Memories of the Heart

Tomorrow, Leif will be dead for two-and-a-half years, yet it seems like yesterday that he was here, so much a part of our lives. Perhaps counting years and months is meaningless, except that we assign meaning to the time passing, and it is also a way of measuring how far we have come in our lives since his death. Tomorrow I will finally notify Facebook and MySpace to "memorialize" his accounts, and this week I closed the last of his email accounts. Somehow it seems like the time is right.

In a strange quirk of fate, that last email account of his sent out blank email messages to quite a few people in his address book. The messages were blank and had no Subject line. I got one of them. It was eerie, and really startled some people who got them. I don't know how it happened, whether someone manage to hack his account, or what, though I don't think so since there was no other unusual activity. Some people thought that perhaps he was sending some kind of a message, some form of goodbye. Several of them fervently believe this.

The messages were sent in groups and so some of those who got them replied to the others. It was interesting to see conversations develop among some of Leif's friends and acquaintances who didn't now each other. It was also odd to see which people got the blank messages and who didn't. I suppose with such an unexplained circumstance, it might be tempting or even easy to attribute it to Leif himself, and I have been told by friends to accept it as that. However, I doubt it.

Never-the-less, it seemed to come at a coincidentally meaningful time, since I was about to close these accounts.

That same day, to other interesting things happened. I went into the garage and a small brown wren flew in and perched in front of me briefly, then flew away, and that night, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and heard an owl hooting over and over in our big oak tree. That, too, was eerie.

If I were a superstitious person, I would see these all as signs, especially coming in a group of three on the same day, but I think that's just the human mind looking for patterns. I know we have owls in the neighborhood. I've seen one (very large) twice, but have hardly ever heard them, certainly not long and loud as I did that early morning.

So, if Leif was here saying goodbye, or letting us know he's around, I'm glad for it, though I don't believe that to be true. Regardless, there was something comforting in the three occurrences.

I still have bouts of sadness. I still miss him. But I also can remember the feel of his baby body and the energy in it, the alertness and the delight in his little face, and be so glad he was mine.

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This photo was very badly exposed, but it's one of few I have of Leif and me that that period of his life. It was taken on May 7, 1975, when he was not quite four months old. We were at Bluemont Elementary School in Manhattan, Kansas, the school near us where Peter Anthony was in kindergarten at that time, and they were having their spring picnic and field day. Peter W. is laughing at my "Princess Leia hairdo."