Coming Home -- and not coming home

Travel and work are the best antidotes to grief and depression, even if they don't always work. Initially after Leif died, even traveling didn't take me far from sorrow and tears, but as the two years passed, I found that being gone from home allowed me to focus on my trip and destination, the people I was seeing, the sights, even though we always talked about Leif. It was as though I didn't expect to see him in those places, so his absence was not painful.

Coming home, though, has continued to be sad. Although I love my home and look forward to returning to it, once I get here I am struck again with Leif's absence, with his things in my house, and the knowledge he will not be coming here ever again. I remember that the guest room was once his room, that my office was once his living room, before I moved down here from Kansas. So many memories. So many years of expectations, of seeing him, loving him.

Peter is so good to me, tries to hard to cheer me up, reminds me of all the good things in my life. He's so loving and sweet, and he's so right. I have so much to be happy about, so many reasons to enjoy life.

But none of them bring Leif back or take into account how much I miss him.

-------------------------------------
This photo of Leif was taken in Norway in the summer of 1977 when he was two-and-a-half years old.

Leif and Peter A. at at Temple in Thailand - December 1981 - Age 6

I don't remember the name of the temple where these photos were taken, but it was on the trip to Chiang Mai that we took with Ben during our trip to Thailand in December 1981. We saw so many beautiful and fascinating things. The boys enjoyed the trip as much as we did. So much variety, from the beach at Pattaya to the elephants near Chiang Mai, from the lake and dam near the Burmese border to the bridge on the River Kwai, from staying with my Thai sister, Lek, and her family to the Ancient City, from Bangkok and riding in a tuk-tuk to seeing a beauty contest in Chiang Mai. It was a wonderful trip.

Our family was so fortunate to be able to live and travel in so many interesting places. I wonder how it felt to Leif as an adult to be so circumscribed in his ability to travel, due to his financial circumstances (largely of his own making), and in many years, the lack of someone to travel with. So many things are less attractive and interesting when you have no one to share them with. He traveled so much with us as a child and some as an adult. Some people have no real interest in travel but it's hard for me to believe that Leif wouldn't have wanted to do it after all he experienced as a child, despite the fact that he told me that he'd rather spend money on things that would last like computers, other tech gadgets, a car and motorcycle and guns.
-------------
The photos: Leif and Peter A. in Thailand at a temple site, December 1981. Leif was a month shy of his seventh birthday.

The Falsehoods We Are Taught About Emotions

Stories are wonderful. They entertain us. They teach us. Sometimes they inspire us. And in the aggregate, they seem to program our minds to believe things that we somehow don't manage to learn are not true. Take the "happily ever after" ending, which isn't just attached to fairy tales, but to most stories in some form or another. Things get resolved. The characters go on with their lives, often without feeling the trauma of all they have gone through. It creates unrealistic expectations for all of us. What's wrong with us that WE can't live happily ever after, get past the hurt and trauma. Why doesn't love conquer all for us? Why doesn't something new and wonderful cancel and blot out the sadness or agony of the past? Sometimes it does, for a time, but not forever.

I've learned it's possible to be happy and sad at the same time, to go on with a good life and still feel grief at loss, to love my family and friends and still miss my dead son, to enjoy a beautiful day and still find myself with tears in my eyes when something reminds me of him.

We just returned home from a 23 day trip to South America. It was a fascinating trip, full of new places and things to see, time to relax, time to sightsee, entertainment, learning. We enjoyed it but even there we talked about Leif at least once a day and I found myself with tears in my eyes a few times, but usually not the deep sadness I felt so often before we left. I've learned that the best ways to keep that at bay are work and travel, being involved in something that engages the mind. Travel also takes me away from where Leif lived and all his things that remind me of him, and in South America I didn't see guys driving silver RX-8s, either.

We were ready to come home after such a long trip and looking forward to being here with our home, our own bed, Peter's cooking, and more exercise, seeing my sister and mother, and I was glad to be back. But, I was unprepared for the flood of emotion that hit me the second day. I was terribly sad for most of the day. I came home, driving into the garage, to see Leif's bike hanging up. In the house, all the things he helped put on the walls and into place, his photo on my desk, the memories of him driving up the driveway to come for dinner, the memory of the sound of him playing PlanetSide in his room or his music, the memory of him sitting at my dining room and kitchen tables, the letter from the IRS answering my inquiry about what to do with his economic stimulus check, the knowledge that in just a few days, he will have been dead for two years. How could it go by so fast? I still miss him with all my heart.

The worst of the sadness passed that day, and yesterday was a happy one, full of activities, beautiful Florida sunshine, and fun with Peter W. Today it's raining and something of a mixture.

We go on. We have to. We find some happiness and joy, but they sit side-by-side in our hearts with the sadness at his loss. Peter said on the trip that he thought I might never get over it.

He was right.
--------------
This photo of Leif was taken at a small temple in Thailand in December 1982. He was almost 8 years old. All his life he loved cats. What a terrible irony that as an adult his asthma was worsened by them.

Leif in Dartmouth, England - June 1980 - Age 5

Quite some time ago I wrote about our adventure in Dartmouth England in June 1980 and posted a photo of Leif rowing our rowboat at the age of five. I recounted the crazy story of him running away from me and me chasing him down with a wooden spoon. There are no photos of that, which is probably a good thing, but this photo of him in the city shows a lot better than the rowboat just how small he was and how easily it would have been for him to disappear and be lost. I'm glad that didn't happen. At that age, Leif was good at disappearing, as he had done in the Akihabara district in Tokyo and tried to do in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. He was unconcerned, as kids usually are, unaware what being lost and without mommy really means. He came close in Akihabara, when he did realize he was alone in a sea of strangers he couldn't talk to and was smart enough to stand in one place until we found him.

Five was a pivotal age for Leif in several ways. It was during that year that he stopped running off from me when we were going places and got control of his temper.

It was a year of extraordinary travel and experiences. We moved from Germany to Japan, visiting England, family in mainland USA, and Hawaii on the way.

Leif in Pacific Grove, California - July 1980 - Age 5

In his 33 years, Leif traveled many places as an army brat and many he saw only once, but a place he visited more times was the Monterey-Pacific Grove area of California during the years his Oma (paternal grandmother, Ellen Garretson) lived there. These photos were taken on one of those trips, in July 1980 when he was five years old and Peter Anthony was eleven.

The boys liked to go walk on the beach and play in the sand. There wasn't much for them to do at Oma's house except watch television, so we tried to get out of the house and go places together. Oma liked the beach, too, especially at sunset. We also took a lot of walks along the seashore path where there was no beach, only rocks, like these at Lovers Point. That was a great place for the boys (and Peter W.) to climb around like mountain goats.

Sometimes we went to visit Ellen at Christmas time and then we would drive or walk around looking at all the Christmas lights. There were some beautiful and elaborate displays we all enjoyed.

We visited Ellen before we moved to Japan, which was when these photos were taken. We were on our way, moving from Germany to Japan, and wouldn't see her again until we lived in Hawaii and she came to visit us about four years later. We weren't back in Pacific Grove with Leif until the summer of 1985, but we visited her every year at least once, sometimes twice, between 1986-1990 and then 1992-1997 when we moved her to the 710 N. 9th Street house in Manhattan, Kansas. Leif knew his Oma much better than Peter Anthony did, because Peter didn't see her on the trips we took after he left for the Air Force Academy. He did see her when he came to visit us in Kansas with his family after 1997.

Leif was a good traveler, adapted easily, or at least it seemed so, and enjoyed seeing new places and things. Looking back, though, I think he felt in some sense cut off from the world except for his dad and me, because we were the constants, always with him, and everything else kept changing. Because of our moves, he had to leave friends behind and those connections were broken. I wonder if it made it hard for him to make friends and commit himself to friendships because of the sense of loss when leaving them.

The sweater Leif is wearing in the photo where he's climbing on the rocks is the one that Peter W's Aunt Käthe made for him.

Oma died in Kansas in September 2002.