neuage (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} neuage) wrote,@ 2007-08-26 18:53:00 |
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Olympic Park Sydney
Olympic Park and what transpired there on 16 August 2003 -
Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:10 PM Olympic Park Sydney (video @ Leigh 07 )
I look first at my times at this place in the world that I always return to on 16th August:
* 2001
January 2001. I came here from Adelaide to watch Leigh play on the U-18s Nationals. I forget which teach
South Australia was against at the time but Leigh was doing well. At one point his finger began to bleed – perhaps a cut opened – the coach wanted to take him out but after getting bandaged he was back striking out the other team. I do not even remember whether
South Australia won that game. He was a month from signing with a major league club and we were all excited. Atlanta, Cleveland, Arizona, and Los Angeles (he signed with the Dodgers in February 2001 though for several months we thought it would be with Atlanta and the year before Arizona looked the best).
* 2003
The worse days of my life were 16 – 20 August 2003. The days before were not only the worse days of Leigh’s life but the last too. Narda and I were to leave Australia on the 18th (Monday) and after stopping in Hawaii a few days return to teaching at the University of
New York at the end of August. I was finishing my PhD and that Saturday, the 16th, unknown to me (this has been the most troubling aspect, that as a parent I did not feel anything amiss) when I was preparing to submit my thesis Leigh was already dead, having died at 5.30 am when I was asleep, totally unaware of my son’s stress. From Melbourne Sacha telephoned Narda (as the police contacted him first – what a thing to tell a twenty-two year old that his brother had just died) and she came to university to tell me. We got the next flight to
Sydney with Sacha being there an hour later and Leigh’s mother arriving the next day. The look on Leigh’s face was so filled with terror. I could not believe what his last thoughts were – except at some point in that two second fall he may have realized his mistake with no way to stop. Narda, Sacha and I spent the night of the 16th at Olympic Park looking out at the stadium that Leigh would have seen before he sat on the balcony and went backwards to the footpath below.
* 2004
As we come to Australia for each northern summer and leave via Sydney I have a memorial each year for Leigh. The first year after his death I could not stay at the hotel and stayed in the city, taking the train to Olympic Park to light a candle and put up a memorial. It was extremely windy and the candle would not stay lit. I received an email from the police officer (Sgt. Malcom) that he had gone to the site on the day too and had seen my memorial. He said he was quite affected by Leigh’s death. We corresponded for a couple of years. I suppose anyone reading his memorial guestbook would feel something – though I have never read all the entries and may never read them - I never wrote in it either – what could I possibly say?
* 2005
This time Narda and I stayed at the hotel on the 16th and left the next day for New York. It was windy and cold again.
* 2006
Narda and I stayed at the hotel on the 16th and left the next day for New York. It was windy and cold again. This is not a routine – I have written these stops in previous blogs for this date.
* 2007
This year was different in that I stayed at the hotel in Olympic Park by myself for three days. What caught my eye at the airport baggage collection point was my suitcase with my name in large texture style on the side and of course my address too. I was reminded of when my mother would put my name on everything before sending me off to camp. I suppose after being married for six years one’s wife believes that a husband needs their name in large letters on their suitcase when they go off alone. Blimey. I really had a hard time sleeping last night – the 15th. After lighting a candle on the footpath and putting up some flowers that I had picked from a nearby flowerbed (Leigh would have agreed – he once picked a bouquet of flowers for a girl friend from a flowerbed at McDonalds) I went to bed but I was awake most of the night – especially between five and six on the 16th. I am not writing about my feelings so much here. In a story I started writing on 06 July 2003 I tell more. (In 2003 I started writing a history of life with my sons, to my two boys. Narda and I were in
Frankfurt and she was catching up with past years with a friend so I started writing my story “Leaving Australia”. I did not think about it until a week later when we were in
Korea but I had started writing my life thingy on Leigh’s twentieth birthday. Because I had raised Sacha and Leigh on my own and we had a bit of a strange trot through life I thought my children would understand their lives more by reading not only what we had been through but what I had been through before becoming a single parent. Of course how would I know that Leigh would die six weeks after I started writing? I have written heaps – some 170,000 words so far – I think I am almost finished though and now my only reader will be Sacha. Of course Narda, I hope, will read it). It has been a good stay – I have had a lot of quiet reflective thoughts and I have lit my candle and walked around Olympic Park a lot. I see this whole place as a memorial to Leigh as I wrote about in last year’s blog. It is interesting in that no one else in the area would imagine such thoughts. The tourists and sports players here now are training for the Olympics in China next year. I suppose Leigh would have gone to them too. He was on the 2004 team for
Athens but instead decided to end his life in front of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Stadium.
* 2008 +
This is my last public memorial for Leigh…
Rest In Peace that you could not find on this planet. We started on the Internet together in 1993 and on computers in 1991 and I am still on the Internet and you chose to move on. Thank you for so many years connected with me on the Internet and in Real Life. You are now so more fully connected to a new life that I can not grasp so far beyond the pains and sorrows of this life.
Leigh was quite upset with me doing webpages for him after he signed. When he was between ten and about fifteen (1993 – before the web had taken off and 1998) we made webpages together. Grief takes on so many forms, levels and colorations and for these first four years I have tried to be with Leigh through webpages. In the future I will do it within myself. Sacha is doing well; he has chosen to embrace life and I will embrace it with him. His latest album has Leigh’s baseball card as his logo with DB beneath it (Dodgy Brothers – because of the Dodgers and because dodgy is Australian slang…). I have never favoured one son but I did understand the world of baseball more than the world of hip hop so it was easier to make sense of sports but because what Leigh did is so far beyond what I am capable to comprehend I have been overwhelmed by this for the past four years. However, as I put an end to my public sharing of Leigh I will embrace all that Sacha has to offer and watch his life bloom. One thing that is for sure is that I have no interest at all in baseball – and that is after growing up with it. Actually, I have no interest in any sports. Rap music is an acquired taste for an old person and I am trying…..
*
How do we know when someone is so depressed that nothing will stop them from ending life? Leigh wrote a six thousand work letter to his girl friend, Veronica, who was in the quarter finals of the Australian Idol competition at the Novotel Hotel in Olympic Park. He apparently did not wait for her response as he was on a flight the same day from Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida to Sydney. The date on his computer for sending the letter was 13 August 2003 and from his receipts he was on a flight soon after. The return ticket was never used and I keep it framed above my desk (currently in
New York City). Veronica could have emailed me (I had said hi to her in a chatroom just a few days earlier so she knew my email – saying that I was in Adelaide at the time finishing my PhD thesis) or she could have contacted Leigh’s mother in Adelaide. She did nothing and Leigh spent the day of the fifteenth with Veronica.
last meal with Veronicalast meal Sydney Harbour 15 August (with Veronica)
She was staying at the Novotel and Leigh requested a room on the top floor with a balcony. She said he was very unresponsive all day and with him to get them a suite with a balcony after knowing about his email to her she should have been concerned. I have not had contact with her since Leigh’s funeral and I never will. Even though she was but a teenager herself (18 or 19 at the time) she could may have been able to prevent this loss. Maybe I am the only who feels that my life ended when Leigh hit the pavement.
Leigh’s writings are too private but to quote a small portion of his letter showing his intentions is enough never to heal the pain
part of what he wrote "……it is inevitable that one day I will kill myself.…I figured I would jump off the bridge. You know the bridge, that goes over the island. That would kill me. At this point, it is still in my head, and I know if something drastic happens, that that is where you’ll be able to find me, floating in that river. But I’m not obsessing over it non-stop like I was a couple of days ago. So anyway, I was on my way out of the door and it literally started just absolutely pouring. It’s been raining a lot lately, just out of nowhere. It’ll be all sunny one minute and then there will be a huge storm. Anyway, the bridge is a damn long way away, and I really didn’t want to walk there in a storm. I actually thought that my walk to the bridge would be a really nice peaceful time for me, alone with my thoughts and preparing myself to die. Anyway, I tried to tell myself that it might be a sign, that there might be more reason to hold on. I took off my shoes and got into bed. This is the day that I stayed in bed all day long. When I finally got out of bed, I didn’t have the same urge to die. I didn’t NEED to do it right that second. And then we spoke shortly after that. And that’s where I’m at right now in the evolution of depressiveness in my head throughout my life. About the obsessions, I’m haven’t started to think about when that came about. All I’ve thought about so far is why I have this desire to kill myself and why I still think that eventually I will. …"
"...I remember spending so long staring off my balcony at the concrete, wondering if I landed squarely on my head if I would die (I doubt it, it wasn’t very high) But still, even so, it was never so bad that I had to consciously hold myself back from doing it. Until this week. This week, at so many moments, if I could have ended it right away, I would have. .."
Leigh’s ticket to Sydney Leigh's ticket to Sydney - the other portion - the return ticket is on my desk at my current home in Brooklyn NY.
One of Leigh’s friends in Florida, Amy, continued writing him after he died. She did not know until she saw a memorial webpage when she Googled “Leigh Neuage” that he was no longer here. Of the many emails in his Hotmail account there were these (Amy told me his password so that I could read his account):
From : Amy … <… @hotmail.com>
Sent : Sunday, August 17, 2003 7:35 PM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
How are you?Just wondering how life has been treating you...Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Sunday, August 24, 2003 12:28 AM
To : llskdodger@msn.com
Leigh -
Where have you been?
Is everything ok?
Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Friday, August 29, 2003 8:34 PM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
Leigh, Where are you? Are you even here anymore? I haven't heard from you in a long time. What's up?Just started school. Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:22 AM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
Leigh, Are you mad at me? Why are you not responding to my e-mails?Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Thursday, September 18, 2003 3:11 AM
To : lskdodger@msn.com
Are you no longer speaking to me
Leigh’s last photo
Figure 2 self portrait - last photo on Leigh's camera
Olympic Park and what transpired there on 16 August 2003 -
Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:10 PM Olympic Park Sydney (video @ Leigh 07 )
I look first at my times at this place in the world that I always return to on 16th August:
* 2001
January 2001. I came here from Adelaide to watch Leigh play on the U-18s Nationals. I forget which teach
South Australia was against at the time but Leigh was doing well. At one point his finger began to bleed – perhaps a cut opened – the coach wanted to take him out but after getting bandaged he was back striking out the other team. I do not even remember whether
South Australia won that game. He was a month from signing with a major league club and we were all excited. Atlanta, Cleveland, Arizona, and Los Angeles (he signed with the Dodgers in February 2001 though for several months we thought it would be with Atlanta and the year before Arizona looked the best).
* 2003
The worse days of my life were 16 – 20 August 2003. The days before were not only the worse days of Leigh’s life but the last too. Narda and I were to leave Australia on the 18th (Monday) and after stopping in Hawaii a few days return to teaching at the University of
New York at the end of August. I was finishing my PhD and that Saturday, the 16th, unknown to me (this has been the most troubling aspect, that as a parent I did not feel anything amiss) when I was preparing to submit my thesis Leigh was already dead, having died at 5.30 am when I was asleep, totally unaware of my son’s stress. From Melbourne Sacha telephoned Narda (as the police contacted him first – what a thing to tell a twenty-two year old that his brother had just died) and she came to university to tell me. We got the next flight to
Sydney with Sacha being there an hour later and Leigh’s mother arriving the next day. The look on Leigh’s face was so filled with terror. I could not believe what his last thoughts were – except at some point in that two second fall he may have realized his mistake with no way to stop. Narda, Sacha and I spent the night of the 16th at Olympic Park looking out at the stadium that Leigh would have seen before he sat on the balcony and went backwards to the footpath below.
* 2004
As we come to Australia for each northern summer and leave via Sydney I have a memorial each year for Leigh. The first year after his death I could not stay at the hotel and stayed in the city, taking the train to Olympic Park to light a candle and put up a memorial. It was extremely windy and the candle would not stay lit. I received an email from the police officer (Sgt. Malcom) that he had gone to the site on the day too and had seen my memorial. He said he was quite affected by Leigh’s death. We corresponded for a couple of years. I suppose anyone reading his memorial guestbook would feel something – though I have never read all the entries and may never read them - I never wrote in it either – what could I possibly say?
* 2005
This time Narda and I stayed at the hotel on the 16th and left the next day for New York. It was windy and cold again.
* 2006
Narda and I stayed at the hotel on the 16th and left the next day for New York. It was windy and cold again. This is not a routine – I have written these stops in previous blogs for this date.
* 2007
This year was different in that I stayed at the hotel in Olympic Park by myself for three days. What caught my eye at the airport baggage collection point was my suitcase with my name in large texture style on the side and of course my address too. I was reminded of when my mother would put my name on everything before sending me off to camp. I suppose after being married for six years one’s wife believes that a husband needs their name in large letters on their suitcase when they go off alone. Blimey. I really had a hard time sleeping last night – the 15th. After lighting a candle on the footpath and putting up some flowers that I had picked from a nearby flowerbed (Leigh would have agreed – he once picked a bouquet of flowers for a girl friend from a flowerbed at McDonalds) I went to bed but I was awake most of the night – especially between five and six on the 16th. I am not writing about my feelings so much here. In a story I started writing on 06 July 2003 I tell more. (In 2003 I started writing a history of life with my sons, to my two boys. Narda and I were in
Frankfurt and she was catching up with past years with a friend so I started writing my story “Leaving Australia”. I did not think about it until a week later when we were in
Korea but I had started writing my life thingy on Leigh’s twentieth birthday. Because I had raised Sacha and Leigh on my own and we had a bit of a strange trot through life I thought my children would understand their lives more by reading not only what we had been through but what I had been through before becoming a single parent. Of course how would I know that Leigh would die six weeks after I started writing? I have written heaps – some 170,000 words so far – I think I am almost finished though and now my only reader will be Sacha. Of course Narda, I hope, will read it). It has been a good stay – I have had a lot of quiet reflective thoughts and I have lit my candle and walked around Olympic Park a lot. I see this whole place as a memorial to Leigh as I wrote about in last year’s blog. It is interesting in that no one else in the area would imagine such thoughts. The tourists and sports players here now are training for the Olympics in China next year. I suppose Leigh would have gone to them too. He was on the 2004 team for
Athens but instead decided to end his life in front of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Stadium.
* 2008 +
This is my last public memorial for Leigh…
Rest In Peace that you could not find on this planet. We started on the Internet together in 1993 and on computers in 1991 and I am still on the Internet and you chose to move on. Thank you for so many years connected with me on the Internet and in Real Life. You are now so more fully connected to a new life that I can not grasp so far beyond the pains and sorrows of this life.
Leigh was quite upset with me doing webpages for him after he signed. When he was between ten and about fifteen (1993 – before the web had taken off and 1998) we made webpages together. Grief takes on so many forms, levels and colorations and for these first four years I have tried to be with Leigh through webpages. In the future I will do it within myself. Sacha is doing well; he has chosen to embrace life and I will embrace it with him. His latest album has Leigh’s baseball card as his logo with DB beneath it (Dodgy Brothers – because of the Dodgers and because dodgy is Australian slang…). I have never favoured one son but I did understand the world of baseball more than the world of hip hop so it was easier to make sense of sports but because what Leigh did is so far beyond what I am capable to comprehend I have been overwhelmed by this for the past four years. However, as I put an end to my public sharing of Leigh I will embrace all that Sacha has to offer and watch his life bloom. One thing that is for sure is that I have no interest at all in baseball – and that is after growing up with it. Actually, I have no interest in any sports. Rap music is an acquired taste for an old person and I am trying…..
*
How do we know when someone is so depressed that nothing will stop them from ending life? Leigh wrote a six thousand work letter to his girl friend, Veronica, who was in the quarter finals of the Australian Idol competition at the Novotel Hotel in Olympic Park. He apparently did not wait for her response as he was on a flight the same day from Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida to Sydney. The date on his computer for sending the letter was 13 August 2003 and from his receipts he was on a flight soon after. The return ticket was never used and I keep it framed above my desk (currently in
New York City). Veronica could have emailed me (I had said hi to her in a chatroom just a few days earlier so she knew my email – saying that I was in Adelaide at the time finishing my PhD thesis) or she could have contacted Leigh’s mother in Adelaide. She did nothing and Leigh spent the day of the fifteenth with Veronica.
last meal with Veronicalast meal Sydney Harbour 15 August (with Veronica)
She was staying at the Novotel and Leigh requested a room on the top floor with a balcony. She said he was very unresponsive all day and with him to get them a suite with a balcony after knowing about his email to her she should have been concerned. I have not had contact with her since Leigh’s funeral and I never will. Even though she was but a teenager herself (18 or 19 at the time) she could may have been able to prevent this loss. Maybe I am the only who feels that my life ended when Leigh hit the pavement.
Leigh’s writings are too private but to quote a small portion of his letter showing his intentions is enough never to heal the pain
part of what he wrote "……it is inevitable that one day I will kill myself.…I figured I would jump off the bridge. You know the bridge, that goes over the island. That would kill me. At this point, it is still in my head, and I know if something drastic happens, that that is where you’ll be able to find me, floating in that river. But I’m not obsessing over it non-stop like I was a couple of days ago. So anyway, I was on my way out of the door and it literally started just absolutely pouring. It’s been raining a lot lately, just out of nowhere. It’ll be all sunny one minute and then there will be a huge storm. Anyway, the bridge is a damn long way away, and I really didn’t want to walk there in a storm. I actually thought that my walk to the bridge would be a really nice peaceful time for me, alone with my thoughts and preparing myself to die. Anyway, I tried to tell myself that it might be a sign, that there might be more reason to hold on. I took off my shoes and got into bed. This is the day that I stayed in bed all day long. When I finally got out of bed, I didn’t have the same urge to die. I didn’t NEED to do it right that second. And then we spoke shortly after that. And that’s where I’m at right now in the evolution of depressiveness in my head throughout my life. About the obsessions, I’m haven’t started to think about when that came about. All I’ve thought about so far is why I have this desire to kill myself and why I still think that eventually I will. …"
"...I remember spending so long staring off my balcony at the concrete, wondering if I landed squarely on my head if I would die (I doubt it, it wasn’t very high) But still, even so, it was never so bad that I had to consciously hold myself back from doing it. Until this week. This week, at so many moments, if I could have ended it right away, I would have. .."
Leigh’s ticket to Sydney Leigh's ticket to Sydney - the other portion - the return ticket is on my desk at my current home in Brooklyn NY.
One of Leigh’s friends in Florida, Amy, continued writing him after he died. She did not know until she saw a memorial webpage when she Googled “Leigh Neuage” that he was no longer here. Of the many emails in his Hotmail account there were these (Amy told me his password so that I could read his account):
From : Amy … <… @hotmail.com>
Sent : Sunday, August 17, 2003 7:35 PM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
How are you?Just wondering how life has been treating you...Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Sunday, August 24, 2003 12:28 AM
To : llskdodger@msn.com
Leigh -
Where have you been?
Is everything ok?
Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Friday, August 29, 2003 8:34 PM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
Leigh, Where are you? Are you even here anymore? I haven't heard from you in a long time. What's up?Just started school. Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:22 AM
To : "Leigh Neuage" <lskdodger@msn.com>
Leigh, Are you mad at me? Why are you not responding to my e-mails?Amy
From : Amy … <…@hotmail.com>
Sent : Thursday, September 18, 2003 3:11 AM
To : lskdodger@msn.com
Are you no longer speaking to me
Leigh’s last photo
Figure 2 self portrait - last photo on Leigh's camera
