How does one celebrate the birthday of a loved one no longer living? We remember them....from birth to toddlerhood, from child to teen to adult, from soldier to corporate employee. So many years, and yet so few, only 33, and then he was gone. He would be 47 today, if he had lived. What would he have been like? Would he have found love, married, had children? We will never know. I am grateful for the photos and the memories. I am still finding new photos as I scan my mother's slides and negatives. This one I think she took in her house. I do know it was taken in August 1994 when he was nineteen and a student at Kansas State University, still a slim fellow who hadn't yet been required to cut his long hair for his job at Aladdin's Castle video game parlor in the Manhattan Mall.
What he's wearing has some significance. The t-shirt was a gift from his brother, who had been an Air Force Academy cadet. It's a USAFA Boxing shirt. The necklace is chain mail that Leif made himself. He made a lot of chain mail items, from small things like this necklace and some earrings, to giant projects like the huge chain mail shirt he made that weighed 50 pounds. He learned to make chain mail due to his interesting in medieval armor and participating in the Society for Creative Anachronism.
We miss him every day of our lives. In April, he will be gone from us fourteen years.
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