BRANDON LEE'S MOM REMEMBERS HIS LIFE AT GRAVESITE VISIT

Linda Lee Cadwell stared at the side-by-side graves strewn with objects of devotion: pennies, poems, smooth stones, burning incense, notes and flowers turning dry in the morning sun at Lake View Cemetery.

One grave was that of her husband, the famed martial-arts hero Bruce Lee.

The other, the freshest, was that of her son, actor Brandon Lee.

"You just never think your kids are going to die before you," she said softly.

It was Cadwell's first look at a newly installed gravestone for her son, killed two years ago at 28 during filming of The Crow, a shadowy, surreal film about a cult comic-book character who rises from his grave to avenge his killers.

Brandon Bruce Lee died 17 days before he was to marry Eliza Hutton, and the gravestone is a tribute to their young love.

Its two twisting rectangles of charcoal granite join at the bottom and pull apart at the top.

"It represents Eliza and Brandon, the two of them, and how the tragedy of his death separated their mortal life together," said Cadwell, who described her son, like his father, as a poetic and romantic person.

The inscription, in gold leaf, is a quote Brandon Lee had chosen for the wedding invitations, from Paul Bowles' book The Sheltering Sky:

"Because we don't know when we will die," it begins with eerie foreshadowing, "we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

"Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really."

Cadwell said that finally seeing her son's gravestone in place gave her a sense of peace. "It brings a kind of closure. It has been 26 months to the day since Brandon died."

Her son was in the final days of production on the North Carolina set of "The Crow" when he was shot with an improperly loaded stunt gun.

The bullet entered his abdomen and severed his spine. Cadwell, charging negligence, eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the film company of The Crow. It included an agreement with Lee's fiancee.

Producers excised the fatal scene from the film.

Cadwell, who lives in Boise, Idaho, with her third husband, Bruce Cadwell, said she initially was reluctant to see the film.

"I kept saying, `I'm not going to see it, I can't bear it.' But I finally said, `I think Brandon would want me to go see it on the big screen.' "

She went to a 5 p.m. showing at a Boise theater and cried through most of it. "The whole thing is so haunting, with everything that happened."

Cadwell and Bruce Lee, a philosophy graduate of the University of Washington, raised Brandon and daughter Shannon in Hong Kong, California and, briefly, Bellevue, Wash. She describes her son as "a handful" growing up, bright and playful. "He liked to pull practical jokes and pranks," she said. "He was either the teacher's pet or the teacher's nightmare."

His first role in a movie was at 6, kicking his way across the screen in one of his father's early martial-arts films. Brandon wanted to be an actor from the beginning, Cadwell said. He spent two years in drama at Emerson College in Boston before quitting to head to Hollywood.

Cadwell, who has helped set up a drama scholarship in her son's name at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., said Brandon finally was realizing his dream with The Crow, a movie that propelled him beyond action-film stereotypes. "It was a time in Brandon's life when everything was coming together," she said. "He could have done so much."

© 1995 Star Tribune