense. It turned out it was pointless to leave the same or even the next day as the autopsy would only take place on Monday, so I booked the flight for Tuesday. I also found out from one of the callous people at the coroner's office (and they weren't all like that) that we couldn't see the body there, since he was already identified (how, by who?). So I had to arrange a viewing at the funeral home, just for us, because I needed to see him. What if it wasn't him? That was a thought that still wouldn't die. I told his roommate after I saw him that I was hoping till then it was all a big mistake. "So was I," he said softly.

After I made those arrangements I felt a little more like I had a handle on things. There were still terrible things we would have to go through, but at least there was a plan. Then I could think of calling some friends, those I needed for comfort. By this time I could speak without crying and was even so in control that when I got my friend on the phone and she seemed to be outside and rushing, I asked her to call me back, instead of telling her right then.

Although food was impossible, as my stomach was still in a state of revolt and hunger would not be something I would feel for days or even weeks, I tried to drink water, but it never seemed enough. I lost about ten pounds from my already spare frame, before I rebounded about a month later. This is a common symptom of grief. But in me it was compounded by a general lack of appetite or concern about food. Whenever I'm stressed, or traveling, I can easily go for a day without thinking of food. Hunger to me is never an absolute.

In all this time I was yet to cry real wet tears. Tears are a luxury, I would find out. A luxury I couldn't afford in those first few days. They would come eventually. They would come most readily when I started writing about him, or reading the tributes to him, or his own words later on. They would come unbidden, when I was in the subway, or on the street, especially when I was listening to music. He's 'a tear that hangs inside my soul forever,' I would quote from the Jeff Buckley song. That's what it feels like – there is always a tear ready to roll with no warning, and another to replace it. Grief is forever.

A few friends came over the next day, bringing food. It was a relief to realize that some parts of life could go on as usual. Nobody was wailing. We were all calm about it. I started thinking and talking about holding a memorial. His friends were already asking about it. I decided to have it on his birthday, almost 3 weeks away. That seemed doable. We walked around vaguely looking for suitable places in the neighborhood, without much luck. I asked my friend to research it while we were away.

### *******

And so we went, my husband and I, to retrieve the remains of our only child from Berkeley, California. The man from the coroner's office had asked me if we intended to travel there. What else were we supposed to do? Our only child – dead. Would we not come to get him?

This was not the first time we had gone rushing to him in response to a phone call. Five years earlier we got a call from his college roommate at that time saying he had been taken to the emergency room, because of an overdose with a prescription medication. He had walked in and found him slumped on the living room floor as he was playing video games. He was already turning blue. He summoned help from a neighbor, who called 911, and Yassen was revived. The culprit was a pain relief patch he had somehow obtained and used. I looked it up later – he gave me the wrapper along with the record of the emergency room visit. Fentanyl – it's something prescribed to cancer patients if the morphine is not enough to manage their pain. It was also, in gas form, the cause of death of those people in the Moscow theatre a few years back. It stopped them from breathing. "Why did you do that?" I asked when I was finally at his side. He told me he had a headache. That summer he had broken his foot. His heel, to be precise – the thickest bone in the body. It happened after a good friend of his died of a heroin overdose. He went to another friend's house and got drunk and told me he slipped down the carpeted inner stairs of the brownstone. I never doubted the story. But then a few months back, I got one of those many messages from people I don't know telling me how much they admired him and the person mentioned that he met him after that summer when Yassen jumped out of a window and broke his leg. He was exaggerating, I wanted to assure this person, it was only a slip down the stairs. But then it turned out this happened in the Brooklyn home of his roommate from Berkeley and he told me Yassen had locked himself in the bathroom and jumped out the third-story window, luckily falling to an attached structure, so only one flight. Batman, indeed.

That summer he spent nearly two months on crutches. He was home from college and he went to the gym every day from our fourth floor walk-up. He was determined to turn himself around. But then he went back to college. I had arranged for him to go to physical therapy there, but later found out he never did. How he started walking by himself, I don't know. He was wearing one of those thick strappy black boots for a while, but then just started doing without it. He must have been treating the pain with whatever he could find, leading to that infamous patch. He told me a few years later that the guy who had sold it to him was dead. That night when we drove to Philadelphia he had already been released from the hospital and was back at his apartment. While his father was in the next room with the roommate and the neighbor, I talked to Yassen. He was remorseful. He knew what he had done to us. He showed me he was wearing a white gold cross I gave him for his birthday that year, with "LOVE, MOM" engraved on the back. I had wanted the Love to go down the cross and the Mom to intersect it at the O, but they told me it's not possible. Therefore, the comma. Yassen said it had saved his life and he would always wear it.

### *******

When we were retrieving his effects from the coroner's office in downtown Oakland I looked for the cross, but it was not among them. He was not wearing it. I'm not superstitious, but in those early days when I was still waiting for an answer to the cause of death, I wondered if that was significant. Did he take it off on purpose? Because he was breaking the promise? Later on, his roommate found it in his room, hanging next to his gym schedule. He was doing martial arts, it was logical that he wouldn't want it around his neck at those times, but why didn't he put it back on that night? It's there in all the photos of him in those last weeks and there are many. That's another thing I wonder about – why did he take so many photos of himself? Did he know? He had finally achieved the physique he had always strived for. To a naturally slender small-boned body, through enormous effort, he had added the muscles of a body-builder, though still without the mass. At six-foot six-inches, he weighed 161 pounds when he died. When we were saying goodbye at the funeral home to the empathetic woman who handled our 'case,' she mentioned that it was surprising that such a tall person's ashes would fit in one box. Then she took my wrist and said he was small-boned like me. I said that his hands and feet were small for his height, as well. She said yes, she had touched his feet when she was preparing him. I wondered then if I was supposed to tip her – I didn't realize that she had been involved in preparing the body – but it felt awkward. She was really nice and kept us there talking. I had forgotten to research the issue of tipping on the Internet. Later I did, but came up with no conclusive answer.

They had done a good job. It was hard to fit him into the box, she said, because it was half an inch short, but they managed. His legs were slightly bent at the knees. We didn't want embalming, but they had done everything else, even though I told them nobody else would see him. He looked like he was asleep. Only his lids were sewn down and his lips were glued. I brushed away some lint from his face before I knelt down to kiss his forehead. "I'm sorry, baby," I choked out. I touched his hands. They were cool, but not ice cold. They looked the same as always, some nicks on them. His hands were narrow and like his feet, too small for his frame. I noticed that he had been losing hair. His forehead was shiny and smooth – makeup, no doubt – and not as it was in life, usually furrowed. His body looked stuffed. I knew they had taken all his organs out. Later, I would read in the autopsy report how much each one weighed. His heart was 350 grams. I looked it up – it exceeded the normal range. He was not normal. He had a big heart to pump blood through his long body. We didn't linger there with the body. I was glad that no one else would see him like this. It wasn't him. I mean, it was his body – I wanted to see that, but he was not there. He was still around, I felt, but not there.

They say in our tradition that the spirit stays around for forty days. It must be a psychological delusion, a coping mechanism, but I felt that. I felt like he was in me. I did things in those days that didn't feel like me. I felt directed by someone else. I wouldn't have had the strength to do them, or the urge. I planned the memorial for over a hundred people. I wrote and read a speech about him; I reached out to his friends – the friends I never knew before. I got a tattoo. A Batman tattoo. I hate tattoos, but it came to me as an imperative. It was the same tattoo he had, on his left triceps. I got it on my right wrist. The permanence didn't faze me. The permanence is what I wanted. I wanted him to mark me.

When I started sleeping through the night I didn't dream about him. The one dream I had about him in those first few days came later. I was walking along a cliff, holding his hand. Earlier in the dream, which had other parts of the frustrating, even comical variety, he was a child, but now he was grown. This part of the dream was distinguished by calmness. Yes, it was dangerous walking along the ravine, but we were not afraid. We didn't speak. When we stopped I turned my head, which was realistically at the level of his shoulder. I pressed my lips to his shoulder. That was it. That was goodbye.

### *******

We arrived in Oakland Tuesday night. The flight was excruciatingly long. In those first days I couldn't read, I couldn't find any distraction. At the car rental office I was so tired that I not only let them talk me into an upgrade we didn't need, but I also unwittingly bought a full tank of gas in order to avoid refueling, which we would return nearly untouched. With the help or impediment of a GPS we made our way to the motel in Berkeley. We were dead tired and slept, but awoke predictably on Eastern Time, too early to do anything. We went out walking. The mornings there are cool and crisp. Yassen had complained since he moved there that every day was the same day. Cool in the morning, sunny during the day. No rain.

I had been to the town once before briefly and remembered the row of ethnic restaurants. We found a Vietnamese one for lunch. The previous foodless day had finally triggered my hunger mechanism, which had been absent for four days. After we saw the body later that day we went to the house where he had lived for the past 3 months. His roommates were expecting us. On the way there, on a narrow street, we hit a parked car and blew out the rental car's right-side rear-view mirror. We stopped and I picked it up and managed to insert it back in.

The house was a small one in the back garden of another house. Yassen's room was on the ground floor. It was a mess, much like any room he'd ever inhabited. We looked briefly through his possessions. He had arrived only with one rucksack and had acquired mainly books and comic books. I took his laptop, which was turned on and open to his Facebook. Later I would see in the messages that someone saw he was online after he died and was asking who was there. That would have been someone from the coroner's office, looking for my phone, to inform me. I made sure the chat was turned off, so I wouldn't prompt the same kind of inquiries. I didn't know his password, so I kept the laptop on until I could change the password. I could do that, because his email was open on his cellphone. Soon I had access to all his accounts that I knew of. So much for online security. When I did turn off his laptop, after making sure I had inspected all the contents, I found it was password-protected. I guessed the password. Besides his computer I took several books, his iPod and a t-shirt that he had bought recently and his roommate said he was fond of. It spells out LOVE with guns. He wanted to be a soldier. I keep the shirt, unwashed, in a box with a lock of blond hair from his first haircut, his first poems and some drawings and the recording of his voice at age 21 months. That recording ends with the plea from him: _"I want a gun, mommy, a tiny little gun."_ His father took a few more shirts. I looked at his shoes, but didn't take them. They looked new. Fancy low-profile running shoes. Nike. The goddess of victory that he had carved on his chest: _"A goddess lives here. Her name is Victory"_ – right across his breastbone. His roommates offered to clean up the room and I gratefully accepted. I was barely standing on my feet at this point. Their dog, which Yassen had become close to and had photographed in his last days, jumped at my thigh and nearly toppled me. I wanted to talk with them, but it would have to wait for another day.

We then went to the marina, as they had recommended. We could see Golden Gate bridge over the sparkling water. It was too beautiful. The beauty weighed on us. My husband reluctantly took the camera I had brought (with which I had surreptitiously taken a few shots of the body when I was alone with it) and started shooting. There were some burrowing, squirrel-like creatures, but with less fluffy tails. He became transfixed by one of them, which was staring back. He told me he thought it inhabited Yassen's spirit. Like I said – forty days. Or as Freud calls it 'hallucinatory wishful psychosis.'

### *******

After we saw the body they sent it out of town for the cremation. It would take more than a full day. We had a day to kill. I wanted to go to Big Sur, which Yassen had said is the most beautiful place he had ever seen, but the drive was too long and my husband was not up to it. After the incident with the mirror I agreed. I gave up driving years ago. I was grateful that he was there to do it. How would I have managed in California if I were alone, I wondered. I finally learned to drive when I was 36, but I hated it. It didn't seem logical to be sitting and moving through space. I had to think which was the gas, and which the brake. Every time. I would space out on the road, forget to pay attention. I had some close calls on the highway. One of them was when I picked up Yassen with all his stuff after his first year of college. He fell asleep in the front seat. I was so tired from driving and loading the car – nothing was packed when I arrived – that I changed lanes without looking over my shoulder. There was a car in my blind spot that just managed to change lanes to avoid me. It never got better. Each time would be like the first time. So when we got a new, bigger car I never tried it again.

I was never afraid of cars before we had to drive once through the mountains in Bulgaria when I was pregnant. We were staying at a resort on the sea coast, but my husband had to go back to reshoot some scenes in a movie. My brother was driving, since he was the only one of us who had a license. We drove at night and the road was bad. There was nothing standing between us and a steep cliff. That's the first time I realized my life was fragile – when I had him inside me. Yassen was like me. Maybe that fear seeped into him. He never got his license.

He told me he had finally scheduled his driving test on what turned out to be the day he died. His roommate said he had urged him to practice with his car, but Yassen would dismiss him. Was he afraid of the exam? Was that part of the causality chain? There was also a weird incident that night. Yassen saw someone in the abandoned lot next door and they called the police. Nothing came of it, but Yassen didn't go to bed until dawn. He was still up in the early hours playing video games when one of his roommates went to the kitchen for something.

### *******

He had suffered from insomnia since his teens. Until he was 11 we lived in a one-bedroom apartment and our beds were within hearing distance. That year we moved into a duplex, where my brother occupied the first floor and we had the bigger, parlor floor which had an open plan, so essentially Yassen would fall asleep to the sound of the TV on the other side of a glass door. I don't think we even closed the glass door – it was too heavy to slide smoothly on the rails. Then, after a year, my brother moved out and we had the place to ourselves. Yassen moved down to the first floor. I don't know if he resisted this, but I know that he was afraid to be on his own. The room where he slept was divided off from a bigger room and had no window, so it was completely dark when you turned out the light. The previous occupants had glued glow in the dark stars above the bed – it was a little boy's room. I don't know if these gave him much comfort, but after he moved downstairs I lost track of how late he went to bed and he stayed up late most nights. I had never had my own room growing up, except for a brief period when I was sixteen. This would have been a dream setup for me, but for a coddled only child like Yassen maybe it was too severe a break. I had an argument with my mother about that after she came to visit and I almost sent her an email – but thankfully didn't – that I would have regretted forever, because it turned out she was dying of cancer at the time. She said the room was too dark. Even the one with windows, because the windows were at ground level and didn't let in much light, and he kept the shutters drawn anyway, even though I had made some translucent curtains that would screen him from view of the passers-by on the street. There was no other possible solution to our living arrangement, since the living room was upstairs and you had to go through our bedroom to reach it (or his bedroom if we had switched). As it was, he had two rooms to himself. But I got angry about my mother's comment, as I did whenever my parents questioned my parental decisions, because I had felt neglected when I was growing up and I thought my son had it so much better. But now I wonder if the isolation did not trigger his other problems. If we had been more in his face, maybe he wouldn't have gotten himself in so much trouble.

So that day, the day we had to kill, we went across the bay to San Francisco. I had been there 7 years earlier with my brother and sister-in-law. I had liked it then. We went to the beach first thing, so my husband could see the Pacific. It was a foggy, cold morning. He continued taking pictures, including some of me. I look unrecognizable in them. My face looks like a death mask. He also took some of the ubiquitous black birds. I identified with them. I put one as my profile picture on Facebook. It said it all. Then we walked in the park by the river, but the fog was so heavy that we couldn't see the Golden Gate Bridge at all. The path there goes along the edge of a steep cliff (the cliff from my dream?) There were many warnings not to approach the edge, because people had fallen to their death there. Those amused me. Death didn't frighten me anymore. Death was something I longed for. In fact, nothing frightened me anymore. The worst had happened. I had been scared of it since he was born. No, since before he was born, in that night mountain car ride, when I realized my life mattered. Now it didn't anymore.

### *******

When Yassen was born we lived with my parents-in-law on the 12th floor of a high-rise. I had always had a mild fear of heights and never liked looking down from the balcony, which just happened to be in a sort of niche of the building and looked straight down on some cement tiles. Further on there were grass and trees, but I figured if you fell you would end up on the tiles. I heard someone had fallen there, or jumped – a girl, I believe. But worse than that, I heard of a family – acquaintances of my parents whose toddler had fallen to his death this way. When Yassen was a baby I was plagued by nightmares of him falling from a height. I would wake up paralyzed by a pain gripping my torso and limbs. The dream continued even after we moved, and Yassen was no longer a baby. It was not specific to that building. Sometimes it would be at my parents' place which is only on the third floor. That would still be fatal to a baby. But while we lived on the 12th floor, I would sometimes leave him for a nap on the balcony in his carriage. Fresh air was all the rage for babies then. He must have been about 3 months old one time when I realized the weather had changed and it was too cold for him to be out. I rushed back to the room, just as he had woken up and was trying to raise himself up. It was winter, so he can't have been able to sit yet up yet (he was born in October), but he was mobile enough to at least turn and perch on his elbows. The carriage was at least two feet from the edge, but I was horrified that I hadn't thought of strapping him down and never again left him out to nap. But that was not the beginning of my nightmares, I'm sure. And neither did they go away as he grew up.

Another story I heard from an acquaintance that has taken hold in my nightmare life was of a man who was fixing the antenna on the balcony when he slipped. His elderly parents were there and managed to catch him by the hands, but he was heavy and they couldn't pull him up. After waiting futilely for help they finally had to say goodbye and let go of him. These are the kinds of stories that live in my mind.

Last year, because of other stress I was going through, but also because of worries over Yassen, I started waking up in the middle of the night. I would wake up with the same kind of pain gripping my stomach and traveling up to my chest and even arms. I wish I could say this has stopped now, since I have no fear, but the fact is that in my sleep I don't always know that I needn't fear for him anymore. Maybe it's not even related to fear anymore – just the horror of my life, because it happens every time I wake up now.

### *******

After we left the park by the Golden Gate Bridge, we drove to Chinatown. As we were looking for parking, my phone rang. It was our landlord. I had left a note along with the check for next month's rent to let him know where we were and why. But since the rent wasn't due yet he hadn't opened it and he started telling me that he would need access to the apartment and asking if we'd be home. I stopped him and told him that we're in San Francisco, because our son had died. There was no easy way to say it, but I had to, since he hadn't read the note. He was shocked and barely uttered 'you poor woman' before he hung up almost immediately. That was the mercy of phone calls, that you could hang up.

The next day when we were in Oakland to pick up his effects from the coroner's office I decided to go in to the gym, where he went, to cancel his membership and maybe speak to his coach. It was a Crossfit gym. That was his big passion. The coach's motto on his card that they gave me at the desk when I asked for him was 'it hasn't killed me yet.' But he wasn't there at the time. I told the guy at the desk, a real mellow California type, what I wanted, my face contorted with impending tears. He asked me to fill out a card, but told me not to worry about filling out the reason for canceling. To their credit, I never got another charge from them, whereas the martial arts gym, where I didn't have a chance to go, kept charging me for months even after I cancelled our joint account.

After having some greasy Chinese food in San Francisco we tried to get back to the park to see the bridge, since the fog had lifted, but the GPS got us lost and we gave up and drove back over the bay to Berkeley.

### *******

Next day was picking up the ashes. The nice woman at the funeral home met us and sat us down again to talk us through this phase. She opened the box and showed us the ashes – white, not darkish as I had expected, a little gritty. The box, surprisingly small, looked like something you would keep photos in. It had a window for a photo on top and she had put one that she had asked me to send her. I thought at the time that this might be needed for identification, so I sent her one where he was looking out the window, shirtless, showing most of his tattoos. His expression was as one of his Facebook friends put it 'nobody gives less of a fuck.' I guess it was appropriate for the occasion, but my husband asked me to take it off. He didn't like the idea of having a picture on the box at all.

We went back to the marina, to kill some more time. It was another beautiful afternoon. We had a brief debate whether we could leave Yassen in the car, but like good parents, decided not to, so we carried the box with us around the waterside park. When we sat down on a bench to rest, I took out a cigarette from a pack I had bought three months earlier in Bulgaria, and smoked one. I would occasionally bum one from Yassen, though of course, I urged him to quit. We once went on a cruise together. This was the winter after the summer when he broke his foot and nearly died self-medicating himself. I thought he needed a vacation and I had always wanted to go to the Caribbean, but my husband refused to go since he gets seasick. On the ship we would go to the bar sometimes and I would smoke with him.

I hadn't smoked regularly since my twenties when we lived in Bulgaria. Then I would try to hide from him, but once when a friend came over, he started pounding on the kitchen door, accusing us of smoking. He was three or four. He knew it was bad for you, so he begged me not to do it. I stopped when I was 26. It wasn't really an issue for me – I never got addicted to it physically. I stopped because of him, but it didn't work. He picked it up when he was 15 or so and got viciously addicted, as with everything else. Even though it affected his performance at the gym, and he considered that he had quit, he never quite kicked it and I found an empty box in his room after he died. I started smoking pretty regularly after that. There was no reason not to.

There is no reason not to do anything risky or 'not life-promoting.' I don't think this is a temporary nihilism. That fear that first gripped my pregnant belly in the mountain car ride is gone. I don't need to survive. The term life insurance I bought 15 years ago after a health scare expired 3 months after he died. The insurance company won that bet. When I bought it I had the option of buying a 20-year policy, but I balked at the small extra cost. I thought, in 15 years he would be 26, and would be able to stand on his own feet. As it turned out, he never turned 26, and if he had, he would still not have been able to stand on his own if I was wiped out. I know that was one of his fears, maybe his biggest.

### *******

I found notes for a novel he was planning, and it starts with the death of the protagonist's mother. He imagined it pretty well: the phone call, the inanity of the stranger's words trying to comfort you, no histrionics, no tears, just the physical weight of it, the broken sleep, the silence. Only it happened to me, not him. Then again, maybe it was wish fulfillment as a friend suggested. Every child dreams of being an orphan. Batman, of course, was an orphan. An avenger of his parents' deaths.

Maybe I was the reason he couldn't grow up, so he had to kill me off. But, no. This is how he would have wanted it, I think. I hate when people try to comfort themselves with what the dead one 'would have wanted.' But this is hardly a comforting thought. He wanted to die before me. He said as much. He said many times that he wanted to die. In our last fight he said it again, except he thought it would be cowardly. And I said it, too, that I want to die, and asked him what I have to live for (I meant if I was no use to him.) That was terrible. I was depressed, and I was hurt by his accusations, but that was inexcusable. To that he replied: _"what you have to live for is the dignity of bearing the weight of life without causing others harm. Complaints go up the chain of command not down it by the way."_ Pretty good answer. Still, among my myriads of regrets, letting that one slip out, is near the top.

Another even bigger regret is that the last time he was home and started a fight with his father, I left the apartment. I couldn't take another one of these vicious arguments, in which I saw the validity of each one's accusations and yet I couldn't help reconcile them. I dropped the ball. Again, I was depressed, but there are moments that are too important, where you can't just give up. If at these two moments I had been stronger, I think things might have turned out differently. What is that saying about the merest flutter of a butterfly's wings being able to change the course of events? Ah, yes, the butterfly effect.

This is a special torment of grief. _If only..._ I told one of his girlfriends, who wrote to me after he died, that if only they could have gone to the same city for college, maybe his life would have been different. She told me I can't play that game of 'what if.' I agreed. But, of course, you can play it. What else is there to do? What is this book about, if not to go over the past and find my faults? Isn't that the work of grief? To see how you are responsible for this death, to find out the worst, and then maybe to forgive yourself. Of course, it's hubris to think you are responsible for a life. But if it wasn't for me he wouldn't exist. That's what he threw in my face during that fight: _"Nobody else is alive because of you."_ No, nobody else.

I never had other children and now it's too late, not just biologically, but because I am damaged. I have nothing left to give. When Yassen was a little boy, I asked him stupidly, like all parents do, if he wanted a sibling. He was no more than four years old, but he said very seriously, _"No, mommy. I don't want you to go through that pain."_ He must have seen a labor scene on TV or something, but his manipulativeness just floored me. This was during his oedipal phase. He would pound his father with his little fists if he saw him kissing or hugging me, and he once tried to kiss me on the mouth as he had also, no doubt, seen people do on TV. But I didn't need him to convince me I needed no other child. In fact, though I outwardly railed against my husband's refusal to agree to have another one, I was secretly glad, because I thought I couldn't love another child as much, and it wouldn't be fair to it. Being a second child, I carried that chip on my shoulder.

### *******

After we took the ashes back to the motel, we went out to dinner with his roommates. They emphasized how happy he had been and how he had liked California. That was not what I had heard from him. I think he felt lost and was lonely. I think he wanted to take the trip, but he didn't really want to stay there. He would have moved to New York, instead, but he couldn't find a roommate and I couldn't afford to pay two New York rents out of my salary. That's what the last fight with his father was about. His father was trying to convince him not to leave Philadelphia, where he had at least a part-time job. There was never any question of him coming home. He barely lasted two days when he came home on holidays. The last time we had lived together was three years before that, when just after we came home from the cruise, I found out he had been expelled from college for poor grades.

He lived at home for a year and a half then before he moved to Maine with his girlfriend. That ended disastrously a few months in when he came home for Christmas and never went back. He was skin and bones and had been drinking non-stop. He couldn't take the cold, he said. He then went back to Philadelphia, where he knew people from college. One thing was true in the story about California, though – that he had bonded with their dog. There's a photo of the two of them lying on his bed, and one where Yassen is napping on the couch and the dog is standing by, guarding him.

Yassen had always wanted a pet growing up, but we put him off with a series of fish that kept dying. One day he smuggled in a baby bunny and stowed it in his sock drawer. Good thing he mentioned wanting a bunny, because one evening I walked into the kitchen and there it was – the small, furry thing had escaped from the drawer. We kept it, of course, but he soon lost interest, because we had to keep it in a cage most of the time, otherwise it would chew through all the electrical wires, and it needed lots of cleaning. That bunny lived for eight years, long after Yassen had left for college.

When he moved to Philadelphia, he finally got what he really wanted – a cat. It was a huge male cat – part Maine coon, he always liked to say – and he named it Mailer, or Mailercat, after Norman Mailer. He loved that cat like a child. I only visited him once in that apartment and met Mailercat, whom he had raised from a kitten. He was the gentlest giant cat I ever saw. When he was about to leave for California he was trying to find him a home and posted a series of appeals on Facebook, some with funny photos like Mailer draped over his shoulder like a fur stole. In one he wrote: " _Does anyone want a super cool new cat friend? He is two years old has his shots and is neutered. I hate to have to give him away but them's the breaks. He is really friendly, you can mush him all up and rub cakes in his face and he won't scratch you. He is also not a racist. Everything you could ever want from a cat."_

He would have made a good parent, I think. Can't think of that. That I'll never have grandchildren. I always thought I could be a young grandma and consoled myself with that for not having had more children, since I adored babies. But I honestly don't know if Yassen would have had children. His ideas of life were pretty extreme. I think that would have seemed to him to be a betrayal of his principles. And I don't know if he ever would have settled down with anyone. He wrote to someone: _"I'm too judgmental for a real relationship. I always think people should be harder on themselves than they are."_

He was loved by many. Some of them wrote to me after he died and they all said the same type of thing – how he knew them best, how he showed them the meaning of love, how he was charming and exasperating in equal measure. I think he tried, but didn't really find his match in these girls. He wrote to one, not even his girlfriend: _"Love me! I don't wanna die!"_ And she did. They all did. But it was never enough for him. Someone told me at the memorial that he always measured girls against me. I don't remember why it came up, but I hope it wasn't true. Certainly not in the sense of comparing their love to mine. Poor baby, don't you know that a mother's love is the only unconditional love?

The singer we both liked from the band Bright Eyes, which I introduced him to, as he liked to brag to his friends, said in an interview that he thought unconditional love is a myth. The only reason he knew it exists, he said, is because of his mom. I didn't share that with Yassen, because I only read it recently. So I posted it on his Facebook wall. That's a kind of madness I've fallen into. Mostly I post songs that we both liked, which are meaningful to me in relation to him. Sometimes I post photos of him. Yesterday I posted a photo of myself, with the prequel of a quote that he had posted on a picture of him and me. Mine read: "And she's growing older, or so they told her." His: _"And flowers won't replace her; you're my sheath I'm your rapier."_

In the early days especially I would go through his Facebook to get a fix of him. He used it as a pulpit and it captures him quite well. I still repost select posts of his to mine. Some of them are uncanny in view of his death, but he talked about death often. I know it wasn't really a sign of any intention in him, but I wonder if he did feel a presentiment. Maybe his body in its exhaustion was trying to warn him. But then the forewarnings extend beyond the immediate days and weeks preceding his death.

A year before, I had asked him to come to New York when my brother and his family were visiting, so he could meet his cousin for the first time. He had recently fought with his father, so he didn't want to come, but he did come just for the day, and he was touched by meeting the four-year-old boy, but he told me that this child will not remember him when he grows up. It should be said that a lot of the death talk was in the context of his desire to go into the military, which had been a recurrent theme since he first dropped out of college, and went through many permutations, but was there until the end. This is the part of Yassen I understand the least, even though he's talked of it a lot. He had a fascination with violence and masculinity that went back, as I mentioned, to his earliest days when he first started talking, but was bumped up enormously when we came to this country and GI Joe became his entry into the English language and then as a teenager the movie Fight Club forged his life view. He was a slender, gawky kid but he would work out and drink enormous amounts of supplements to get pumped, ever since his teenage years. Just before he died he posted a photo in which he is so muscled that it made me gasp. He was trying to subvert his nature.

### *******

Our dinner with his roommates was on our last night in Berkeley. We had accomplished our mission. We had collected his remains. Fees had been paid, papers had been signed. The coroner's report had to be requested by mail, with a five dollar check. But not until we had heard from the funeral home that it's ready. They would keep checking for us, they promised, because they had to request the final death certificate. The one we got said 'cause of death under investigation.' I still don't have the final one. Does it matter? If they put a cause of death, will we really know why it happened? I still don't, although I ordered the coroner's report and read it in all its factual detail – some of it quite grisly, I thought. What does it matter how much his heart weighed, or his lungs? Does it explain why it stopped beating, why they stopped breathing? Why it happened then? Medicine is a very imprecise science. Maybe that's why they call it medical arts. It's an act of improvisation. I saw my doctor recently and I thanked him for performing a procedure that I had stubbornly resisted, because I thought it was the medical industry trying to foist an expensive solution to a problem that would go away on its own with time. Its effect turned out to be life-altering. I told him I was wrong and he was right, but to his credit, he said it's not about being right or wrong – that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It worked like magic for me and my energy level was greatly improved. I can't imagine how I would have gone through the physical ordeal of this otherwise. One of Yassen's accusations in that last fight we had was _"you don't have enough energy to actually give a fuck."_ That cut me. It's true. I spent his childhood – my twenties and thirties – in a fog of migraines and anemia. By the time I would get home from working overtime or going to night classes I was useless. I would routinely doze off on the couch when we were watching TV. I would even do it in movie theaters, to his embarrassment, especially during action movies, which bored me to tears. In the fight he also said sarcastically _"probably just makes you want to take a nap."_

Why am I focusing on this last fight? It wasn't unique. We made up. He said he didn't mean it. Because I think he did mean it. He just took it back because he loved me. He didn't want me to suffer. But I did let him down. I did give up on him. I did treat him as a problem – his words. Yes, I loved him till it hurt, but I didn't see how he could turn himself around. There were too many false promises. Too many opportunities thrown away. But I didn't know then what I know now – that he realized all this. Because with me he always put a positive spin on things. He didn't want me to despair. Or to take any adverse measures. He was always trying to convince me, to appease me. I was too powerful in his eyes. I held the purse. That's why all our fights started with money, but ended with love. He hated being dependent on me, but he didn't know that I hated it even more. I wanted us to be equal, to enjoy each other and not have this sick suspicion between us. I always gave him what he wanted. That's probably bad parenting 101. I tried to set limits, but I always gave in. I couldn't bear to think of him wanting for anything even if I couldn't reasonably provide it. I think he secretly despised me for this weakness, which gave him the upper hand. That's why he accused me of replacing caring with money.

### *******

So we were all done with our mission in Berkeley, but we still had to get home. I had asked if the complimentary urn they provided (really a box) would be TSA-friendly and was assured it was, but we were still nervous about having to put it through the scanners. And although we didn't take much stuff, our bags were bulging from the little that we did. The urn went into a backpack. I set the alarm for some ungodly hour (4 a.m.?) but my husband still woke up before that and there was nothing to do, but leave for the airport before daylight. The GPS, which had caused us mild headaches so far, got us completely lost in downtown Oakland. My husband was completely freaked out already and was sure we were headed to the wrong airport, no matter how many times I assured him that there was only one in Oakland and we were not headed to San Jose. At one point he just stopped in the middle of the highway refusing to go forward. I had to gather all my sanity to get us to Oakland airport's car rental return, where they mercifully didn't notice that the side mirror had popped out, or the big scratch down the right side sustained when we parked at the Coroner's office and my husband was introduced to the parking meter, which he'd never used before. Of course we were very much early, but at least we were there, although our return flight had a connection in Long Beach, which I am positive is south of San Francisco, but somehow we got back in about the same time as the flight over there. Nobody cared about the urn. When we got back home to Brooklyn, it seemed like we had traveled to Hades and back.

### *******

I had already secured all of Yassen's accounts that I knew of – email, Facebook and text messages and we had spent some time in the motel room reading those, looking for clues, and when I got back I continued poring over his Facebook history and trying to clean up his email, which had never seen a delete, and was mostly junk. I was also looking for the story he told several people he was writing, but there was no sign of it. I think he may have been writing it in his head, but was too exhausted physically to do any real work. According to his accounts he was spending about five hours a day training in different martial arts disciplines and Crossfit.

I also continued answering the many messages from strangers that were still coming and I started planning the memorial, which I had set for his birthday, October 13th. My friend had arranged for us to rent a space at a chapel, but when we went to see it, it seemed musty and too big, not welcoming. I kept looking at other places in the neighborhood and found one in Brooklyn Heights, which belonged to a church, but was their reception room and didn't have the feeling of a religious place. It was like a posh oversized living room. There would be no religious service and they were okay with that, but because it was a memorial they offered us the place for free. I was amazed and grateful. I did send them a donation afterwards, but the fact that they didn't require it was a relief. The only problem was the place could hold 85 people according to fire regulations. So even as I started spreading the word about the memorial I was afraid that too many people would come. One of my colleagues prepared a beautiful invitation using photos from his Facebook and a line from the last poem he wrote: _"when the spine of the horizon sings from the window of a moving train, there I remember you."_ I actually underestimated the number that would show up, but I shouldn't have worried because the room was big enough and nobody was counting. The people at the church were extremely nice and didn't even say anything when we overstayed our time cleaning up. The 3 hours passed in a blur for me. It's a good thing I asked a colleague, who is a professional photographer, to take pictures, because I wouldn't have remembered everyone who came.

In the week and a half leading up to it after we returned from Berkeley I worked on choosing and scanning photos from his childhood to project on a screen and ordered prints from his photographer friend, who took photos of him for a project earlier that year. They are a series of black and white photos taken almost at stop motion intervals and they show every conceivable expression of his face. I am so grateful to have them, because unlike the family photos that he barely tolerated, these really capture him as a living, breathing being. Four of the prints now hang in my small room, surrounding me. The two that face the bed are from a different time, taken outside on a rocky surface with fog in the background. He is standing in one, sitting in the other, looking very as he put it, _'can you tell I'm eastern European yet?'_ \- with a heavy brow and a heavy gaze. Only his red sneakers break up the grayness. It looks like he is in another world. A desolate, moon-like world. Apart, even while he was here.

He wrote to someone: _"It's rare that I feel that I inhabit the same world as most people."_ And yet he knew his way about this world. I was reading today a description of Asperger's syndrome, in which people have trouble deciphering social cues. Yassen was just the opposite. He could command a room; he could make people eat out of his hand. But that didn't fill the void of not being understood. He also wrote to someone: _"I'm probably always going to be alone. It's just how it is. I make people sad when they are close to me. It's unfair to drag people into that. I have too much love for the real world."_ And, _"I have a need to be wanted. It's a massive cruel weakness."_

As I was writing my speech for the memorial, I was finally able to cry real, wet tears. It held me up as it tore me down. As a writer, of course, I made a story out of it. Here's most of what I wrote:

"The phrase 'Live fast, die young' never applied to anyone more than it did to Yassen.

This is how it started. Yassen was born on a Sunday, 26 years ago. The doctors weren't expecting him till the following morning but he was already out at 1:30 am.

He weighed almost nine pounds and when they brought him to me later that day his eyes were wide open, taking in the world. He looked like a one-month-old already and he started feeding right away and growing and growing. By six months he weighed as much as a one-year-old.

Then he started moving. And getting into trouble. He did so much crawling that his little knees developed calluses like the ones we get on our heels. And nothing could stop him.

One time I left him for a minute in my parents' living room – he wasn't walking yet, but somehow he managed to move an armchair and get his hands on some old Easter eggs on a table behind it and smeared them all over his face. We had to take him to the emergency room (the first of many such visits) because we thought he might have swallowed some, but he was fine.

Another time, still before he walked on his own, I was holding his hand while taking some clothes out of the washer. With his other hand he reached over and brought down a barbell from a cabinet onto his foot – his first sports injury and another visit to the ER – but his flexible bones bounced right back and nothing was broken.

He so resisted any confinement that I had to arrange pillows all around his crib, because he would pull himself up by the bars, and try to hoist himself over the rail and flip over head first – and he succeeded once or twice. Two days shy of 10 months he started walking.

But even more remarkable than his physical growth was the speed at which his mind developed. He said his first sentence at 16 months: 'grandpa drives'. By age two he could hold his own in a conversation.... At that age he was also making up words all the time, extrapolating from things he knew. For example, he was pretending to read a book once and when I asked him what he's doing, he told me he's a readnik (this was in the Bulgarian equivalent, but you get the picture). If I didn't have a tape recording of him at that age, I wouldn't trust my memory, but friends who knew him then also bring up all the time his amazing verbal prowess.

At age four he dictated to me his first poems. Again, they were in Bulgarian, so I can't read them to you, but one of them was about a building, whose heart of stone nearly broke because it had so many people in it that they had to build 30 more stories and it ended with an admonition that people should stop and think. Just that – that they should stop and think a little. We lived in the outskirts of Sofia at the time and the buildings really did look sad there. He continued to write poetry and prose occasionally throughout his life....

Reading became a major occupation for Yassen. I'm sure he's read more books in twenty years than certainly I have in forty, or most people read in a lifetime. And not just any books. In fifth grade he astounded his English teacher by choosing to read Plato's dialogues as his assignment and doing quite well with it.

But school could never hold his attention or contain his ambitions. He tried studying at different times acting, political science, English; but never stayed in one place long enough to turn those credits into a degree. He wasn't interested in getting an office job – he just didn't see the point in becoming a cog in the machine. But the years added up and he knew he had wasted a lot of time, which tormented him, because he wanted to be responsible and financially independent. He got a certificate in emergency medicine – he was attracted by the notion of saving people, one at a time. Once he had to set the broken leg of a little boy at a ball field where he was volunteering and he was most proud of how he managed to calm his frantic mother. At the EMT class he met some ex-military people, whom he admired for their discipline and selflessness. He explored options to join the military, but never took the final step. In preparation for that, or maybe in its stead, he put all his energy and passion into physical fitness.

He found Crossfit in Philadelphia a year ago and got a certificate as a trainer this spring. He saw it as a way to confront his fears and overcome his weaknesses – it was much more than physical exercise to him and he gave it his all. He ran regularly even though he had broken his heel five years ago. Even then he went to the gym on crutches every day from our third floor walkup. Lately he trained up to five hours a day and added martial arts to his workout. He was naturally slender and stood 6 foot 6 and a half, so it took inhuman effort for him to accomplish what he did.

Sharing that kind of discipline with other people was what he wanted to do and he was about to join his friend in building the first Crossfit gym in Detroit, where part of the plan is to involve underprivileged youth. Yassen was also volunteering at a youth garden in Berkeley at the time he died. He was a natural leader and I'm sure he would have done well in this field.

Because the most remarkable thing about Yassen was not his impressive stature, his chiseled body or his considerable intellect and talents, but the way he connected with people and the impression he made on them.

Recently Yassen wrote: _"We are not here to be happy -- we are here to take care of our brothers and sisters whose happiness in turn will give us joy."_

I never knew how much he lived by this credo until all the messages started pouring in from people saying that he inspired, helped, taught, challenged, amused, or even saved them from despair. I count myself among them.

Not many people achieve that even in a full lifetime and I am so proud of him."

I was amazed that I got through it, even though I practiced until I could get as far as the end before choking, but during the real thing I had to pause several times and my voice was a high-pitched squeaky mess. No matter, people seemed to appreciate the content and in the photos, you can see them smiling with recognition. After me, my brother, who was also the MC, spoke. He remembered Yassen at two distinct points in his life when they had lived together – the first at age five when Yassen came to stay in New York for a few months with my parents before I came here myself. This is how he described him:

"I do remember Yassen as a young boy quite well. It's hard not to: he was lovely in appearance with long soft blond hair and gentle but probing eyes. He was very verbal and curious with a notable attitude of concern about all things; even a sense of worry at times. Because of his appearance and what seemed to be an unusual degree of poise and maturity for his age, it was very natural to compare him the character of the Little Prince in the famous children's book of the same title."

But his portrait wasn't entirely idealized:

"He and I would play together, hang out and watch TV (Ninja turtles, mostly) and sometimes even get into arguments. I remember one time falling into the trap of an intense argument with him which, of course, caught the attention of his grandmother – his biggest fan and also my mom. She later came and reprimanded me about 'stooping down to the level of a 5-year-old' and not handling it in a more grown-up manner. Interestingly, I remember feeling that not I had stooped, but that rather it was Yassen who had risen to quite the adult level of passive-aggressive discourse along with a keen sense of psychological attack and manipulation; and he scored, what were clearly important points to him at my expense."

Then when Yassen was nearly a teenager my brother shared that duplex apartment with us and played a rather formative role:

"I had the luck of accompanying him to his first viewing of Fight Club. He asked me to do it since it was rated R, he couldn't get in by himself and I unwittingly agreed. To this day I have some misgivings about this, but I will never forget the amazing imprint the movie left on him, how it visibly changed him and became both a visceral and philosophical outlet for his teenage angst. ...

"The last time I saw him was a year ago. He had grown quite a lot physically and had a strange new intensity about him. He looked both excited and hopeful. I will never forget that day since it was the only time when he and his cousin and my son, five-year-old Martin, spent together. They seemed enamored with one another –Martin overcoming his shyness and clearly in awe of how strong and muscular his cousin 'Baten Yassen' was (Baten – a mangled version of 'bate' meaning older brother in Bulgarian); and Yassen enjoying the attention of the little one and showering him with gentle playfulness and warmth."

After that, I had invited four of his friends to speak – all guys – the girls I asked all chickened out and could be heard weeping at the back of the room. The first one was his roommate from college, whom I had met several times, most notably the time when I picked Yassen up after freshman year and the next time when they moved into a one-bedroom apartment together. He didn't have a speech prepared and meandered a while saying things like how Yassen threw a shoe at him during class, no – he threw his shoe to the front of the classroom and so he had to go in his socks to retrieve it. But the love was palpable. He had told me in our message exchange that they basically had been like brothers. That rang true – they had been brought together by circumstance and didn't have all that much in common, but their experiences had bound them together for life. I was glad to think of it this way, because I always regretted that Yassen didn't have a sibling.

The next young man, younger than Yassen, was someone he met when he went back to Philadelphia and convinced his college to readmit him. They lived together briefly in a house with his Russian-born wife and 3 other people. He was the photographer I ordered the prints from. He also tried to demur on the speech, but I insisted and he did a great job. In our private exchange he told me how Yassen had helped him when his father died. He wrote: "He helped me keep my head up and my back straight. Yassen has been one of the greatest and most impactful people ever in my life." I remembered hearing about that trip upstate, and his name would come up often, but I had never met him before this. I made a point to see him and his wife and their other roommate. We invited them out to Yassen's favorite drinking hole in our neighborhood on the 40 **th** day of his death, which as I mentioned, is symbolic in our culture. The third speaker was Yassen's Crossfit mate, who was planning the gym project. He was older than the others and had a big brother attitude towards Yassen. He called him 'Cheecho' about which I asked him later and he said it was just something he made up. I told him it means 'uncle' in Bulgarian. He also called him the gangliest person he'd ever met and praised his fortitude, citing his favorite motivational phrase: 'Kill!' As in, 'kill this WOD' (workout of the day in Crossfit parlance). The last speaker was his roommate from Berkeley, who had come to Brooklyn for the occasion. He didn't know if he could get through his speech, which he had sent me and he had asked his mom to deliver it for him, but in the end he stepped up to the plate. This is some of it:

"Yassen was a warrior, an athlete, a son, an animal lover, a poet, a friend. There are so many ways to describe him. He was an extremely unique individual who always marched to the beat of his own drum. He was a hard worker who always pushed himself to be the best at everything. He was an inspiration to everyone around him and most importantly he was a great friend."

After that I played a song that Yassen had emailed me two years before. It's the only surviving recording he did as an adult and it's chillingly beautiful. When I first played it to my husband he said it couldn't be Yassen, it sounded so polished. I think he had some help with post-production, but it's definitely him and his guitar. These are some the lyrics:

Crow Jane, Crow Jane,  
Don't you hold your head so high  
Someday baby, you know  
You got to die  
You got to lay down an' die

To use a cliché, if there was a dry eye in the house until then, there wasn't after this. Music does that, affecting us like nothing else. Yassen had a talent for it – one of his many talents that he never quite took seriously, maybe because it came so easily to him.

I had also made a playlist and let it run after that. I was surprised at how many of my favorite songs and his – we shared a taste for many bands – speak of death. Especially the ones he was listening to that summer, according to his roommate, who sent me a few suggestions for music. Again, the question comes up – did he have a feeling he was going to die, did he wish it, or was it just part of his character to ruminate on mortality? After all, many of the songs were my favorite ones, too. I often think I made him in my image, and he couldn't survive in this world.

Not that I influenced his taste in music, rather the other way around – I relied on him to find new artists that I liked. Except in that one case – he always credited me with introducing him to Bright Eyes. I couldn't say which one of us liked them more. Their front man, Conor Oberst is a poet of the highest caliber, and a sage. We went to three of their concerts together – the last one in March, one of the last times I saw him. We both grumbled at the teenage girls who were blocking our view and ruining the experience for us – he more than me – until I found us a pair of empty seats in the front row of the balcony. I realized then that he was closer in sensibility to me than those 5 to ten years his junior. While compiling the playlist I also found some new favorites that he had been urging me to try, but I'm very slow at adapting to new music, because I'm basically tone deaf – all I listen to are the lyrics. But now everything took on meaning. These were the Strokes, Beirut, and the Antlers. And then there was The War on Drugs (could any band name be more ironic) who have a song Arms like Boulders (which he had – the arms, I mean) and the lyrics speak of having to lay your body down when your train comes 'round (yet another reference to trains and death).

I don't know how many people heard the music. I certainly didn't. I was amid a blur of faces and so grateful they were there after the loneliness of the past three weeks. Perhaps that was still him inhabiting me. And every one of his friends said they had heard about me from him. To think that my husband tried to discourage me from doing the memorial! Death is private, he insisted. No, death is public. That's why we have ceremonies for it. Although I had never been to one, I just knew what I had to do. I knew I had to hold my head up high. I knew I had to tell the world, or whoever would listen, how proud I am to be his mother. It is totally not in my nature to exhibit my feelings, but for this I had to. I couldn't sweep his death under the rug. I had to share the grief. And I was gratified by all the people who came and wanted a piece of me, because I had given birth to him. So many people wrote that – thanked me for bringing him into this world. Such a contrast, I realize only now, with his accusation to me that I did the same thing.

I found out things about him that I never would have otherwise. Our relations always had the same underlying theme – about how he needed to grow up and take responsibility for himself. He could never be with me what he was to other people. They only knew what he chose to show the world. But that was the part of the picture I was missing. In a way I envy them. I wish I could have enjoyed him as they did. Without having to worry about him. That worry that often overshadowed any joy I felt. Why can't we love without being afraid of losing? Are the two synonymous?

### *******

Even the pain that I would wake up from at night went away for a while, but it returned with a nightmare. I hadn't had 'worry' dreams about him for a while. But this time I was following him and watching him go somewhere, a bad place, at night, looking for danger. I wasn't trying to stop him, more spying on him, but I was cut by the knowledge that this is what he does, that there are things I don't know about, risky things. I have been thinking about this – his risk-taking. I even had a conversation with my brother about some new research that parasites from cats can cause mental disturbance, and specifically risk-taking behavior. Because the parasite wants to go back to its natural host – the cat, so it has to kill the human it has wandered into by mistake. And of course, Yassen had a beloved cat and wasn't very strict about hygiene around the apartment they shared. But it would have had to have happened before, because this behavior preceded his forays into teenage mischief. So maybe when he visited my grand-parents' village and there were pictures of him grabbing and mauling baby kittens. That's much more plausible, since his beloved Mailercat was strictly an indoor dweller. This is still really far-fetched, but I always had a feeling there was something 'off' with his brain. Like he would do things, self-destructive things that belied his intelligence. The first words that came to my mind to describe him were that he had no fear. It's more like he had no inhibitions. I believe he really wanted to be good and to keep his promises, but that always got in the way.

I have been reading some of Freud's works lately. Mourning and Melancholia really helped me to parse which of my symptoms are not really part of mourning, but an underlying depression. When I finished that I started reading his introductory work on dream interpretation. I wasn't paying much attention, just filling time on my commute, since I had already read his later work on that topic, but somehow it affected me, because I had a very 'Freudian' dream – one easily related to both wish-fulfillment and the events of the day. Here it is:

Yassen was 6 or 7, we had gone back to Bulgaria for good and I was concerned that he would forget English, so I was going to get my father (a former Ambassador) to ask at the American embassy if they would admit him to their after-school program, so he could go there maybe once a week. There was also some other opportunity - a play (?) that I wanted him to try out for. The embassy's back yard abutted on our own (or what appeared to be my grandparents' village house yard). We could hear the kids playing. As I was formulating this plan there was some urgency to it, but at the same time I thought, well, what's the point, when he's dead now, but I still planned to go through with it.

I'm not sure what the 'dead now' meant. Obviously he was around right then and there. That he would die when he grows up? That there was no point in him learning English? Actually, my brother had recently wondered aloud what if we had gone back to Bulgaria when Yassen started having trouble here. I dismissed that. One of my thoughts was that he didn't know enough Bulgarian to get on at school. So that option, which was suggested to 'save' him, would involve learning a language, or keeping up with it. There is also the fact that I returned home from the US when I was 7 and I did forget English before we came back. I always resented my parents for that. Was I trying to come out as a better parent than them? Because I actually fear that I was a lousy parent? Because what is a worse failure than your child not surviving? When everything you've done was aimed at this one goal – to keep him alive, to make him happy. It turned out that these two things were incompatible. I feared that as long as he was alive he would never be happy.

And the event of the day to which my dream was tied? It was a conversation with a former colleague. He was telling me about his troubles with his 16-year-old son – a bright, handsome boy, musically gifted, but not trying at school, prone to violent outbursts, diagnosed with depression and put on anti-depressants. As much as I want a do-over, I was at a loss as to what to tell him. I did warn him against the drugs. It's one of my biggest regrets that I let them do that to Yassen when he was that age. He didn't take them for long. When he really got in trouble and was expelled from school, he dumped them down the toilet and went cold turkey. While he was on them, he said he couldn't feel anything. I believe they really shut down his feeling of right and wrong and made things much worse. I also fear that they affected his brain permanently. So there – I was trying to redeem myself in the dream for bad parenting. Sending him to a psychiatrist was one of the faults he blamed me for in that last fight: _"let's send him to a psychiatrist. That's expensive enough to pass for parenting."_ He was right, of course. But the fact is I had no one else to turn to but the 'experts'. My mother had just died. I was a motherless child. Yassen used that phrase on Facebook. That he felt like a motherless child. Well, he never was. He will never be. But I am. I am also now a childless mother. Which is what I had always feared.

I think the reason I became a mother so young was because I always wanted to be one and I was afraid that it might not happen. I don't know what I would have done if Yassen's father hadn't married me. I don't know if I would have had the mettle to be a single mother. And although I am staunchly pro-choice, I don't know if I could have given up a child. Thankfully, I never had to. And yet, now I am done with that. I have given some thought to adopting, but I don't think I have any love left. I don't have hope. I never think of his death in terms of not having anyone to look after me as I grow old. I don't plan to grow old. And if I do, I'd rather not have anyone worry about me. I just think of his death as a personal loss – that of a friend, more than anything else, but really, a loss of the meaning of my life.

### *******

After the memorial was over – and it ended with a gargantuan rain storm at night – there was nothing more to do about the death. So I went back to work. 3 weeks. That's what I gave myself. The same as when my mother died, except she wasn't dead yet when the 3 weeks started. That's the only other death I had experienced up close and I kept comparing the two in my head. And they were very different. When my mother was dying of cancer, she knew she was dying and she felt sorry for herself and I felt sorry for her, and there was a gulf between us that I couldn't cross. I felt I was failing her by accepting her death. Iris Murdoch, one of my favorite authors, describes it in her novel Nuns and Soldiers – how we give up on the dead before they are gone, because we don't want to care too much for what we are losing. How death ultimately defeats love. That's what it felt like and it showed me that no matter how well you live your life, how many people you love and help, you die alone and there is no point to it.

I fell into a depression after my mother died and I think it precipitated Yassen's downward spiral. He turned 15 that year. His school wasn't happy with his performance. They had accepted him because of his stellar test scores and had given him a scholarship, but from the beginning he never quite fit the mold and got progressively worse at meeting their expectations. Earlier that year at the school's insistence we had gotten him cognitive and psychological testing. When I re-read the report recently I was surprised that so many of the things described there had remained consistent throughout his life. At the time, I felt it was blackmail on the part of the school to require this assessment which cost two thousand dollars and I felt its conclusions were dubious. It contended that Yassen's intelligence, especially his verbal IQ, was very high, but his performance did not match his intelligence, because of his slow processing speed. I scoffed at the need to put him on medication because his performance was average – shouldn't average, by definition, be good enough? Yassen himself attributed his failure to laziness and I tended to agree with him. But now I wonder if there really was something to that – that he really never could achieve his potential and how frustrating that must have been to him. That was on the cognitive side. The report also said of his emotional state: "Anxiety is a constant companion and frequently gives way to depression. Yassen expresses a fear that he might 'get tired of being unhappy'... He feels like he is dying inside but no one sees this because the important people in his life are not listening to him." I don't know how much of this is true and how much of it was him playing into the role that he was being pushed into. Yes, he was that clever. According to him in our last fight, he was already abusing substances at 13 and this might have been just an attempt to disguise that. If so, he did very well, because he ended up being sent to a psychiatrist and put on medication. It's a pretty common story, unfortunately, and a symptom of a broken system, but why did I have to let us fall into it? Why didn't I see through him? Was it because I was in a daze over my mother? Or I just couldn't relate to him anymore? I would kill for him, and yet I let people mess with his mind, his precious mind, which had awed me since his birth. I brought my treasure here and I let them ravage it and spoil it.

### *******

So three weeks after the unspeakable, the unthinkable, I was back to my desk at work. I had asked to be treated as normal and people obliged, mostly. There was the occasional person, often not even someone who knew me that well, whose sympathy was so palpable that it would unsettle me and the tears would break out. But mostly I was dry-eyed. I could even concentrate enough to work. I made mistakes, but for the most part, it was a relief to be occupied, just as I had thought it would be. I knew that people couldn't understand. How could they? I didn't understand before what it would be like. You have no choice – you have to keep breathing, you have to put one foot in front of the other. Not because you have a future, but because there is no exit. Sure, you would welcome death. But you know you're not getting that visit. And killing yourself, well, that's just too much work. Not just for you, but for those who would be left holding the towel. You can't do that to anyone. And somehow you feel you don't deserve it. He – he earned it. He was bright like a jewel. He lived furiously. _"Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."_ He packed more life into those 26 years than you have in your 46. He never settled. You – what can you prove by dying? You might as well continue your living death. That is what you deserve.

Freud talks about this kind of self-loathing in Mourning and Melancholia: "If the love for the object—a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up—takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object ( _the self),_ abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering."

Self-hatred alternated with self-pity. Joan Didion talks about the latter in The Year of Magical Thinking – how people in grief are afraid of being seen as dwelling on the loss, because it reminds others of death, 'which is unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.'

I was certainly dwelling on it. I would spend hours scouring his Facebook history, his emails and texts – there was plenty to feed on. It nourished me. I needed his voice. I needed to feel his presence. I worried that I would exhaust these resources, but I haven't yet. I still find something new. But outwardly I was managing the situation. Nobody could accuse me of breaking down. People express their admiration for my 'strength'. What is so strong in going about your life as before? That is not strength. He had strength – the strength to push himself out of this life, which could never satisfy him. Although he would have considered that a weakness. I'm glad he's not here to judge himself. I'm not trying to sanctify him. He had weaknesses, just not the usual ones. He thought nothing of pushing his body to the limit. He conquered his body, but he couldn't conquer his mind. He died trying to tame that. This is one of the messages I found that he wrote to a friend: _"the things we hate in others we learn to recognize from ourselves first. It's nice being a little bit more enlightened but it sucks to have to go back and undo soooo many mistakes. I feel like I have maxed out all my existential credit cards. It's like living on bread and water my greatest achievements involve not fucking up that day."_

And fuck up he did. Many, many times. I've lost count of the number of higher education institutions he attended. He studied at different times acting, political science, creative writing, Emergency Medical Technician training (twice). He passed the EMT, but never got a driver's license so that he could practice it. He went back to college because he wanted to enter the military as an officer, but even though he somehow convinced the college that had dropped him to take him back, his email account is full of apologies for missing classes and papers sent in late. He did the work, just never on time, it seems. I don't even know how he paid for that year, or rather how he avoided paying for it, since the generous allowance provided by my employer had run out, and he didn't want me paying anymore, either. He put enormous effort into things, but didn't bother to secure the foundations of what he was trying to build. I don't know why he thought the rules didn't apply to him. He was continually surprised when things didn't work out – it felt like the world was set against him, I'm sure. He didn't seem to understand that so much is needed just to stay afloat. He begrudged the caution that ordinary people take for granted. Yes, he realized he had made mistakes, he just didn't realize he was still making them. Always when he would confess to some misdemeanor he would follow it with 'but I'm not like that anymore.' Even if it was like three months ago. He thought he was a different person, who couldn't be held accountable for that other one's mistakes. Just a month before he died, he wrote this:

" _I'm just not that person anymore. It bothers me that I was so weak. I don't know that guy anymore and I feel like I will always be trying to make up for the shame I brought on myself."_

But as someone said to me – sometimes life catches up with you. It caught up with him when he had other plans, when he was feeling invincible, and was probably just looking for some sleep.

### *******

When a few weeks had passed, I called up the Coroner's office to ask if the case was closed. It was. After I identified myself to their satisfaction, they told me the cause of death: 'acute methadone poisoning.' At that point I didn't know the amount and what it meant. I was too shaky to demand an explanation. They made me feel guilty for even asking. But they sent me the report after I sent them a check for five dollars. Until then I wasn't sure the death was accidental. But it was. The amount was too small to have been deliberate. From what I read, it was within the therapeutic dose. For someone who was used to it, it would not have been deadly. Except it's a tricky drug, with a long half-life, so it kills plenty of people, even those who take it under doctor's orders. If the previous dose is not completely out of the body, the next one could cause an overdose. They found the pills, too. So he didn't take all of them. Why he was taking them, I don't know. He had taken various unwholesome things at different times. I know from his roommates that he wasn't drinking then, and there was no alcohol in his blood. Perhaps he thought this a suitable substitute to calm his overactive mind. It's not a drug for pleasure, just a very effective pain killer. He had complained of injuries and had stopped training a few weeks before, but had then resumed. Perhaps he started taking it when he was hurt and inactive, but continued when he went back to his heavy physical load, and his body couldn't take the two things at once.

The report doesn't offer much explanation except that he was healthy, though bruised, and how much his organs weighed. His heart, as I mentioned, weighed 350 grams. Now I have that knowledge and I can't un-know it. Some things are irreversible. Death, obviously the foremost one. And yet, I recently read of a baby born prematurely and declared dead, who was then revived by his mother's touch. It makes you think even death is not absolute. It's a gray zone.

He almost died twice before. Almost, but not quite. Up to a point death is reversible. The first time I didn't find out until weeks later when the insurance bill wound its way to me. I was going to dispute it – it seemed a false claim. When I asked him he denied it. But then I worked my way back through memory and remembered it was a tumultuous night around Thanksgiving and he didn't come home until the next day, in a very bad mood. He finally admitted it, but attributed it to alcohol. The second time was the one in Philadelphia, when his roommate called us. But he was revived on the spot by the EMT workers. There is a shot now that has been a godsend for opiate overdoses. It wakes people up, who should rightfully be dead. To be sure, it's a rude awakening, as he himself told me after the second time. The trick is someone has to find you on time. There was to be no third time. The last time he was in his room and his roommates left for work assuming he was still asleep. They found him later that day. What if he had still been living alone as he did for a year, with only his cat?

Sometimes life catches up with you.

### *******

By the time the news got to me it was incontrovertible. I had no choice, no say, no option but to accept it. That was a mercy. I had feared something would happen to him – a grave injury – and he was uninsured at the time. I had tried to buy him insurance in Philadelphia, but he never received the paperwork because his mailbox was busted. One of the many ways he screwed up. I was waiting for him to settle down, to try again, but it never came to that. He would never settle down.

Sometimes his death seems an accident – a chemical quirk; other times it seems inevitable. It's the same when I think of his curtailed future. Sometimes I think he was doomed to struggle, other times I think that he could have risen above his history and fulfilled his greatness. "Life is long," a friend once told me in consolation, when I was regretting Yassen's missed opportunities. At that point, he had a year and a half left to live. Of course, no one could have predicted that. I myself was sure that nothing this bad could ever happen. How can life continue when this has happened? There is only one answer. This is not life.

From the first moments this happened I've been fighting the feeling that it couldn't be real, because it's so literary – to be precise, it's like a bad novel. Life shouldn't be so pitch perfect, with everything taking on meaning, everything being foreshadowed. Life should be messy – the bad guys should win, nobody should get what they deserve, a parent's worst nightmare shouldn't come true. No, this can't be reality.

As a result, it's not only his death that seems unreal, but my whole life has taken on that tinge. It's like –you can't be serious. I am not going to play along anymore.

'For nothing now can come to any good,' as W.H. Auden said in Funeral Blues. The secret is I'm not even trying to make it come to any good. I have no hopes and dreams now. Whatever happens happens. I will not be disappointed. Because I expect nothing. The only thing I have created, the only thing I was responsible for is now gone. I am a failure at life. I admit defeat. I will not be angry to die. I had my chance at posterity and I blew it. I had the terminator gene, it seems. I don't know how I bear it really, the unfairness of it. He was really my only reason for going on. But I still go on. In our last fight he said: _"I used to think I couldn't join the military because it would be too hard on you. Now I realize you can ignore anything."_ But I'm not ignoring anything. I never did. I lived with all of it – the fear, the gnawing worry, and now the loss. Maybe I got used to it. Maybe he prepared me for just this. In the past three years I have seen him about ten times. I missed him even when he was still here.

He wrote in the weeks before he died:

" _It's really harder on the people that care about me than it is on me. That's what I regret. That's why I keep my distance I guess, so nobody has to see it."_

" _I don't remember not feeling alone when I was there. It just makes me sad. I don't have a home, there isn't anywhere for me to go. There isn't anything else for me."_

### *******

I had another dream about him recently, a nightmare. It was that he died in a fight, not in his sleep. He was in a deadly fight and he killed someone before he died himself. Freud says all dreams are wish fulfillment. Did this one mean that I wish he had fought with death? That he didn't 'go gentle into that good night?' Or was it speaking to the fear I had of his attraction to fighting, to war. When things were going badly he would always threaten to enlist. He tried to convince anyone, who would listen that he would do it because it's an honorable profession, but really it seemed like a form of self-punishment. Otherwise, why would it always come out when he'd overindulged, or screwed up in some way? And this fascination with fighting, which seemed to start with watching Fight Club as a teenager, what did that mean? In his last months he was actually training in MMA (mixed martial arts) which is a pretty brutal discipline, I gather. He described subduing an opponent a few days before he died. He was proud of himself, but also repelled by it. He also said he was kicked in the head, but he didn't make a big deal out of it. I wonder, though. I worried a lot about that. I told him off a few weeks before when he was bragging on Facebook: " _Got smashed in the face a couple of times today; nose seems to not be broken... so I'm still prettier than you."_

It was more than a sport to him. He was trying to prove that he's not weak. He was always a skinny, smart, sensitive kid, now he was trying to become something else. The other. The not me. The Batman. And yet I know that he was proud of that other self. It was only parts of it that made him ashamed – the weakness. _"Pain is just weakness leaving the body,"_ he would quote repeatedly. This is how he described his day: _"I just spent the last 3 hours getting beat up in 3 different styles. It was my 2nd workout of the day my hands are bleeding my feet are bleeding. I'm so tired that I have nightmares every night."_

He said his day was training and being alone. He had sworn off relationships. He needed to find his way first, he would say. He couldn't depend on another person to make his life for him. But in the end he thought he was in love. I'm glad he had someone in his heart when he died. I was afraid he couldn't love. He joked about it himself, putting as his Facebook status: _"Aspires to one day be in love with something other than himself."_ But then in the comments he explained: _"I ain't lookin' to be eternal I just want to do the right thing before I die and pass the love that gave me birth on to something worthy. I wasn't talkin' romance specifically."_ I was surprised to hear from his friends that he spoke of his parents often and warmly. I mean, I know he loved me, but who does that – talk about their parents to their friends? Is it because he couldn't talk to us? Perhaps his worst accusation in our last fight was this: _"You mumble at me on the phone half asleep as if small talk were some kind of emotional currency."_ Small talk. Me. I hate small talk. He sure knew how to hurt me. Because I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse his grandiose plans. Like joining the army. I did support his last plan about opening a gym in Detroit, but I cautioned him not to promise any funds on his part. I would have given even those if it came to that. I was already in debt, a few more thousand or ten wouldn't have made a dent. But I wanted him to believe in himself, that his own contribution of labor and enthusiasm was enough.

Yesterday was six months since his death. I invited some of his friends, because I usually feel alone in missing him. But even among them I felt alone. They missed him for the fun times they had. I miss him for the meaning of my life. They have moved on with their lives. I am stalled. I'm not trying to diminish the depth of their feelings and their loyalty, which brought some of them from far away just to feel the remnants of his presence. They told stories of how he would dominate a room when he walked in. He was larger than life and that's the only thing that seemed to make him happy, albeit temporarily. Even his excesses were outsized. He shattered a fish tank. He jumped from a third floor window. But his sadness was also outsized. The last girl who loved him left, because she couldn't deal with the persistence of his sadness and nihilism. She was flattered by his attention, but could not fulfill its demands. Most importantly, she couldn't watch him destroy himself. That actually prompted him to get back into fitness, which really turned into a religion. She was the first one to tell him 'no'. But as with everything he took it too far. He couldn't stop with good enough, he had to keep pushing himself to exhaustion and pain, and ultimately to his death. But just before that he came back to her, long distance. He told her he had sworn off being with anyone, but really he had not wanted to be with anyone else. Two days before he died he told her he loved her.

" _I honestly didn't admit to myself that I felt this way. Even though we were talking all the time I just didn't let myself admit that I had feelings for you. Now it's just so hard to be here."_

" _I wish I had known not to leave."_

Now she has to live with that. I'm glad he had that in his last days, but I also think it was an illusion born of the loneliness. But isn't any love like that? The day after her visit here she broke up with her current boyfriend. She said she expects more out of relationships after having been with Yassen. I have to say that warmed my heart. He was good at love! What more could a mother want. Of course, I told her to keep the faith and not set herself up for failure.

### *******

I have been reading a lot about the brain and how our patterns of behavior are influenced by our relationship with our mother as infants. At the back of my mind is a diagnosis that one of the many psychiatrists Yassen saw threw out at us as we were leaving his care, because Yassen refused to take any more medication. He was being treated for depression and when I asked if there was an alternative to the anti-depressants, i.e. talk therapy, he told me coldly that no, that wouldn't help at all because Yassen had borderline personality disorder. I looked it up when I got home and I was furious that he would say such a thing about a fifteen-year-old, when you're not even supposed to use that diagnosis before the age of 18. The symptoms would match any disgruntled teenager, it seemed to me. And yet the condition is very serious, and it's thought to be caused by attachment difficulties in infancy. So I keep scouring my memories for instances that speak of that. If separation is a factor, we were hardly ever separated until he was 3 and a half. But when he was five we were separated for 3 months, when his father brought him to stay with my parents in the US and I was still in Bulgaria, figuring out how to make the move here. When I finally came he did seem unusually clingy and anxious. When I walked in from the airport, at first he looked past me before he realized I was the one he was expecting, and then he started talking to me non-stop and if anyone else tried to get my attention, he would turn my head back to him and insist that I listen only to him. My parents had tried to enroll him in kindergarten, but he was devastated to be left alone in a strange environment with a strange language, and he promptly got sick and put an end to that. When we were finally reunited and he started school in a few months, he cried, but this time he understood there was no going back, so he soon got used to it and bonded with his pretty teacher and quickly learned to employ the few words he had picked up from watching cartoons. Television was one of the bad habits he'd picked up. Plastic toys were the other evil. It was all he would talk about and to get him off his back my father had worked out a deal with him that he would get a toy at the end of the week when they went to the country house in New Jersey, so he was well-versed in the merits of shopping there. This was the end of innocence, as I remember it. Back home he had hardly any toys and we would spend hours reading books. Here, he would wake me at 6 by turning on the TV in our room. I tried unsuccessfully to teach him to read that summer. I was confused myself as to which alphabet to teach him, since his English was still non-existent. Anyway, I failed.

Meanwhile, I was looking for a job, any job. I had decided we had to stay. The reason I had sent him with his father to my parents is that back home things were falling apart. Food was being rationed, there was hyper-inflation, the rug was being pulled out from under us. I had worked so hard to adjust to that reality after growing up in a sort of vacuum here. I was present but I didn't really have a life here, because I knew I was (and was longing) to go back. Now I wanted to stay. I had brought with me everything I needed – my family. I was no longer alone. I was now on a mission – to make a life for us. And I did what I set out to do. I found a job, a precarious one, but it allowed us to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn just in time, because my parents left the country soon thereafter. When we first showed Yassen the apartment, he surveyed its bare misery briefly and said: "Is this it?" He had gotten used to lording it in a spacious Madison Avenue apartment and a weekend house. (He later revealed that he thought the building was a hotel, because of the doormen.) I answered cynically "This is it. If you don't like it we can always go back home." To which he responded from all the wisdom of his five and a half years: "But we can't. It wouldn't be the same now." Is it any wonder that I found it hard to mother him? I worshipped him, but I could never feel I was an authority. He always seemed to see through me. I tried my best, though. That was my pathetic defense in our last fight: "Believe it or not, I'm doing my best." _"Believe it or not I am too"_ he responded. There was no winning this argument.

So if we're looking for the root causes of the difficulty he had with life in his separation from me – for the first three years there was no separation to speak of. I could barely conceive of leaving him for any length of time and only did so during my exams. When I started work after that, he would spend the week at his paternal grandparents' house and I would visit him every other day. He seemed content with the arrangement. Then there are the three months by which he preceded me here, but his father was with him most of that time and would continue to be his main caregiver as we moved here. The idyllic times when it was me and him all day long were over. He soon learned to read at school and I stopped reading to him at night. I would only do it when we went back home for vacation, when I would read to him in Bulgarian trying to entice him to learn it, but he never did. Here I worked long hours and then concurrently went to graduate school trying to advance my career. I still couldn't conceive of him being 'out there' without me, and yet he was every day. I didn't handle it very well. Instead of being the overprotective mother I was when he was with me and I couldn't take my eyes off him on the playground or let him get into any conflicts there, I was the opposite. I didn't micromanage him at all. I trusted in his inherent intelligence and social aptitude. And he did okay, but I could see that his world and mine were already diverging. I'm afraid my social skills were lacking and I couldn't smooth things for him out there. He was conscious that we were different from others. It was both a source of discomfort and a source of pride, I imagine. For some reason I remember once he told me the kids at school would make fun of me after I dropped him off, because I was 'too skinny.' I found that hilarious and we had a good laugh together, but it must have been hard on him being different. One day, already in the fourth grade, he told me he had had some kind of basketball faceoff, if not an outright fight, with some kid. He told me he'd stubbed his fingers, but was obviously proud of how he had acquitted himself. It's the first time I remember that he showed that kind of urge to prove himself physically. Years later he would form a 'fight club' at his prep school, before they kicked him out.

The book I was reading, A General Theory of Love, argues that from a neurological point of view a lack of love is responsible for most forms of psychological and social deviancy – depression, anxiety, drug abuse, you name it. I agreed with most of what the book espouses. This has always been my fervent belief – that love can conquer all. Unconditional love is what I thought I was offering as a parent and I thought that ought to be enough. Tough love was never in my vocabulary. As I write all this, it is inevitably a story of regret that lingers on the failure of love. But I know the love was there and it was mutual. A friend of mine remarked about the photos that I posted online of Yassen as a child, some of them with me or his father – she said "there is so much love there." Yes! I wanted to cry. So why did we lose? Why do I feel I deserve this? No doubt a therapist would find that thought itself a symptom of mental illness. But I'm certain it's not. I know the ways in which I've failed, and I know why my love wasn't enough to save him and couldn't have been. Because parental love is not enough. It is the model, but you have to find your own love in the world out there, and this turned out to be a noxious world for him. In the first few weeks after he died I told a friend that I thought love could have saved him. He had been alone for two years, giving his love only to his cat. And while he credited his cat with 'changing the shape of his heart,' which that book also claims can happen, it can't have been nearly enough for a young man.

In our last fight – I should stop calling it that – in our last real conversation he told me of his loneliness and it made my heart bleed. He told me he wasn't attacking me, but still I took it as an accusation. I didn't see what he really meant. Only after his death I found out from the girl he was writing to all day long that they had been in touch. He didn't mention it to me. I wasn't even sure he could be in love and yet I found so much written evidence of fervent feelings on his part. Maybe he was fickle, but he knew how to love. That's why I can't pathologize his failings. He wasn't damaged goods as he once accused me of making him feel. And yet I'm not sure I realized this before. Because I didn't know his feelings. I only knew what he told me. And he had exhausted my patience trying to convince me that the only way to set himself right is to join the army and become a man. I couldn't follow in this logic and I'm afraid I gave up. I stopped arguing. Fine, I said in effect, I will support you in this as I have in every other crazy scheme you've come up with. Of course, he suspected the truth, which was that I hoped he wouldn't be crazy enough to do it. And this galled him, because he wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted me to believe it, so he could believe it himself. Someone at the memorial said when I mentioned that his first idea was to go into the Navy: "wasn't he rejected twice?" I didn't know that, but it seems likely. He said he switched from the Navy to the Army because of the better benefits they offered, but he was never one to consider financial incentives.

### *******

He had several surgeries on his chest because of a genetic condition that first manifested itself in his teens. His breast bone was caving in towards one side of his ribs. The first surgery when he was 15 was to put in a metal bar in his chest to push the breastbone out. It stayed in for 3 years, and it did the job from a functional point of view, but aesthetically, it didn't take care of the resulting asymmetry because it pushed out both sides equally. The last surgery was cosmetic. They inserted a silicone slab to fill in the difference. It made his pecs even, but the edge showed on his lower rib cage and he was self-conscious about that. He still looked like an Adonis, but nothing could convince him that he was not a freak. He was also worried that it would disqualify him from military service, although I doubt they would be so picky, but he made inquiries about it, trying to get his medical records from his doctor.

I recently read something in which military service was compared to devoting oneself to religion or other pursuits that require self-discipline and subjugation to a higher cause. He ended up pursuing the physical discipline by training to exhaustion and engaging in martial arts fights. I still don't understand why the physical discipline was so important to him. He read so much – surely he was an intellectual at heart. But he didn't trust that kind of self-definition, in words only. There are many things I can't relate to in his experience – the ferocity of his addictions for one. Why, when he had conquered so much did he still have to turn to the medication that he surely must have known could kill him? The psychology book on love talks about self-cutters – that they inflict pain on themselves, because that releases the chemicals in the brain that soothe their bigger pain, which is the psychic one. Even before I read that I suspected he inflicted pain on himself as an excuse to permit himself the painkillers. It is fitting that the drug that killed him does not induce euphoria – it merely dulls the pain.

Why was he in so much pain? Why was he so unfit for this life? How can I not blame myself for that? Did I encourage the wrong things in him – his precocity and sensitivity, his sense of irony, his cleverness? Did I create him in my image, making him unfit for life? And yet I'm still here. The truth is he wasn't like me. _"I only wish I knew how you did it."_ I only wish I had been able to teach you how to do it. Wasn't that my job, my only duty to you? And yet I was doing everything else but that. The truth is I was barely a person when I had him, I had hardly lived. I stayed on the right path, because I knew no other. I had taken to heart Kahlil Gibran's poem on children as arrows. I knew I had to be a stable bow, so that he may fly far. I knew I could strive to be like him, but not seek to make him like me. The truth is he probably changed me more than I changed him. He had the stronger draw. Many fell under his influence. All I could hope for was to make sure he knew I was on his side and would always be there for him. And he did. But that was also his grief. He could fool everyone that he was independent and strong, but he knew he depended on me. And he would say that everything he did, he did to make me proud of him.

### *******

As the days, weeks and months go by, I keep waiting for the other shoe to fall. Surely things cannot go on like this. And yet they go on. Nothing gets easier, but time passes, and I am closer to death. That is the only mercy. Things cannot go on forever. Until then I will replay in my head over and over my life so far. And his life, which is complete. Cut short, but indisputably complete. Why it had to end like that? There is no why. Things don't happen for a reason as religious people claim. Because there is nobody who creates them. Things just happen and we have to go on from there. I watched a movie about an autistic woman who loses her daughter and takes it in stride, because she sees this essential truth. You don't need to be autistic to see that. You just have to cut the bullshit. It doesn't make it any easier, but it cuts down on the self-pity and that is really what makes me cry. Poor me – bereft. I can't cry for him, because that doesn't make any sense. I can't pity him, because there is no him to pity. While he was alive, I would bleed with his pain. My whole being was gripped by his struggle with life. And I still feel that, because, as he wrote: _"it's the past, but memory is emotion."_ In fact, as I write this, the hardest part is not writing about his death, but writing about his life. All the things that went wrong. All the times that I was wrong. How I could have been different. How it all could have been different. Because nothing is meant to be. It could all turn on a moment. The butterfly effect. If only I hadn't been so despondent last year. Could I have been more present to him? Could that have held him up? The worst is that I felt it at the time, as it was happening. I felt him slipping away and I couldn't do anything. When he told me he was tired and scared, why didn't I go to him? I told him I would come visit him in California after he said there was no point in coming to see him off in Philadelphia. But I didn't make a firm plan. And when the call came it all seemed to make sense.

The previous summer I did go to see him. That whole year seemed to mirror his last year. He also had a period then when he was overtraining and he was even banned from the gym. The difference is that in Philadelphia he had more friends and the people at the gym cared about him. I saw an email from his trainer asking him to account for his excesses. In California he was new and he was going to two different gyms. Nobody knew for sure how much time he was spending there, even if they would care. So the previous summer I just had the urge one day and took the Chinatown bus and went to see him. I was puzzled that it hadn't occurred to me before. I should have done the same before he left for California. But of course, that wouldn't have changed anything. I would have to go – how far back – to change the course of events? And what could have changed? He would still be who he was and this world would still be what it is. Maybe things are meant to be, after all. And what am I meant to be now? A childless mother. I think that on some level he wished it this way. He came, he saw, and he did not want to stay. And I forgive him. I'm not angry that he threw it away. I'm just sad for myself. What was it all for? I should have known better. It took him to teach me that it wasn't worth it, after all. I always thought love is reason enough to live. Where is the love now? I have none left. That's one of the things I realized a few months into my grief. I don't love anybody anymore. And I don't think that will ever change. I even considered adoption in the early weeks, but then I realized I have no love and no hope to pour into such an enormous responsibility. He took it all. I was right not to have another child – I knew I would have no love left after him.

### *******

It's a truism that all we have is the present moment. That the past is gone and the future does not yet exist. But that is false. The past is all we have for certain. And whenever I get unbearably sad, that is what I remind myself of. I do not have a future with him, but I have the past. And the present, I could never have had anyway. Then I start grieving over the past. How I could have been more present in it. It's an endless loop of regret. Every reminder of how wonderful he was makes me lament how I didn't appreciate him more. But I never took him for granted. Doesn't my fear speak to that? That I was never secure in possessing him? That I knew what I stood to lose? But didn't the fear spoil the unfettered appreciation? Too many questions and no answers. At times I find reassurance, at others I despair. Nothing is certain until the end. And he reached that before me. Like so many things.

### ***

" _Little boy lost he takes himself so seriously. He speaks of his misery. He likes to live dangerously."_ \-- January 6, 2010 at 3:28pm via mobile

When did my little boy get lost? When did he start living dangerously? I think back to that year when his grandfather died, when he was ten. He reacted to that with anger. Why did his favorite grandparent have to die, he asked me. His grandfather, who took him to soccer matches and taught him to play chess, who took him out on the playground with the utmost patience. His grandfather, Georgi, who expected that his first (and as it turned out only) grandson would be named after him, but we went with a completely random name instead. Well, not random. Yassen in Bulgarian means clear. I liked that. It is also a kind of tree, but I think of it as the adjective. And it's 'clear', both as in being understood and as in a clear day. My mother called him her 'clear sunshine'. I didn't even have a girl's name in mind. I was sure he would be a boy. I even dreamed what he would look like. When they first showed him to me, I was only surprised that his hair was dark. But that was soon replaced by the golden hair he would have throughout his childhood.

So, his grandfather died, and his father went home to bury him and take care of his mother. He is an only child, too. That's the first time I remember Yassen 'acting up.' I had no experience as a single parent – his father had always been home to take care of him since we moved to New York. I asked his friend's mother to walk him home and he would call me and wait there for me until I came back from work. I had to ask to be let off the late shifts at work. I don't remember what I did about my evening classes – skipped them most likely. But one time he called me from his friend's house, instead. He said the key wouldn't open the door. I knew he was lying. I picked him up from his friend's house, bringing a pie as compensation. I didn't make a big deal of the lie, but I was hurt that he would try to exploit the situation. He also took advantage of my being out of my depth in other ways – usually by nagging me to get him expensive action figures. That year, on our landlady's advice we had him apply to private school. He aced the test and got a scholarship. We made a big deal of that. He felt golden. How I would pay for the rest of the private school tuition along with my master's degree I had no idea. But I was betting on the future. My bet paid off. The degree eventually landed me my current job, where I make more money than I ever dreamed of. His bet didn't pay off. Private schools, various colleges and professional schools – he didn't complete or make use of any of them. It's like he didn't believe in the future. He would make only sporadic efforts to please the powers that be, but he never put up with the drudgery long enough to succeed. He later blamed it on drugs, but I think it was the other way around. The drugs came later – to help him bear the guilt of throwing it all away.

That year, when he was in the fourth grade, after he got admitted to the private school, his grades got worse and his school absences were noted with concern by the new school. When I went to his graduation assembly that year, he turned to me from where he was sitting a couple of rows in front of me, with amazement and outrage in his face at the fact that he wasn't getting any awards or honorable mentions. He already thought of himself as smarter than anybody else. Than his chubby friend from an immigrant family, for example, who did get awards. I think of that as the moment when he and reality parted ways.

It was the exact opposite of my experience with my mother when I was graduating from junior high school. This was two years after we came to the US and I had had to learn English and skip eighth grade, so that I could finish high school before we had to go back. She came to my graduation assembly, where I embarrassingly had to wear a white cap and gown on my gawky frame – the only graduation ceremony I've ever attended. She came with her friend, whose daughter was a couple of years younger than me and who apparently had just swept the awards at her elementary school graduation. I wasn't called to the podium for any distinction. My mother was mortified. She had been embarrassed in front of her friend, who was trying to comfort her with the fact that I did, after all, skip a grade, and so on. I felt ashamed, but I also felt the injustice of my mother's reaction. She had never taken an interest in my school. She had just expected me to excel, like my brother, the genius. I was a pretty good student. I even took a test as a potential awardee in math, but I had a headache that day and did badly. I told her that and she was like, yeah, well, you didn't get it.

Now I think maybe my reaction to my son wasn't that different. I was not upset that he didn't get any awards, but I was quite cool to him about the fact that he expected any, when he hadn't put in the work. I didn't try to console him at all. They say we can only love the way we were taught to love. In a way I was as hands off as my own parents had been. It was only to his credit that we were closer than I had been with my parents. Well, maybe not. I felt a natural affinity to him. We shared a taste in literature and music. We were only twenty years apart. He was my friend. I suppose that's bad parenting. Kids are supposed to be afraid of you, right? He probably was, in his own way. Afraid of losing my love maybe. That's why he always had to try to convince me that things were going fine with him. He rarely let me glimpse the truth. Probably thought I couldn't handle it. That's why that last fight was so jarring. He told me I was in denial, but really he was hiding the truth from me all along. 'Can I trust you now?' I wanted to ask him. I don't want to relive my whole life; I just want to redo that conversation. Even if it fails to change anything. I just want another chance. There are so many things we think are impossible to change, but death is really the only one. There is always another chance before death. We just don't want to take it for fear of being wrong. I didn't ask him 'can I trust you now' because I thought he would fly into a rage as he did whenever I doubted him. I predicted his behavior and acted accordingly. But what if I was wrong? What if that would have been the right opening? What if even if he had still died we had had a different conversation from all those other ones. There are signs that he really changed towards the end. I missed out on the opportunity to acknowledge that.

### *******

" _Every day I wake up and spend five hours training my body to exhaustion just so I don't have enough energy to actually throw myself off a bridge. Every day I am forced to reconcile the mangled pieces of a human being and I don't think you've even noticed."_

Of course, I noticed. With a mix of pride and terror I watched his boastful postings about his injuries. A really bad shin scrape, the _'still prettier than you'_ almost broken nose, the bruised ribs he complained of a few weeks before the end and which I suspected had caused him to overmedicate. The Fight Club therapy he was practicing. Was he rebelling against me? Against my emasculating power? I wrote to him in remorse during our last fight: "I could only protect you for so long. I'm still trying." But he responded: _"I don't need protection. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm more dangerous than anything that's gonna come down the road."_ And he ended it with: _"I have to go hit people now. Thankfully."_ Three hours later he apologized. It was self-punishment, wasn't it? Freud's melancholic, who rather than hating others turns it upon himself.

### *******

"Fight Club is the story of an individual who must torture himself into manhood," according to a paper I found online, called Hurt So Good. The movie is about a person with a split personality. And Yassen had that to an extent. There was a continual struggle between his extremes. The movie also speaks to a broader theme of generational disillusionment, which Yassen very much channeled. The generation that had the rug pulled out from under them. They were promised everything and found out there was nothing left for them and they are very pissed off.

Yassen was pissed off alright, but he didn't really participate in the struggle. He never held a menial job for more than a few months and mostly he didn't work for pay at all. He had an unrealistic view of my earning power, but then I didn't try to correct him, except sporadically and ineffectually. I didn't try to discourage him when he got a job at the airport unloading cargo planes at night, but I was glad when he dropped it because getting there and back was too dangerous, and he got robbed the first week, not to mention climbing iffy ladders with heavy boxes on little or no sleep. Just before he died he told me he was trying to get a job at a dog pound, but he was turned off by the noise and the smell. I told him he didn't have to, if only he would stay within his budget, but he said he needed to save money for the gym project.

### *******

Last night I had a dream that we had moved back home, after my retirement, I presume. I was back in the same neighborhood where we had an apartment briefly as a young family – the same one that Yassen wrote the sad building poem about. To me it was actually utopia. At 22, against prevailing societal norms, I not only had a dashing husband and a beautiful baby, but I had a place of my own. It was brand new, spacious enough, light-filled and sparingly and cheaply, but tastefully furnished. When the building association volunteer came to collect dues for the maintenance, he looked past my shoulder, and asked if he could speak to my mom. She doesn't live here, I said, it's just me. He looked at me incredulously with my bare legs and stringy figure, and accepted the dues from me. I'm sure he was thinking – since when are kids allowed to have apartments, when people wait half their lives to get them. It was true – I was privileged. I only spent two long years living with my in-laws. And I was ecstatic to have a place of our own. My husband thought it ugly and remote. And we didn't have a telephone. After I woke up from the dream in the middle of the night that's what I was reminded of. Getting a telephone also required months or years of waiting and I hadn't even bothered to sign up. This was a bit worrisome as I was often alone with Yassen – my husband was off shooting a mini-series, and I couldn't drive. That worry came home to me one day when Yassen had the stomach flu and threw up several times in a row. He was two or three years old and it was the first time I saw him so drained by an illness that he wouldn't play or talk, he just lay there limp. Then I got a whiff of acetone coming from him and I realized he was severely dehydrated. We had just been dropped by the posh government hospital where he was born and allowed to be cared for until age three because of his grandfather's rank of ambassador. I knew where our district hospital was, but I couldn't call a taxi and I couldn't carry him to the bus in his limp condition. I ran to the phone on the corner and called a friend who lived nearby. I barely got out through the sobs what I wanted her to do. She said she would send her husband with the car, since she was pregnant and was afraid of catching the virus. Later she told me that she thought when I first called that 'the worst had happened.' When he came I asked him to drive us to my parents' place from where I called the government hospital and they came anyway, even though we were no longer signed up with them. Some hydration salts later, all was well, and I was ashamed of my panic. From then on I would have nightmares that I have to drive somewhere because of him. I didn't get my license until 13 years later though.

I have always put the question to myself whether I would relive my life if given the chance. Always the answer had been 'no.' Despite the beautiful things I could have had again, the pain and hardship always seemed worse – it was never worth it. Until Yassen's death. Now I would do all the hard parts again, just to have him back, just for a chance at a different ending. But it just occurred to me that it could all have ended sooner. All the reprieves from danger we had. What if the inevitable happened sooner the second time around? Shouldn't I be satisfied with what I got?

Someone said, trying to comfort me, that Yassen's life was not wasted, that his purpose was to be my son. That's hardly the case – he was so much to so many people. And yet there is some truth to it. He was tied to me in a way that nothing could break. He called himself disparagingly _'a contract you can't break.'_ Except it wasn't a contract, because he didn't sign up for it. It was his birthright. Of course, I couldn't break it. I would have sooner harmed myself than seen any harm come to him.

And yet harm seemed to follow him everywhere. Besides the occasions I mentioned in the memorial speech there were many others. Once, as I was holding his hand, so he could step off a swing, he instead jumped at the horizontal metal bar which supported the swing's poles, hitting it with his open mouth. His four upper front teeth were cut off in the middle. Fortunately, they were baby teeth. He didn't cry much, but he was typically voluble about his anger that this had happened to him and the follow-up which involved a dentist, my mother's friend, polishing the rough edges of the stumps with a very slow drill. We would eventually spend a fortune on his baby teeth because by the time we got to this country most of them had cavities from lack of fluoridation of the water back home and tons of gummy bears and chocolates sent by his grandparents from Switzerland and eaten with ardor in the lean times we were living in then. These were followed by the most expensive braces (worn on the inside of the teeth, so they wouldn't mar his coolness). When they took those off he didn't wear the retainer and his teeth went right back to all their crooked glory.

Then there was the time he 'broke' his head. We were at a friend's house. Her son was about a year and a half older and had convinced Yassen to climb onto the piano and when he refused to jump apparently pulled him down with him. As he landed he cut his head on a piece of furniture and we had to take him to the emergency room, where they glued together the skin on the back of his scalp. He was freaked out and talked about his head being glued, and he was really upset at the other kid. The scar remained visible when he would crop his hair short.

Another time, I was coming from work to see him when he was staying with his paternal grandparents. As I approached the playground where he had climbed onto the monkey bars and was calling out to me, his friend, in a fit of jealousy, or something, threw a sharpened stick at him hitting his face. I was still far enough away to not see what part of him it landed on, but I saw blood dripping into his cupped palms. It was the inner corner of his eyebrow – a blood-rich area – narrowly missing his eye. Again, he was more upset at the stupidity of the other kid, asking why he would do such a thing. He was scared by the blood, of course, but we managed to staunch it and he didn't need stitches. His grandfather who was minding him got really angry and went to yell at the kid and his parents.

When he was learning to ride a bike at age 10, he fell so many times that I couldn't watch him anymore. Then when he finally learned, we were out in the park once and he speed-crashed into a fence. I expected his body to be broken to pieces, but he was only mildly rattled.

Even though he started walking so early, he was never as stable or adroit at it as he should have been. I watch tiny little kids now whizzing down the street on scooters, their parents lagging behind, trusting them to stop at the cross-section. That could never have been me and him. My heart was always in my throat watching him move. I, or his father, held his hand well into his childhood as we walked down the street together. I was terrified of losing him, and with good cause.

### *******

Then came the surgery. When he was 14 or so, his doctor noticed the irregularity in his chest. It hadn't been there before. I was watching out for it, because my brother had the defect – _pectus excavatum_ it's called. It's common in Eastern European males especially, although I have it, too, in a milder form. The weird thing is it only appeared in adolescence in him, when he was growing too fast. The first doctor I took him to was an orthopedist. I thought since he deals with bones, it would fall under his specialty. Turned out not to be the case. He did diagnose him with mild scoliosis (a sideways curvature of the spine), which I also had growing up. Mine had virtually disappeared as I continued growing and the same happened to Yassen's. But that doctor, who was himself very short, also made it his business to tell me that Yassen might be suffering from a rare genetic disease, because he deemed him so tall. I just looked down at him from my nearly six foot height and told him I don't think so.

The next doctor I took him to was a chest surgeon – one of the best. He was a polite, soft-spoken Sikh and after he examined him, he asked me if Yassen was an only child and didn't I think I was being overprotective. He was used to operating on people with life-threatening cancers. Apparently, he didn't think a mild disfigurement worthy of his time.

Fortunately, this was the age of the Internet already, so after extensive research I found the only surgeon in New York who specialized in this kind of problem. They had come up with a minimally invasive technique unlike the butchery that my brother underwent at age 3 that left him with scars as if from open heart surgery. So when Yassen was 15 and a half he went under the knife at Columbia Presbyterian Children's hospital. There was barely a bed long enough to fit him there. They had to put in an epidural before he went under because the procedure involved putting in a metal half circle, placing it so it pushes out the breastbone. It's like getting braces, except they don't adjust them gradually to displace your teeth, but all at once. The procedure was minimally invasive, because the bar was put in through a small incision on the side of the chest and secured on the other side, so there was no extensive scarring. But it was maximally painful. He would have to remain on the epidural for 3 days until the worst pain was over. The first night in the ECU, the tube got pinched and the epidural started weakening and he frighteningly started feeling the pain before I called a nurse to fix it.

Then they moved us from the ECU to a big room with other children who had epidurals. Most were toddlers. I slept on a mat by his bed for two nights. The third night when they put him on regular narcotics I went home to take a shower. He called me confused as to what time it was. He was high from the medication. I rushed back and started monitoring the squeezes on the morphine pump. He was hooked. Back home he took the narcotics in pill form and I had to call in for more. He couldn't lie down. We bought an expensive massage chair so he could lie half reclined, but it didn't work. He ended up sleeping on the sofa bed propped up by pillows.

The metal bar, which I have still, stayed in his body for almost 3 years. They kept it in extra-long because he was older and the bone was difficult to mold, I guess. Throughout this whole ordeal he never seemed to have trouble attracting girls. I remember his first real girlfriend cuddled up on the sofa with him right after he came home from the hospital. She was a year older than him, but she didn't know it, because he had lied about his age. He was born in October, so some of his schoolmates were a full year older, the cutoff being in September, I presume. When I asked him if she didn't mind his deformity, he said "nah, she's a good one." He minded, though. He started working out even before that, trying to build muscle so his chest would even out, but it just made it more prominent, because he was so skinny that every little bump stood out.

At one point, besides his bed, the whole rest of the room was occupied by weight-lifting equipment. He would make shakes with protein powder – vile stuff – intended to help him gain weight. He took supplement pills with ominous names and properties. They were supposed to pump oxygen into his blood cells, or something. Just like yo-yo dieters lose weight and then lapse and regain it, he would pump himself up, then give in and let his natural skinniness take over.

His last skinny phase was just before he moved back to Philadelphia. Before that he lived in Maine with a girl. He had realized at some point that he didn't want to be there, but it took him a few months in which he went on a drinking binge to work up the courage to leave. They had set up house together. He came home for Christmas and never went back. We had to go retrieve his stuff from an understandably pissed off girl.

He wrote a poem about it:

**New England  
The skeleton of something**

_That year I was skinny  
Living in a rich man's house I had forgotten how to eat  
In a mansion full of empty bedrooms  
I had forgotten how to touch you  
I slept under the chandeliers in the ballroom  
Whiskey sliding through my chest  
staring up at the hanging crystal  
glittering vacant with moonlight

That year I was starving  
I wanted to lose all that I could  
just to know what couldn't be taken away  
_

That was his last skinny period. After that he went to Philadelphia and by next Christmas he was buff again. But not before he had another relationship and another breakup. And I'm not counting the rebound girl, who was with him when his apartment got burglarized. He had just rented a studio on the ground floor. He saw the robber who came in through the open window leave with all his valuables, including his laptop with a novel he was writing. He never attempted to restart it. I think I found the notes for it in one of his many abandoned, leather-bound journals. The one that starts with a phone call telling him his mother's dead. A death foretold. Only not mine, but his. He thought of death a lot. Dreaded it, or desired it. It's hard to tell. It seems his whole life he was playing Russian roulette. I don't understand why, but he was reckless.

### *******

Two colleagues of mine are having similar troubles with their sons. One is 12 years older than Yassen, the other 10 years younger. They frame a generation. I just read that one in 54 boys has some form of autism. That it's linked to testosterone. Not that I'm comparing unruly behavior to a disease, but there must be something driving boys crazy. The father of the younger boy told me he couldn't recognize in the sullen and even violent teenager the child he raised. It must be the hormones, I tried to comfort him. Is it? Is that why I felt there was a barrier between me and my son – that as much as we had the same sensibility over a lot of things, I couldn't walk in his shoes? I didn't really understand what he was going through. It scared me. And what about his father? They were very similar, and they both hated that. They couldn't tolerate each other because they saw their weaknesses reflected in one another. And I saw each one's side, but I couldn't bridge the gap. I was useless when they started arguing. The last time it happened I left the house. Couldn't take it anymore. I half expected to return to a crime scene, but it didn't come to that. I don't know what happened, but they stopped speaking after that. Till the end. It wasn't the first time. But it was the last. I can't even imagine what that regret must feel like.

Although, is it worse than mine? Wasn't my betrayal worse? I was his rock and yet I failed him. I thought I only had to be there for him – that he would find his way. But he couldn't. He drowned. Will it ever stop, the regret?

I've been wondering all these months what people mean when they say it will get easier, except not knowing what the hell they're talking about, obviously. But I think I know now – it's this, this terrible calm, this acceptance that nothing will ever be the same and yet things will go on regardless. And this is so much worse. It's like hoping for a death sentence and getting life in prison.

In going over his Facebook posts, trying to keep his voice alive in my head, I've come across a quote repeatedly. It was like a mantra. It's from Joan Didion and it talks about keeping 'on nodding terms with the people we used to be,' otherwise they would come knocking on our door in the middle of the night. But she says, we 'forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.'

Except when death freezes things and the present stops obscuring the past. Surely then we don't forget.

But this is not about remembering. It's about understanding. Though as Simone Beauvoir said, one can never know oneself, only narrate oneself. We tell stories to make sense of ourselves.

He wrote this less than a week before he died:

" _I feel my rich imaginary life helps me live my ordinary one. Ordinary life isn't really that ordinary and when you let your mind swim with really lush shit it gives you faith that you can do anything. I mean maybe it's hard to actually become Batman but I think I'm doing a pretty good job...._

" _There's so much more to life than what happens. There's an entire world inside people."_

### *******

People tell me that he was an old soul, that he had lived a lot. I believe that, but not that it was in previous lives, but in his internal life. His mind was on speed. That's why he was anxious. Nothing was ever simple. I think the main difference between me and him is that I can sleep. Seriously. Insomnia was the beginning of his emotional problems. I need to sleep, a lot. He said, wanting to wound me in our last fight, when I wasn't buying his guilt trip: _"Yeah, it's all bullshit. Sure. Probably just makes you want to take a nap."_

It's true. For me sleep was always THE escape. For him it wasn't an option. He relied on other things. He died seeking it, I believe. I'm sure he thought he was being virtuous. He wasn't looking to get high, just to get some rest. That's why I don't begrudge him the rest.

A friend wrote to me when she found out: "You gave him so very much of your life to help make his... horror. what horror. how incredibly cruel." Cruel, yes, but a waste, as is implied by the first statement – emphatically, no. He made my life as much as I made his. Maybe more.

I always felt sorry for couples who were childless by choice. Maybe even felt superior to them. Do I feel chastened now? To the contrary. A child is not an investment. A child is the closest an atheist can get to God. That's what I felt when I was in labor. I was just a vehicle for life to come through me. That's what I always felt it was – a sacred responsibility. That's why I feel like such a colossal failure. I had a treasure – I held the meaning of life in my hands – and I lost it.

Still, better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.

### *******

Life is random. Life is cruel. Yassen used to say that you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it. It was more of a wish than a fact for him, but he had the right idea. I believe his failure lay in wanting to control too much. The way he tortured his body. _"Why are you afraid of discipline?"_ he asked me when I objected to his low-carb diet. "It rubs me the wrong way," I said, "Moderation is best." Moderation wasn't in his vocabulary. He was prone to extremes. He was skinny or he was pumped. He was drunk or he was sober. He told me once he couldn't have just one drink. He had an addictive personality. It was evident from when he was very little. He would do anything to convince me to get him yet another plastic action figure. He would down Coca Cola by the gallon. And cigarettes he never could quit:

_Yassen Andreev "is in a howling mood. he needs to profess his undying and epic love or he needs to smash someone's face through a plate glass window. Either or I guess. Maybe I just need a cigarette. Maybe I can't tell the difference anymore. The beast is hungry. Off to muaythai."_ August 27, 2010 via mobile

I always thought exercise was just another addiction for him. And no less dangerous. Combined with his other ones it proved lethal.

'It hasn't killed me yet' was his coach's motto. Still I can't blame the discipline. He knew he was overdoing it. He said it himself:

" _Burnout! Apparently I'm not Batman. 1 week forced break from training. Fuck my life. Fuck yours too."_

... _I'm not allowed into Crossfit for a week. I'm dragging ass! Taking a week off from everything. Don't know what the fuck I'm going to do. However I've been an ass and overtrained to death. I'm gonna knuckle down and listen to coach. Part of discipline is doing the smart thing, and right now that's letting my body rebuild. Gonna come back hard though, you know how I am, a week off has got to be punished. KILL."_ September 29, 2010

This was almost exactly a year before it happened again. But this time there was no one to stop him. I should have. I should have flown over there. Instead, I was stressing over my stupid job. As if the world would end without it. But that's always the case, isn't it? We obsess about the wrong things. I was worried sick about him, but I tried to put it out of my mind, so I could function. I guess that's what he meant in accusing me of denial. But no, that's keeping two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. You are worried to death, but you go on nevertheless. He said he didn't know how I do it. That's how. _"I can't go on. I'll go on."_ A Samuel Beckett line that I've internalized since my teenage years, and which he also quoted. Life is absurd. Yet we have no choice but to take it seriously. He took it maybe too seriously, yet he was careless with it. He didn't want to play it safe. He had many chances, but he always let them slip away. He was after greatness or oblivion.

" _Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."_

One of my favorite quotes from him: _"So what if I'm superficial? Am I not super every-fucking-thing else?"_

And my favorite piece of advice from him: _"Whenever you feel blue just take a telescope and fix it on the farthest star you can find. Just think, between that star and you is a bajillion light years of no one gives a shit how you feel shut the fuck up."_

I couldn't help but be proud of his wry cynicism. I still am. The first psychologist we saw told us point blank that we're part of the problem – that his problem with authority stems from our failure to instill it in him. We would praise his originality and his critical sense – these are not qualities that are prized in school – despite what they might claim. And this quickly became apparent at the fancy prep school, where they had taken him on because of his high test scores. I remember a conversation with an administrator whom Yassen particularly hated – said she had grabbed him by the collar once. She was complaining yet again about Yassen's grades and told me incredulously that when she had reprimanded him for those, Yassen had pointed out that he had scored exceptionally high on the SATs he took in 7th grade, which qualified him to take a college course that summer. She sneered at that. But isn't that what they were after? Shouldn't it have counted for something? Okay, he wasn't doing the work, but why put down his natural abilities? That school killed off any sort of academic ambition he might have had. From then on he would look outside school for his validation. If he couldn't be the best, he would stand out by being the worst – the most reckless, the most lost, the most irreverent. _"Am I not super every-fucking-thing else?"_

### *******

" _After my father left us, my mother cried all her sad-sack tears into the meals she fed me and my brother. All those tears are no good for a boy -- they sit in his stomach like broken glass, eating away at his strength. .... All her fears leaked into my brother's dreams, and his heart became like an attic full of trapped animals."_

This is from a story he wrote a few years back. It's about two brothers, one of whom dies. The narrator is the survivor, obviously. When I reread the story now it is so clear to me how he wanted to be the strong, cynical narrator, but was afraid he was the weak, sentimental brother - the dead one.

The portrait of the sad mother is damning to me, although I'm not divorced, nor had he ever seen me crying, except on his account. But I know he blamed me for being sad.

In the story, the brother dies at war and is given a hero's funeral, but the narrator knows he really died of his own weakness and stupidity and he can't bear his mother's exalted mourning of him.

" _People never remember the dead for who they were, everyone's life becomes the television biopic of itself."_

I am guilty of some of that. I want people to remember the good in him. I know he would, too. He was all about the image.

### *******

So typical of him to throw away what others go to extreme lengths to preserve – life itself. He threw away whatever privilege he had, and the comforts others hold so dear. There was nothing to take away after he died, he had so few possessions, and those were expendable. Nothing to tie him down. He quoted Camus once:

" _Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."_

It's hard to live with that level of awareness. No wonder he had to tamp it down with drugs. Most people do it with a dead-end job. He had too much free time. For that I blame myself. He had too much time to contemplate his differentness.

" _It's rare that I feel that I inhabit the same world as most people."_

I think a companion would have helped. But he had been alone by choice for two years. That's a long time in a young person's life. He told me he wanted to get his life together and not depend on another person for his validation. But maybe he thought it would never happen.

" _Everything passes before you get to scream I LOVE YOU out the window of the train"_

" _I'm probably always going to be alone. It's just how it is. I make people sad when they are close to me. It's unfair to drag people into that. I have too much love for the real world."_

" _I just assume that people are with me until they find something better or newer. Like everyone is just playing to win not trying to love."_

And yet he wasn't reconciled to that.

" _I have a need to be wanted. It's a massive cruel weakness."_

I feel just the same. I never knew we were so alike. Though it figures – a misfit will beget a misfit. This line, especially struck me:

" _I'm too judgmental for a real relationship. I always think people should be harder on themselves than they are."_

### *******

A few years ago I gave him an iPod inscribed with the following line: "Do you know there are spaces open and wide?" It's from a Bright Eyes song, which goes on: "Believe me, there are days longer than nights. And you will be happy the minute you try. So won't you try?" It's a mother speaking to her son. I'm not sure he even noticed the line before he lost it at the gym, but it meant a lot to me. I knew he needed space to find himself. Last summer he traveled by train to California. It was an ordeal – he didn't even get a sleeping compartment and it took almost four days. But he loved it, despite the discomfort of being confined on a train. In one of the comments on his photos he wrote:

" _The country unfolds in your heart. The landscape is such a powerful message. Makes you want to run wild like a Comanche. Brother I am in love with this life."_

And later he would write:

" _The country unfurls like a big biblical text written across the face of the world. I feel like it's supposed to be read right to left. I think I would like to see it the other way before I decide."_

He was restless and always moving. He didn't really have a reason to leave Philadelphia – he was just looking for something new.

" _I just feel like there are parts to a person that you have to go somewhere to find. Moving around helps you feel new. It makes you braver."_

It's true. I experienced that when I left the comforts of home to live in London for two months by myself. I had never been so alone and I had never felt so alive. That just reminded me of a song he sang at his seventh grade talent show. It's almost an exact quote of the refrain, in fact. That was a sight to behold. His abandon, his rock star despondency, all of thirteen – magnificent. He had such stage presence.

There are also the short films he made on his summer jaunt at film school in Italy. He had dropped out of high school, yet I funded his whim. Had to reschedule his GED. The gentle bureaucrat whose task this was asked me the reason. I was ashamed when I said it. He just nodded.

But though he aced the GED and got into drama school he only lasted a semester. He never lasted long at anything.

" _I think I will be ok, if I could always be looking at the world through the window of a moving train."_ \- _June 14, 2011 via mobile_

### *******

When Yassen was about 3 years old I took him by train to see my grandparents. As a child I had made that trip many, many times. My parents would send me there for nearly every school vacation and my grandparents had raised me until I was three. It was four hours from the capital to the nearest town with a big train station and another ten minutes from there to their village. The train cars were ancient. There were two kinds – first class had worn red velvet seats, second class had vinyl-covered ones. The difference in price wasn't much, but we must have been in second class because I remember it was summer and the seats got sticky with our sweat. Yassen especially would sweat when he slept. A four-hour train ride with a 3-year-old and no distractions to speak of. I must have been mad. But he handled it like an adult.

My mother's cousin met us at the station – he worked for the railroads. As we were getting off Yassen stumbled on the steep steps and hung for a moment from my hand over the gap between the train and the rails. He was that small. There was no question of dropping him – I held his hand firmly and yet it gave me a start. His life hung in my hands. Driving us in his car to the village the old man asked Yassen about the train ride. He was still cranky from his nap and said he had slept in some filth. His precision with language was stunning. I realized at some point that I had dispensed with introductions and Yassen thought this was my grandfather. He was that young that he wouldn't have remembered the last time he had seen him. But when I corrected him he did his best to smooth over the situation.

This must have been the last time we were there before my grandmother died. The reason we were going alone by train was that my parents were away in Switzerland. When she fell ill I had to arrange with one of my mother's friends to take her to the hospital where she worked. One of Yassen's earliest memories, according to him, was how we went to visit her, but they wouldn't let us in because visiting hours were over, and my brother climbed up through the terrace to give her the food we had brought. The hospital stay yielded no diagnosis and she went home. Soon my mom had to come home to take care of her and she died a few months later. Yassen was four. When I told him, we were riding in a car and I remember he cried briefly and silently. A few days after that he had a nightmare that I had grown old and he woke up frightened because I would die. He had learned about mortality.

While Yassen was young and my mother was still alive, I too, would send him for the summer to his grandparents back home. It never crossed my mind to question the wisdom of this. It seemed to be the law. Twice he even flew by himself in the care of flight attendants. It boggles my mind now. He enjoyed it, though, and it formed part of his personality. He kept a journal one summer. He liked to chase the chickens in the yard, although he was frightened of a particularly vicious rooster (there was always one of those), he had kittens galore to squeeze, he even had a friend the first summer, a neighbor's girl.

Last summer he wrote this about my grandfather, the idealized version of him he remembered:

" _It was the last time I ever saw him I was 13 or 14 he was in his late nights (sic). He was the strongest man I had ever known. He had lived through 3 wars, he had been mayor of his farming [village] his whole life, he had gigantic hands with this terrifyingly strong grip that always wrapped around my whole hand. Even when I was soooo young he was always up for hours before me and he had already fed all the animals and done so much work before the sun came up. I would wake up to him whistling. He had lost his wife a few years before, I was there when she died I think it's one of my first memories. My uncle climbing through a window of some makeshift eastern European farm town hospital. They buried her in a tiny graveyard outside the village. He had lived through that and was still the same man but earlier that year his daughter had died. My mom's mom. He had buried his child. He had a few strokes it took several to bring that man down. We were sitting outside and he looked at me and he looked off and he began to cry so fucking hard. He said 'I'm sorry for this life my boy, no matter what it all crumbles. You lose everything. If you live long enough it all comes to ruin.'"_

By that time Yassen didn't really like to go back, but I took him with me until he turned 18. Some of it rubbed off.

" _I miss my country that deep distant part of it. Everything becomes kind of hallucinatory when you feel so far away from where you are."_

Though he continued to understand some Bulgarian he never really advanced his vocabulary and it was hard for him to speak. He never learned to write, though he could read some. We spoke English at home, at first so his father could learn it, and then because it just stuck. We still do that. But Yassen never lost the feeling he was from somewhere else, that he was an outsider. Maybe that's why he thought the rules didn't apply to him.

### *******

It wasn't just the country, of course. He was an outsider to life. He was a teacher. Here are some of the things people wrote when he died:

"Will never forget you Yassen. And I'm sure no one who had ever met you could possibly try."

"You were too good for this fucked up world..."

"You were one of the best, most refreshingly honest and unique people I know."

"Yassen was a seeker. He sought the truth and often found the answers through a daily dose of pain and suffering. It was through these encounters with the 'source' of life, that he became a man wise beyond his years."

"You taught me so much about life you don't even know. You lived more in your 25 full years than most people will in their entire lives. You are such an amazing, inspirational person you made me a better person."

"Yassen's spirit and personality were just tremendous, truly a force of nature. I am better for having known him."

"He had the most intense force of personality I will ever know and he was a truly loyal friend."

"Yassen was one of the deepest, most intelligent people I ever had the privilege to know."

And here's a tribute from one of his friends on his fake birthday – the 4 **th** of July:

"Hither came Yassen, the Bulgarian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."

And this one, recently:

"I never really got to tell you how strongly you influenced me. Any discipline, any trace of a warrior's heart that I may have is because of you."

Of course, this all came at a price.

"I feel like that's all I ever am for people a catalyst to something a stepping stone never a destination. I embrace it."

He was an inspiration, but that level of intensity was hard to sustain. He had great highs and deep lows.

" _Why are you afraid of discipline?"_ he asked me as I worried about his physical condition and his sanity. Because I know how weak we are. I feel it now as I try to walk through life bearing this cross, this great loss. There are moments when I feel I can't take another second of it. I know that I have to let these moments pass and not dwell on them, because I know how fragile my will to live is. Even though I try to write this every night, sometimes I give myself a pass when I feel that it's too much to bear. It's not that I ever forget, but there are levels of awareness which I only occasionally have the strength to embody. He didn't give himself that pass. Maybe if he had he would still be here.

" _I always think people should be harder on themselves than they are."_ He was hardest on himself.

### *******

Today is one of those Saturdays we dream of all year – warm and sunny and breezy and green. The streets are crawling with babies in strollers, kids on scooters, and annoying bicyclists. I never know what to do on such days that you are supposed to enjoy. And I don't mean just now. When we first moved to Brooklyn we always walked by the little park where we live now and hoped to one day work our way up the social ladder so we could afford to live here. Now we do and I haven't spent one hour in that little park. Sometimes I look at the playground from the window when I am exercising on the stationary bike.

When I walked out on the last fight Yassen had with his father, I was walking around unable to breathe. It was just such a warm night, in May again – the last time I saw him. He went out to search for me and when he dialed my phone he heard it ring in the dark and came to where I was sitting in the little park. We didn't say much, but he agreed to stay the night. The next day was Mother's Day.

He had come to New York to meet with a casting agent, who had seen his photos. When he told me he was coming I reminded him it was also Mother's Day that week. He rebuked me for reminding him and said that's why he was coming then.

We went out on Sunday. First I took photos of him, because the casting agent wanted to see natural light ones. They were terrible. I probably cost him the job. If he had gotten it he might have moved back to New York instead of going to California. Any of a number of things could have made things turn out differently. If he had found a roommate, he could have moved back even without a job. If only...

We went to brunch at one of the neighborhood restaurants. Waiters were handing out roses to the obvious mothers in the room. He looked at me, not getting a rose, and said: "you know it's because you look too young to be my mother." That much was true – we could have been a mismatched couple. We got that a lot on the cruise we went on several years earlier – to my amusement and his annoyance, I'm sure. When he was talking up girls at the bar after I went to bed, the waitress asked him pointedly where his wife was. He told me he had protested then: "that's my mom!" That became a recurring theme on the cruise.

Then we went to the park where I took a couple of photos of us both. On the way back he got hungry again, so we stopped at an Asian restaurant. I had under-tipped in the morning, just because I couldn't calculate after the Bloody Mary, not because I didn't get a flower. He was a little upset with me. Here I overcompensated and he asked me sarcastically whether I liked Asians better than Mexicans.

That's all I remember of that day. Next morning he left, then he moved to California in June and four months later he was dead and I never got to see him again.

Today I walked back to our old neighborhood. It's not far. We used to walk together every day to his school, from where I took the train to work. We didn't have to. He was old enough to walk by himself, but I cherished this morning routine. My mother once questioned why his father couldn't walk him to school, since he wasn't working and for me it meant leaving the house half an hour earlier and I told her that this was the time I had with him. I was always cold and he was never dressed warmly enough for my taste. I told him it made me colder looking at him, but he would laugh it off. We walked fast. Now I couldn't keep up with that pace.

I can almost remember how it felt walking with him. The synergy. Running like colts. Once we were walking, the three of us, with his father. We took up the whole sidewalk, of course, and as we neared someone walking in front of us, he turned suddenly to look who was casting the tall, menacing shadows over him. Someone else once called us a family of giraffes – all of us tall and gangly. For reasons I can't explain, that made me sure this person liked me. I was proud of our uniqueness. I think I managed to impart that pride to him. Though it must have been hard always standing out like that and he didn't want to be defined by it.

" _I'm tired of weighing nothing and standing 6 and a half feet tall. Putting in 3 times as much work as anyone else just in order to not be a walking joke."_

" _Even considering all the work I have put in I still feel like that scrawny ass little dude on the inside."_

He wrote this a couple of weeks before he died. He was training to be a warrior, as he put it.

" _I wake up every morning shaking because the amount of abuse my central nervous system takes makes me run a fever all night. I get up and I still train. For what?"_

For what, indeed? Who set him on this mission? I think he just needed a higher purpose. He couldn't accept the utter meaninglessness of life that most of us take for granted.

" _The Navajos believed that when a man was given a message to deliver he stopped being a man and became that message._

" _I will not let my spirit be corrupted by the weakness of the temporal form. The warrior is eternal."_

" _When I sit still it all catches up with me. I am the Indian runner, I am the message. That only exists in motion. Otherwise I'm just a fuckup with money in his pocket doing the same selfish bullshit everyone else does._

" _So it makes me want to die._

" _My heart is better than my character. If I let it lead I can do the right things."_

The money is my biggest guilt. When we came to this country our existence was so precarious that I did my best to make sure that he would never lack for anything. By doing so I concealed from him and even from his father how fly-by-night our existence really was. I paid for his private school and my graduate school at the same time by juggling an endless stream of credit cards. I became a wizard at carrying a balance of tens of thousands, while dodging interest fees. I nearly broke even when he dropped out of college and moved back home for a year and a half, only to sink in again when he moved away and required rent money and more. It's not that I never brought it up. We fought about his thoughtlessness with money constantly. And yet, there it is – he thought of himself as someone with money in his pocket. While I never did.

What this did is it set him free. Or set him adrift would be another way to look at it. I was always driven by fear. Fear of failure, fear of disappointing, fear of not providing for him. He only had a fear of not living up to his own standards. Outward failure never seemed to faze him.

Although I think that was part of why he pushed himself so hard. It was a sort of self-punishment. A bid to prove himself worthy.

" _I feel like my intentions are so good, something just gets lost in translation. That's why I separate myself. I feel like I just hurt people. This monastic lifestyle is some sort of penance but sometimes I still fuck up. Because I'm needy."_

" _I've sacrificed fun, I have sacrificed companionship, I deal with enormous amounts of pain and frustration on a daily basis. Sometimes I am crawling on hands and knees but if I don't get better that day I can't sleep. I don't get bored; I fight for my spirit from when I wake up to when I crawl into bed. It doesn't define me it is only one expression of who I am. It teaches me how to live. It teaches me how to persevere."_

It's amazing that I have this record of his thought process in the last couple of months of his life. Because he had someone to share it with. I am so grateful for that. Most of these quotes are from text messages he exchanged with the girl he loved. It's a great narrative in itself – the dance of trust and holding back that they went through until it ended abruptly the night of his death. His last written words are: _"Did you fall asleep?"_ (Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 1:40 AM) That's California time.

He stayed up for a few hours after that playing video games. Then he made a bargain with the devil it seems, so he could get some sleep himself. He mentions taking different things to make himself sleep – none of them safe or even appropriate. It was only a matter of time before he overstepped the line. Russian roulette. How fragile our bodies are – once something tips over it keeps going from there. The amount of opiate in his blood was 'in the therapeutic range' but 'potentially toxic.' If he had not been so exhausted, perhaps it would have been just another night. That's why my mind keeps going in loops – it was inevitable, no, it was an accident. An accident waiting to happen, I guess would be the right qualification. And judging from his writing, he was aware of the fine line he was walking.

### *******

One of the first text exchanges that caught my attention is this dream sequence he described to the girl:

" _You were in my dream last night you came to see me I was throwing a party at some new apt I had. Then you disappeared and more and more and more people kept streaming in and I just kept throwing them out of the way. I finally reached you in the street but your face was replaced with light and you said 'I have to go, she needs me.'_

" _I went back to the apt which had become half a forest there was a young girl there that seemed to be trying to convince me to go somewhere. She seemed to be trying to seem like you somehow. I didn't follow and I dug my way out of some hole and started running through the forest then I woke up."_

When I first read this in the motel room in Berkeley, I focused on the last part – that he dug himself out of a hole in the forest. We were at that time contemplating what to do with the ashes. My husband had read of a bio-urn which you plant with a tree seed in it. It seemed appropriate to have something nurtured by his remains, all the more because his name in Bulgarian is a kind of tree – the ash tree, as it happens. But then I thought of his dream as a premonition and as a sign that he didn't want to be buried (and especially not under a tree). This dream was exactly two months before he died.

A week later he wrote this:

" _I so rarely dream but lately it feels like I'm having visions. It's wearing me out. I feel like I can't breathe until I start running in the morning. I know they say that everyone in your dream is you but I think some things come from the outside."_

I don't know that it was from the outside, but maybe his body was warning him of its imminent demise. At that time the conversation with the girl had just started. By the end it would escalate into a profession of love and hope of being together once again.

" _You give me hope, you keep me strong. I will be fine when I get some rest. Sleep well. You are a beautiful person and I'm thankful you are in my life._

" _Come here! I can't take not being near you anymore. It's starting to feel like withdrawal. It like physically hurts."_

I know that pain. I feel it every time I wake up. First consciousness, then pain. Mine starts in the guts and sometimes spreads to the chest. I don't know if that's what he felt, but I think it was. So now I know what withdrawal feels like.

The second time I read the dream sequence it struck me that she wouldn't go with him because someone needs her. Her future daughter? The young girl who was trying to seem like her? So I see it as a premonition that he was leaving this life, but that she couldn't go with him. She had to stay.

She was the one who broke up with him before. The only girl who ever broke up with him according to him.

" _I just kept remembering that time you unloaded every awful thing you thought about me. It was actually probably the most painful things anyone has ever said about me. I believed them for so long. You just made me so ashamed that I kind of gave up on ever being with anyone. I decided to join the army and disappear because I never wanted anyone to hate me that much ever again._

" _The venom with which you said those things to me tore me apart. You literally told me I was worthless and you laughed in my face. I didn't want to bring it up but I've realized I have to. I don't want an apology I just want you to understand that it stuck with me and it may affect my perception of the things you say sometimes._

" _It's the past but emotions are memory."_

She explained to him that she didn't hate him, but felt powerless to change the self-destructive path he was on. She had to go to work every day and he was living in a fantasy world, she told him. She said she never stopped caring for him, but was afraid that if she stayed they would both self-destruct. She thought her leaving would help them both grow up. And though she was still wary of him, she found that he had grown up. That made him happy. I think for the first time in years.

" _When you told me to come home it made me so happy. It's hard for me to deal with, I wanted to come running then and there. I couldn't believe you were saying that._

" _Well maybe there is a way for me to keep my purpose and still allow myself to be happy. Maybe I don't have to be such a goddamn Martyr._

" _Yeah, I can't even stand talking about it. I need to see you so badly it's maddening. It makes my heart hurt, I just want to put my head on your shoulder. I have been playing it off for a while but I have this epic longing to just be close to you._

" _I can't help it. I can't hold it in anymore. I've just never been over you. I painstakingly learned to live without you but I've never been able to change how I feel."_

At first I thought it was just the loneliness talking, but now I think it doesn't get more real than this.

" _It's good to be able to talk to someone, who shares my longing for knowledge, someone with spiritual needs, someone that sees magic in the world._

" _I feel that us talking again especially now is something that needed to happen. When people come back into your life like that I think it's because they have something to learn from one another. It's a sign of an important bond; it's a little bit of magic._

" _Whenever we have been together during good times and bad... I always felt more awake... I felt more present. Like I was living my real life. When you left I realized that I wasn't living the right way. I realized that I had to change because I adored you but I hated myself, I felt like I could never be with anyone until I became the man I want to be. I didn't do it to get you back I did it so that I could be happy and live the way I wanted to but as time passed I found myself always choosing to be alone and now that you are back in my life I realize that's because I wanted to be with you. It wasn't that I didn't believe in being with anyone, it's just that I want to be with you._

" _I feel like I've learned so much and really grown and coming to the point finally where I have to apply all of that to my life. With you and me and with this business in Detroit, I'm finally dealing with things that are really important to me. All this training I have been doing was starting to feel really empty. Now I feel like I'm a real person dealing with real hopes for my life. It's time for me to build something I care about and it's really a deep thing for me that this is when you come into my life again. I feel like I'm finally recovering my life from all the damage I did as a younger man._

" _I feel like life could be really good for a change."_

But the change didn't come fast enough. He would still retreat into darkness.

" _My ribs are killing me; I'm too tired to sleep. I feel like no matter how hard I try I can't help anyone I care about, I can't do anything right. I feel scared and alone all the time._

" _It's like the world wants to divide us up and ride us into the dirt._

" _I guess that's what got to me last night, I just felt like I couldn't hope for anything good to happen. I feel like you are just back in my life to be taken away again. No matter what I do I feel like I can't get to you. Like it's just a cruel trick the world is playing on me."_

Again, premonition, or self-fulfilling prophecy? I think he just didn't believe in happiness.

" _Happy is just one thing, it can't be permanent ever. I want more than to be happy. I want to be strong. I wanna be strong enough to carry the weight for those that I love."_

Or he didn't think he was strong enough for it.

" _I think of the military as a purification, a way to galvanize myself. I am constantly in love, with all of it. I'm just not strong enough to carry it. It tears me apart. I have to face the horror of it all to be able to really feel that love. At least that's how I have it figured. Sometimes I seem harsh because I am preparing myself for something extremely harsh. I don't have hate in my heart."_

For the first time, though, he also seemed to be letting go of that idea.

" _If I decide not to go to the army I'm not going to stop being a warrior. I'm going to be Ronin. I'm going to have to be true to that somehow. It will be up to me to find a new purpose. It will be hard."_

That idea of being a warrior, though, is what did him in. If his resolve had been weaker, he would have survived.

" _I felt really worn out. I took a few really serious punches and then I got mad and handed some out. I'm steadily improving as a striker. Then during jujitsu I got picked up and slammed on my ribs so hard that I couldn't breathe for a minute. Now I can't breathe. Sadly I'm not much of an athlete I guess. Not really much of anything."_

But he persisted.

" _Eh. I'm pretty durable. I just don't have the knack for self-preservation. My coaches worry too because I don't have the instinct of protecting myself the way that other athletes do. Most people would give up way before they reach the point of exhaustion I do. I worry about it just because I could be getting better results if I toned it down. I think it's more important to be tough than it is to be talented."_

So, I was wrong – somebody did care enough to tell him to stop.

" _I'm fine. The very fact that I can keep up this pace is a very good sign. The body adapts. I have trainers and coaches monitoring me. They are not going to let me actually kill myself."_

And like the year before they made him take two weeks off.

" _They said you are one of our best athletes and we like your work ethic and we think you need to take better care of yourself. Take it easy for a couple of weeks and we are gonna book you an exhibition fight."_

But then he went back to it.

" _This is what I am. This is what I need to do and I'm too tired to pretend it's not hard, and I'm too tired to pretend I'm not afraid and I'm too tired to pretend I'm not fighting a losing battle. Like the story about the king who tries to fight the sea, wanders out into the water his sword clutched in his hand."_

### *******

This a poem Yassen wrote at my urging when he was ten. It was for a poetry contest – I sent in one, too. It turned out to be a scam – a self-publishing deal – everybody won the right to have their poem published in the book if they would buy a copy of it. The sword reminded me of it.

**The Blood Stained Sword**

Fury, rage, passion and pride  
They all battled inside my head and at my side  
The thought of loss could not be found  
The faster my heart began to pound  
The faster I moved to and fro  
As did his sword high and low  
The glint of his sword  
Made me pray to the Lord  
Oh, if I were to see another day, another day  
With his blood I would pay  
The battle raged on  
To rage and anger I was a pawn  
The shadow of death neared  
And across the corner it peered  
Then it was done  
With a swing of my sword  
I had shown that I and the devil both had won

I have pictures of him on his tenth birthday. Instead of bringing cupcakes to school, or whatever it is you're supposed to do and I never did for him, he asked to stay home from school that day. It was a freakishly warm October day, though far from unusual for New York and we went to the Central Park zoo. He was melancholy – he'd gotten what he wanted, but it wasn't satisfying. In those photos I see the person he already was to become as he grew up. I always thought that the teenage years changed him, but it was all there already. It wasn't the hormones, or the drugs. It was his mind. He would never be satisfied with the ordinary, the average. He would always strive for more. And this is where it led him.

" _That's really the only thing I like about myself. I'm only going to be alive once, what is there to hold back, you can't take it with you. I can deal with being sad, I can deal with being in a pain, what I can't deal with is compromising myself. If you are going to fight you fight to win."_

Maybe there's a psychiatric diagnosis to explain this, but I prefer to think of it as his true self. No, he wasn't well-adjusted. But what does that really mean? We adjust to the world by subverting our true natures. We learn to hide them, to cooperate – for the greater good, or just for mere survival. He just felt more keenly the prison of being a rational being in an animal's body. Somebody said those who never move don't feel their chains. He rattled those chains.

" _I'm just angry at myself for falling down. I'm unwilling to fail, if I wasn't cut out for this someone would have told me. I'm just ... tired. You would never know if I hadn't told you. It's not visible. I feel vulnerable enough to tell you but I would never let it show and I will never bow to the compromise of my temporal form. I am not as weak as this sad vessel. I will fight until I am a free man."_

He wrote this on Facebook 15 months before he died:

June 10, 2010  
_"I cannot emphasize enough that my body  
Is a badly designed, poorly put together vessel,  
Harboring these diminishing, so-called 'vital organs'  
I hope my heart goes first,  
I HOPE MY HEART GOES FIRST!"_

Well, I don't know if it went first, but it must have been a close second. It's like he set out to destroy it.

" _I just spent the last 3 hours getting beat up in 3 different styles. It was my 2nd workout of the day my hands are bleeding my feet are bleeding. I'm so tired that I have nightmares every night."_

" _One of the symptoms of overtraining is increased anxiety and depression. I feel kind of like a frightened animal."_

No wonder he was frightened. His body was trying to tell him to stop, but his will overpowered it. At least that's how I think it went. I think he always wanted to be free and he knew that he couldn't be in this life.

" _I wanna be an Apache. I want a tribe, I want to be pure of heart and in awe of the world, I want to love and protect those around me. I feel like the white man took my dignity from me. It's like Shakespeare says being born is like being kidnapped and sold it to slavery. I don't want money I don't want power I don't want any of the things they tried to teach me to want I just want dignity. That can never be reconciled with this world."_

He felt like an outsider. Part of it was being a foreigner, even though he was thoroughly assimilated. Maybe he just used it to justify being different. But it was always there. Here's what he said about his grandparents.

" _That's probably why I feel so at war with the world we inhabit. Maybe it's that those people left me in my hardest years. I miss my country that deep distant part of it. Everything becomes kind of hallucinatory when you feel so far away from where you are. Maybe it's an illness; my spirit animal has a broken paw or something. I half woke up in the night last night and I couldn't move but I saw the outline of this giant cat at the foot of the bed just watching me. Maybe I'm just going crazy."_

But it wasn't just the country. He never felt at home in this world.

" _I don't remember how it is not to be lonely._

" _I have too much love for the real world._

" _I'm afflicted with a perpetually broken heart."_

"My mourning is constant, meditative, we are all returning."

"I'm constantly dreaming. It's like there is no one else here but me. Surrounded by burning bushes."

" _It's hard not to feel really isolated when you can't be understood by the people that you are supposed to be close to. I think it's those people that keep the most distance from us anyway. The stakes are too high there for comfort."_

This is in my court, I guess. He was right, of course. _The stakes are too high for comfort._ Others could enjoy him in all his wild glory, and not have to worry about where his extreme ideas might take him. I admired him as much as anybody, but I worried all the time. _I don't think you've even noticed._ Really, I sometimes had to put him out of my mind, so I could go on. So I didn't go crazy with worry. Well, I've kept my sanity...

I wish I could have kept him here. I wish he didn't live alone for the last 3 years. This was his day in the last two months of his life:

" _I just spent the last 5 hours training and I come home to a dark silent house and it just kicks me so hard in the gut. As hard as I try my life amounts to absolutely nothing._

" _I was writing for a while, now I feel incredibly agitated. I need some sort of catharsis. I have been reading like 3 books at once like 200 pages a day on top of training and I just feel so FULL I could fucking scream."_

" _I could have a girlfriend; enough people have auditioned for the job since I've been out here. There is something about being touched gently that I don't respond to very well anymore. It makes me want to die. I don't know, maybe they were all the wrong person. Maybe I'm the wrong person. I miss Mailercat."_

But this is the life he chose. He even let go of Mailer, whom he loved like a child. This is what drew him:

" _There is something in me that truly longs to be something hard, fast, and merciless in the darkness._

" _To be on the outside. To be elemental._

" _That way I could at least be free of desire, of hope."_

The Dark Knight. It is not about what feels good, but about what feels right.

" _I make a point of being good regardless of how I feel. I don't really feel good. I feel pretty fucking lost and isolated._

" _I do the right things most of the time, which I guess is what counts._ "

" _It's not like I sit around and feel sorry for myself. I am just aware of how I feel. I don't act on emotion. I act on reason. Therefore I think it's my right to be miserable. I think it's rather Batman of me."_

### *******

Why Batman? I named this book after his obsession, but I still don't know the answer. I turned to the Internet for clues to Batman's psychology.

They say that the bat mask is Batman's true face, while the rich playboy part is the act.

That rings true. Most of his friends remember him as fun-loving and carefree, but really he was worried and anxious most of the time.

The appeal is the transformative effort he puts into himself. Batman is the only super hero without superhuman powers. It's more about the process than the end result.

The process certainly seemed important to Yassen. The goal seemed to shift, and really not to matter – policeman, EMT, navy seal, army ranger, Crossfit trainer, martial arts competitor followed one another, but the path remained the same – physical exertion and discipline. The Crossfit ideal fit because of its well-roundedness – not just strength, but endurance, flexibility, speed. So did the martial arts – that he took from him literally.

Batman's power is in his mission and his drive to improve himself.

Then there are his flaws. One article argues that he suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, egomania, substance abuse. I'm talking about Batman, but I might as well be describing Yassen. Maybe his identification stemmed from being able to channel all his flaws into something indisputably good – saving other people. At least that was the idea.

But really, there doesn't have to be a reason – it's the myth he built around himself. The idea for the title came from a girl, who wanted to get this tattooed in memory of him, only she wants it in Bulgarian, so she consulted me regarding the translation. He proclaimed it and they believed it:

Yassen Andreev  
_Is the fucking Batman.  
_ June 21, 2010

### *******

On the question of love, Yassen vacillated in those last few months. He said at first he didn't think it exists, but then admitted to aspiring to it. He gave his unfulfilled quest for it as a reason for thinking of death.

" _Because I miss whatever it is I'm lonely for.... Because there is no such thing as love, because no matter how hard I work at it I hate myself 90% of the time. Because if I didn't think about it I would get so claustrophobic that I would probably do it. It's nice to know where the door is. I never really unpack anywhere I go."_

" _I have felt it both in myself and from other people but never at the same time. There is some kind of distortion some kind of interference in the world now, it keeps us apart. I also believe that only very strong people can really love and I don't see that in others, the willingness to carry any sort of burden. Love is an action not a feeling. I hope to one day be strong enough do honor it properly that is my goal. That is why I do what I do, believe in what I believe."_

" _That's all I've ever wanted out of anyone. And from myself only to be worth that trust."_

" _Because you are what you love, not what loves you back."_

" _Because love must be courageous."_

" _You have to stay in the fight. Loving in itself is a victory. When you love someone it makes you better."_

He was writing a story about a man who failed to love. Or said he was writing it. I couldn't find it on his computer. But this is what he said about it:

" _I need to find the last piece of it. I need to figure out how he wins out in the end. How he overcomes himself sort of. The whole thing is about... what do you do when you realize you are a bad person? Do you spend your whole life trying to punish yourself; do you let other people victimize you? The point is no. You keep fighting. That's what I have to find."_

He called the story: _"the little black pearl I have been keeping under my tongue all these years."_

But it never got written.

### *******

One of the few recent complete works he left is this poem:

**Atlas**

something in this world is always leaving  
a wind is trapped in the curtains like the Holy Ghost  
sometimes I feel it in a panic  
like a herd of glass marbles barreling across the floor  
sometimes it is the smell of rainfall on stone  
marching through the opera of days  
it is never gone  
it has always just walked out  
never any farther  
never any closer  
like the smell of a lover on a pillow  
a distance itself an arrival  
it is an old photograph  
known, touched, like an old dance floor  
somewhere its footsteps color a marbled corridor  
up a flight of stairs painted in memory  
bellowing underneath centuries of ocean  
a place between here and now  
when the spine of the horizon sings from the window of a moving train  
there I remember you  
I can almost make out the lines of your face  
y o u  
a constellation  
a rumor among the stars  
a collection of bright dead lights  
you never even found a name

### *******

I read that when a woman has a baby some of its cells remain in her body. Scientists are trying to discover the evolutionary purpose of this. They say the cells can have healing properties and can even repair an injured maternal heart (true story).

No wonder that when he died I could feel he was still around, that he was part of me. That part of him lives on through me. It should have been the other way around, of course. He should have carried my genes into the future. Why did he have to go first? It seems like in a lot of ways he was ahead of me. That he had gotten everything he could out of this life and was ready to leave it.

A few days ago I was perilously close to some falling debris that would surely have killed me. An umbrella had blown off the roof of a building and its cast iron stand shattered, scattering shards at my feet where I was sitting on a bench, eating my lunch with a colleague. I barely even flinched. I realized that though I've stopped longing for death as I did in the first weeks and months, I am certainly ready for it. I wasn't ready when he was still around. _The contract you can't break._ In a way it's a relief. Having watched my mother part with life was one of the most heart-wrenching things I've been through. I'm glad he won't be there for mine. I loved him so much that I would let him out of that.

Now I can go any time, guilt-free. I thought it would happen automatically if something happened to him. And to an extent, it did. The ego doesn't die, but I can imagine no future where I won't want to die. I have no illusions of an afterlife. The thought actually scares me. Nor do I think I can reconnect with him. He was a unique iteration of the human spirit, and maybe some of his cells are still in me, and for sure his thoughts have shaped mine and he is part of me. He made my life as much as I made his.

You lose a child continually as it grows up. You miss the different stages of its life. But you never expect its life to be complete. His life is complete now. This is only my take on it.

" _People never remember the dead for who they were, everyone's life becomes the television biopic of itself."_

But he also wrote:

" _You have to romanticize your shortcomings otherwise you just have a list of shit that is wrong with you. And what the fuck are you going to do with that?"_

We are necessarily selective in our memories. But I have tried to let his voice come through.

I feel uniquely responsible for him. _Nobody else is alive because of you._

When I started writing, that last fight by text was paramount in my mind. I knew it was just one of many, but it seemed to sum it all up – my guilt, my failure. But now I see that there was no escaping that failure. Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five that his mother upset him simply by being his mother. That she made him feel ungrateful, because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life and sustain that life, but he 'really didn't like life at all.'

I brought him into this world and that is my guilt and my grace. The world would have been poorer without him. I certainly would have been. And yet he suffered disproportionately. That, too, couldn't be helped. He was in many ways larger than life. Not only because he stood six foot six and a half, but also because he felt things more deeply, saw things more truly. There was no fooling him, even when he was a small child. He wasn't always sad, though. As his friend wrote, he had 'gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.' He was outsized and couldn't be contained. He blamed me for not guiding him, but as a parent I was outsmarted by him at every turn. From the beginning I was in awe of him. I felt too lucky to have him. It always felt too... improbable. Maybe that's why it couldn't last.

Losing him is the worst thing that could have happened to me, but for him it seems fitting. He spent everything he had. He abused his body as he built it up. He was never careful, never held back. " _I HOPE MY HEART GOES FIRST!"_ I think if he knew the outcome, he would be satisfied with it. He didn't show weakness. He found the hardest way to kill himself – by reaching the limit of his strength, by spending his life.

" _Honestly, I like my pain, it makes me feel... reverent. It keeps me calm."_

" _I'm sober and at my best, or at least my strongest. I just want to be good, whatever it costs. It really is love it just manifests as fury."_

On learning martial arts, he wrote:

" _It's a priesthood of a kind. It's crazy how your body learns things. You can't learn any of this with your brain. There isn't enough time to think then do. You just learn to react appropriately. The most interesting thing to me recently has been feeling the change in my body from kickboxing. Everyone has their own rhythm their own movements, it's a war dance. It comes from the deepest part of your being._

" _It's transformation, transcendence."_

And on boxing a punching bag:

" _It's kind of intense really. It's like working out against the resistance of eternity. When you are tired. Yeah, how do you know when to stop if the thing you're fighting can't fall down?_

" _That's the thing you define yourself as a fighter against the weight of complete meaningless. Being alone with a heavy bag and really going for it is a very private thing. No else is going to know what happens there because no matter how hard you fight, the heavy bag stops moving the second you stop fighting. It's like fighting god."_

On coaching two young martial arts fighters:

" _It feels good to be able to get inside someone's head and motivate them change the way they feel about themselves. It's amazing how much about you can change through the confidence it brings."_

It seems that fighting really was a way of teaching himself how to live:

" _Be as angry as you want but there is only so far anger will shield you from what you actually feel. The more you stoke that fire the more naked and alone you will feel when it passes. There is an enormous amount of shit in this world that you have to let slide in order to be able to cope. In a fight when you are overwhelmed and in a vulnerable position on the ground the focus becomes creating a bit of space between you and the other guy, not hitting back but just finding the room to catch your breath. This is present in all battles._

" _You are always present in your opponent. For the most part you are your opponent."_

This is what he wrote his first day back to training, five days before he died:

" _It's gonna be rough. The mental game goes first. Your endorphins reset so your pain threshold is dramatically decreased. You kind of have to turn into the wind and just bite down. The harder you go the faster you get back in it. It takes me about 5 days normally to get back to 90%."_

September 21, 2011 – a day before he died, and after a two-week hiatus he was on a high:

" _I dominated. I blew everyone's mind. In the final half hour of sparring I had 8 submissions. One of which was a flying guillotine (look it up on YouTube if you can it's unbelievable that I pulled that off). I am now on the competition team. And I am def getting a tournament. I was in some kind of dream state my body just went on auto pilot. Coach said: I think we got us a fighter gentleman. I actually let a few tears go."_

The flying guillotine:

" _It's a counter to a double leg take down. Ahmed tried to grab my legs and pull them out from under me then drive me into the ground with his shoulder. I jumped wrapped my legs around his waist so that I was postured high enough to get my armpit across the back of his neck and my forearm across his throat, then I locked that in, shifted my weight backwards and brought him to the ground. So the choke is also a neck crank because it pushes your head to your chest and in the process your throat into my forearm. No one ever taught that to me. I had seen it done before and I just did it instinctively. It was so, so rewarding after all that self-doubt. I belong. I'm good enough I'm better than good enough I'm a real athlete. I really did cry and hugged the shit out of Ahmed."_

The same night he quoted from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, probably his favorite author, in what really was a non sequitur: ' _b_ _orrowed world, borrowed time and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.'_

23 September – the early morning of the day he died:

" _My night was ok I worked off my frustration. Got kicked in the face full force. Won 4 out of 5 sparring sessions. Got a hug from my 65 year old Asian lady trainer."_

At 1:40 AM:

" _Did you fall asleep?"_

They say that life is a dream. If so, I am ready to awaken when this dark night finally ends.

See you in the morning, my Sun.

### **###**

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bissera Kostova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in June 1965. She currently lives in New York.

