Sometimes I feel Jon within me as I work and deal with things here. I can feel him as strongly as if he were sitting next to me...how you sense a person's density or warmth..... He never was very interested in the yard or the garden, always working on his van or his carvings. Sometimes he'd go out back and play with Wishes his silly chocolate lab. But when he's with me in the garden I tell him what I'm doing, why this plant, what kinds of things you need to do....the way he'd explain what he was doing with a carburetor.....I tell how you could weed from a wheelchair, or while using crutches. I remind him how I drove a stick shift with a broken arm in a sling.

I try to let him inside my arms and hands so he can feel strong hands again, untwisted by contractures. I pay attention to bird songs and the hot sun on my back so while he sits in his wheelchair staring at the ceiling, he might be seeing me watch a blue jay and a cardinal quarrel over some seed. While I weed I tell him some plants just are too aggressive to be allowed in the garden and some plants are just in the wrong place and need to be moved. Recently I realized that I have forgotten to allow in my meditations that the plants feel it when I tear their roots...Jon seems upset when I kill a plant so I have been trying to move them instead. We have a lot of white clumped violets in the walkway so I have to find a good bed for them where they won't get walked on. It's odd but when Jon first came to me and I let him in, I suddenly could feel a trache in my throat, the taste of the plastic filled my mouth and I could hear the hissing air. I decided that if feeling my son's pain was a price for letting him out for a walk in the sun, then I would take the pain any time he wants to come visit.

Jon comes, I think, around the time he's in coma stim, when they put on that loud movie and do random things to his body. I think that all that sensory stimulation is maybe misdirected, at least in his case. I think he needs somehow to be allowed to make some choices, so lately when I think he's in there I ask him what he wants to do. Sometimes I drive somewhere and he gets scared when pickups go by, I can feel him tighten up and I get old memories of accidents I've been in. It's a funny experience because he and I both have had about the same number of accidents and even when they had to cut me out of my car, I only broke a couple of vertebrae and walked out of the hospital about two weeks later. I've always had what they call "fey luck" I have good luck because I need it, whereas poor Jon had bad luck and didn't deserve it.

I hope my poor boy doesn't die before I do, because I may be the only way he can take a walk in the garden. I don't "know" if it's true, but I feel that it is and that makes some things easier for me. I just hope it makes some things, a lot of things, easier for Jon.