Augusten’s Blog

Happy Birthday Leap Kids!!!!! who get to age slower than everybody else.

AIDS has now surpassed the Black Death on its course to become the worst pandemic in human history. At the end of 2004, 20 million people had been killed by it, and twice that number are currently infected with HIV. Barring a medical breakthrough, it could claim the lives of some 60 million people by 2015. AIDS exerts a terrible toll on societies, crippling their economies, decimating their labour forces and orphaning their children.

Nine out of 10 people living with HIV are in the developing world; 60 to 70% of those are in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the disease is spreading in every region, with fierce epidemics threatening to tear through countries such as India, China, Russia and the islands of the Caribbean. The statistics are sobering - in some Southern African towns 44% of pregnant women are HIV positive, in Botswana 37% of people carry the virus.

- New Scientist

Friday, February 1, 2008, Los Angeles, California. In Memory.

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,

Our statures touch the skies-
~Emily Dickinson.

It was spring and Dennis and I were outside in the driveway. I don’t remember what we were doing -maybe washing the car or watering the striped crocuses, misting them gently so that we didn’t knock them plain over on their skinny legs.

I remember that I looked up. And across the street, standing in our neighbor’s driveway, was a woman I’d never seen before. She was so brightly lit, as if she somehow carried her own source of light. She was dressed in jewel tones, and her lips were exactly ruby red. I thought of California. And then she started walking toward us with our neighbor, Carleen.

“Guys, this is my mom, Susan,” is what Carleen said.

Susan smiled and there was sun in her mouth. Her gold hair glittered and when I took her hand it was soft and perfect, her bright glossy nails reflected the sky. I think, I fell a little bit in love with her right there on the driveway. This is Carleen’s mother, I remember thinking. What were the implications? Carleen seemed always so…smart. Ambitious. So serious. And this woman, made of light and color, was her mother. Oh yes, I would have to give this some thought.

We invited her inside and gave her a tour of our house. And she was gracious, complimenting our favorite painting, the four-hundred-year-old chair I love most. We talked that day like we had known each other for years. She told me she was a librarian. She knew I was a writer. I was impressed by her grace, her style. And of course, her impossible charisma.

And it had begun. We became friends with Henry and Carleen; we came to love their children, Kai and Claire. And when Susan came to New England for a visit, we always looked forward to seeing her. There were meals at our home. And Christmas dinners at theirs. Just this last Christmas she told me that when she was a girl she picked cotton. Carleen gasped. “You never told me that, mother.” And Susan replied, “Honey, you don’t know everything there is to know about me.” And she smiled that smile of hers, a weapon in the wrong hands. Glorious, beautiful, beautiful.

I remember Susan sitting in the white chair in front of the window in our home once, her head throw back in laughter. Dennis insisted she have another glass of champagne. Susan smiled, “Oh, no, I probably shouldn’t.” But she extended her glass.

I would often wonder, what must it have been like to be able to say, all your life and whenever you wanted, “This is my mom.”

To see the way she looked at her daughter across the table? I don’t know the words to describe what I saw. I believe when Susan looked at her daughter, she said to herself, “There is the very best I could do. There is everything good I had to offer the world.”

I was standing in the driveway again this past summer when Dennis came to me and said, “Susan has cancer. It’s very bad.” I shocked myself by bursting into heaving, horrendous tears. I hadn’t cried in how long? It had been years. In the space of a life, I had known Susan for just a single sweep of the second hand. But I sobbed there on the driveway because something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with the universe.

Over the next months, I watched my ambitious, intense, neighbor and friend Carleen step off the tenure track at the job she’d worked so hard to earn, so that she could care for her mother, so that she could be something greater than a tenured professor -so that she could be a Good Daughter, loving fiercely her magnificent and brave and dying mother.

For months I didn’t see Carleen. Her home office window was always dark. But I knew where she was -in California; painting mom’s toenails, or roasting a chicken -she was busy assuring that grace prevailed.

Susan has died. Susan is gone. And there is measurably less light in California. Indeed, the world is a darker place now. But Susan lives in me - what she gave me I will never lose; what she showed me I will never look away from. And more important, Susan lives on in the grandchildren she cherished: regal Kai, daring Claire. She lives on in her beloved son-in-law, Henry. And most, most of all, Susan lives on and on within her brilliant son, Tim and her fiery, soulful daughter, Carleen.

Sometimes, when Carleen is sitting in our living room having a glass of wine and finally -finally- laughing, I recognize her mom in those sparkling eyes and I see how very much alike they truly are. As time moves forward, I believe more of Susan will unfold within Carleen, a gift unwrapped in time, and I believe Carleen will be a happier person, her mother always with her. One day, Carleen will open her mouth and California sunlight will spill out. And I believe Susan’s beautiful son will continue to spread his invincible charm as he finds -perhaps invents- his own way in this life. I’m sure his mom will watch and make suggestions: a flat tire before an interview for a very bad job; a phone call that arrives just exactly at the right time.

And there will be kisses, felt on the cheek at the oddest times. A whiff of her perfume.

A certainty in your bones that Mom was just right there beside you. And you will know.

Susan has, then, not died after all. She has generously spread herself all, all around. She is now in each of us -inside you and inside me and we, all of us, are brighter for it. Tonight, when you are alone and you feel dark, look in the mirror and see if you do not notice a certain brightness that was not there before. The slightest spark, fire- entirely new.

And at night, when you look up at the sky, you will see her there, among the stars, the planets and the galaxies. You will recognize her because no matter where you look- north, south, east or west, she will always be the single brightest point in all the sky.

-Augusten Burroughs