Leif & Nikko - First Christmas Eve Married - December 24, 1995

This photo was taken at my mother's house (Leif's grandmother, Marion S. Kundiger) on Pottawatomie Street in Manhattan, Kansas. In those days, when my brother, Donovan, and his family were living in the area, Mom would have large family gatherings at her house for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, and also birthday dinners for all those having a birthday in a particular month. We all looked forward to those events, and usually there were 13-16 people there. The Christmas of 1995 there were even more. My sister, Sherie, and her family came all the way from Michigan, and Donovan was engaged at that time and had his finance and her children there, too. It was quite a crowd.

And, of course, Leif and Nikko were there, for their first Christmas as a married couple. They were cute, playful and affectionate.

Our family has a tradition of celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve with a big dinner and opening presents. Our parents wanted us to know where our presents came from, so Santa didn't bring them. "Santa" did come and bring a few small things, like a tangerine and nuts, a toothbrush and a new pair of socks, in our stockings, but the "real" presents were from our parents and other family members. Peter W. and I continued these traditions with our own family.

Mom also waited until the afternoon of December 24th to put up her Christmas tree, a custom common in Germany and perhaps Norway. The tree was always new, magical and special for the celebration that night. Until recent years, the tree was always a real one.

And, we had our Norwegian specialties, without which it just wouldn't have been Christmas. Mom made Julekage, a Norwegian Christmas bread, which made the house smell wonderful, and cookies like Berliner Kranse.

Leif loved all those traditions, especially the Berliner Kranse.

Leif & Nikko - Married October 20, 1995 - Manhattan, Kansas

Leif and Nikko were married on October 20, 1995, by a judge at the District Court, in Manhattan, Kansas. The only other people present were Leif's best friend, Michael, and Nikko's friend, Julie.

It would have been an elopement and the marriage kept secret for awhile, except that Leif, as a college student and only 20 years old, was on our medical and auto insurance, and he knew that he wouldn't be eligible for at least the auto insurance and would have to let us know to take him off. So, he told us they were getting married, but they didn't want to have anyone else there for the ceremony. At that time, they hoped to have a wedding celebration at a later date.

I was concerned that at 20 they were too young to get married, and I tried to talk Leif into waiting until he was at least 21, which would have been only three more months, so it probably would not have made a difference, but he didn't want to wait. Leif wanted a companion, friend and lover in his life, and though he and Nikko had been together, and were now engaged, he believed they were ready for marriage. Leif was not afraid of commitment. He sought it.

I told them that getting married was a very special and important step and that I didn't want them to just go the judge and then go home as if nothing had happened, which was what they were going to do. I wanted to give them at least a small celebration of the day. So, I got a small wedding cake, make some decorations, and set up a modest but pretty table.

After the short ceremony, Leif, Nikko, Michael and Julie came to our old stone house to celebrate. My mother, Leif's grandmother, was also there. We shared wedding cake and champagne (or was it sparkling cider, since they were 20 - I don't remember any more). And we gave them some modest wedding gifts. They still wanted to wait for a bigger celebration.

It was a gorgeous fall day, one of those lovely Indian Summer days that occur late in October in Kansas. We not only took photos in the house, but outside with the turning leaves.

They were a handsome, affectionate, cute couple, with all the hopes and dreams for the future that newlyweds have. It was a special day for all of us.

Leif & Nikko - Her Birthday - October 8, 1995

Young love is beautiful. This photo was taken at Nikko's 20th birthday dinner at our old stone house on Moro Street in Manhattan, Kansas, October 8, 1995, just days before they were married.

So much has changed since that day of happiness. The old house is gone, demolished to make way for a townhouse complex. We are gone, moved away to Florida. Their marriage is gone. Leif is gone.

But in this photo, they are young, beautiful, full of hope for the future, and we rejoiced with them.

They lived near us for two years, first within a block, then across the street, then finally on the west end of town before Leif enlisted in the army, and we were happy to be able to spend time with them and share their lives.

Six Months of Missing Our Son

Today it is six months since we found Leif and the world of our family was forever changed. I miss him as much today, more, than I did in April. As the days go by, the reality, the finality slowly sets in.

In the movies, on television, death and dealing with it more or less ends with a funeral or the reading of a will. People's lives go on, as though that chapter were finished. In real life, it's not like that. We have to deal every day with the changes, the emotions, the enormous loss.

And, we have to deal with all of the tasks that go with settling the affairs of the loved one who is no longer there. This can take months, years. The myriad details eat away time and open wounds. There are all the belongings to take care of, sell, give away. There are all the financial issues to take care of, the legal ones. The mail that comes for someone now gone, everything from the ubiquitous credit card offers and magazine subscriptions to personal mail that needs to be answered.

With a death like Leif's, there are still issues concerning how he died. The detective's completed investigation just arrived, bringing with it little new information except that now I can see what was done while we had to wait outside in our car, wondering what they were doing in the apartment with our son after we called 911.

The holidays are coming, the first Thanksgiving and Christmas we will face without Leif. We are thankful we have more loving family to spend them with.

I read a horrifying statistic a few days ago, that in 1870 common diseases took the lives of half of all urban infants in the USA before their first birthday. Many more would not make it to adulthood. Modern medicine that can vaccinate children against most of those diseases has made it less common for parents to have to face the death of a child, but I have discovered that there are still many of us who have to live with this pain, and when they find out about our loss, they are willing to talk about theirs.

My heart has always gone out to anyone who loses a loved one, especially a child, especially a son or daughter in the military, but now I know, really know, what that loss means. We are many.

Unfortunately, such deaths are part of life.

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This photo was taken on a hike in the mountains in Japan in June 1982. Peter Anthony was 13 and Leif was 7 years old. It was taken by one of Jerri's Japanese friends who took us on the hike in a beautiful rural area. As always, Peter W. has his protective loving arms around his family, but there comes a time when we can no longer protect our children.

Leif & Nikko - Engaged June 8, 1995

Leif met Nikko at the SCA event, Lilies War. I believe it was in June 1993 or 1994. Nikko lived in Wichita, and they might not have gotten together if she hadn't moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where they ended up working together at the Aladdin's Castle video game parlor in the mall.

When they met, Leif had the long, long hair he had as a high school senior, but by the time of their engagement, he cut it because Aladdin's Castle had been purchased by a Japanese firm and they did not approve of long hair.

They made a very handsome couple and you could see the vitality and attraction, the vivaciousness, in their eyes.

They were engaged on June 8, 1995. This photo was taken in our yard in Manhattan, Kansas. Leif was 20 years old, and Nikko was 19. She would be 20 on October 8, four months later.

The Blog Journey - The As-Yet Unchanging Face of Sorrow

I started this blog right after Leif died without any plan or idea of what I wanted to do with it, other than remember my son and share those memories with anyone else who wanted to read them. I had no organization to it, no progression other than which memory came to me, or which photo I wanted to post and write about. At one point, I thought about trying to tell a chronological story of his life, but I didn't like it. I didn't want to just spend time on his infancy for a long period. It seemed to me that a more or less stream of consciousness of memories was more real, more like the way we do remember those we love, in random incidents that come to mind.

I also thought, when I started, that I wanted to remember the "good times," but it quickly became clear to me that doing that was also false. I had to be honest about both grief and the times that weren't happy.

And, I discovered that there isn't a way to create a truly rounded picture of Leif's life, because these are mostly photos of him, alone, and some with us, his parents, a few with his brother when they were children. There are whole areas of his life that are missing, without photos of him with friends and lovers, without accounts of their part in his life. However, it is not my story to tell those parts of his life, and I probably could not do it fairly.

Tomorrow it will be six months since Leif died. This is incomprehensible to me. How could we have lived six months without him?

I have not run out of memories, nor things to say, and there are still people from Leif's past who are just now finding out about his death, and they, too, have memories to share.

Now I see some groups of photos that tell a story in themselves, and I am going to try to post some of them that way and see how it works.

I thought that perhaps by six months, I would feel less sadness and sorrow about Leif's death, about the hole in our lives, but I don't. Each day when I wake up, I have to discover anew that Leif is not here. Each time I look at a photo or something that was his, I am struck all over again with missing him.

Except for a funeral or wake, we make grief a private affair. None of us wants to embarrass ourselves with tears (or worse, the kind of sobbing and crying that's much more vocal) in front of others. They don't want to be confronted with it, either. What can they do? They ask how we are doing, and we obligingly say we are all right, or, as I usually say, "It depends on the day and the hour," and leave it at that. But we are not all right.

There are times when I can talk calmly and rationally about Leif and his death, and times when I'm just choked up and can't speak.

Yes, all of this is normal, but it's also lonely. No one can really comfort us. No one can really see inside.

Maybe that is for the best. Although we are sometimes told it is better not to bottle up strong emotions, it is important for us, for me, to be able to control them and go on with life. But I will still cry, though I may do it alone.

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This photo of Leif was taken May 22, 1977 in Charlottesville, Virginia. We went for an outing and visited an old mill and the Michie Tavern. It was a hot day. I remember having ice cream cones. Leif loved them, loved ice cream. He was 28 months, or two years and 4 months old in this photo.

Happiness Essentials

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.
- Joseph Addison

It's succinct and correct, but the something to do needs to provide a sense of accomplishment and usefullness; the something to love needs to be something worthy of love and that returns that love; and the something to hope for needs to be something worth hoping for, something sustaining and good, and something attainable.

I wish Leif had had those things.

Leif & Peter Anthony - Playing together in Germany 1977 & 1979

Yesterday I wrote about my sons playing together when they were very young and mentioned how one minute Peter Anthony was trying to keep Leif out of his room, and Leif throwing toys at his door in frustration, and the next minute the two of the playing grand games of imagination together. The second photo, taken in Fuerth, Germany (near Nurnberg) in December 1977 may not have been taken at that exact moment, but it was taken in Peter Anthony's room where they were once again constructing a complex playscape with quite a variety of toys.

It says a lot about Leif's intelligence that he was able to play with Peter Anthony, who was six years older, and a lot about Peter Anthony that he would play with Leif. They each had their own friends, but often chose to spend time together.

In this photo, Leif is not quite three years old and Peter Anthony is days shy of his ninth birthday. Despite their occasional frustrations with each other, I found it quite amazing that a two year-old and an eight-year-old could play imaginatively together using intricate story lines and scenarios.

The photo at the top was taken two years later, in October 1979, when we were living in the German village of Sachsen bei Ansbach. Both boys were attending German schools and by this time were as fluent in German as any of the local kids in the neighborhood and our family was fully bilingual.

Each of them had German friends, Peter Anthony was in an American Cub Scout pack, and the two of them continued to enjoy playing with each other. Peter Anthony was nearly eleven years old and Leif was three months shy of four years old. They were thoroughly engrossed in and indoctrinated by the first Star Wars movie, which came out in May 1977 and you can see that's what they were playing in this picture.

When the boys outgrew those toys, I packed them up and kept them, and now they have been passed on to Peter Anthony's son, Marcus.

There were only a couple of other American kids around in our village, two girls, each the age of one of my sons. Leif and Erin were fast friends, and Peter Anthony occasionally got together with the older girl, but neither of them went to the German schools like our sons did and they didn't speak German.

The summer after the "Star Wars" play photo was taken, we moved to Japan, and there the boys continued their interest in Star Wars but added, as I have written before, an avid interest in the Japanese children's shows on television and the fantastic robot toys that were being produced in Japan at that time.

Some children never learn to play creatively, as our sons discovered when they tried to play that way with other kids, and I was always fascinated to hear them playing with such inventiveness, especially with each other.

Leif & Peter Anthony - Kyoto, Japan, Spring 1982 - Ages 7 & 13

Leif and his older brother were close and spent a lot of time together until Peter Anthony left for the Air Force Academy in the summer of 1987, and most of the time they got along well, but not always. Sometimes Peter, like most older brothers, delighted in teasing Leif or doing small things just to get a rise out of him, such as extending his right arm full length and pointing at Leif. Just that, just pointing. It drove Leif nuts.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard, "Mom, Peter's bugging me," I probably could take the family on a trip. One time, Peter did something that made Leif so angry that he grabbed a chain with a bicycle lock on it and chased Peter, swinging it. Whether he would actually have hit his brother with it, I don't know, although I doubt it. That was after he had the outburst in kindergarten and mostly had his temper under control . . . except when it came to frustration when drawing or building models, and then he'd crumple paper or, in extreme cases, break the model.

It was the usual sibling relationship. I remember when Leif was two-and-a-half and we were on the plane from the USA to Germany. They amused each other for quite some time, and then Peter got tired of it and started to get annoyed. They began squabbling, which annoyed me. Of course, it was primarily boredom at work. They were confined and ran out of things to do. Peter A. said to me, "Why does HE have to be here?" and added some comment about why we couldn't just leave him.

It wasn't long after that that Leif fell asleep. I thought Peter A. would be glad, that now he didn't have to put up with his little brother, but no, in a few minutes he was asking me, "When is he going to wake up?"

I said, "I thought you wanted to be rid of him. Now you are. Why do you want him to wake up?"

His answer was so telling, "I'm bored. There's no one to fight with."

When we got to Germany and moved into quarters in Nurnberg, Peter was eight-and-a-half and Leif was two-and-a-half. Peter quickly started making big deal about Leif not coming into his room. One day, he shoved Leif out and Leif got so upset he started throwing his toys at Peter's door. (This was before the kindergarten incident when he decided no more toy throwing.) But then, not long after that, the two of them were happily playing together and had constructed a big spaceport and city with all their toys.

By the time we moved to Japan in 1980, and Leif was five years old and precocious, they could do more together, though they each had their own friends.

These photos were taken in Kyoto in the spring of 1982 when Peter Anthony was 13 and Leif was 7. They were having a good time pretending and posing, play fighting, and making up imagination games. You can see the fake fist "fight" followed by the very genuine affection. There was a lot of that, and we loved to see it.

Leif - 1987 - 1991 - How Quickly a Boy Grows Up - Ages 12-16

These two photos were taken four years apart when we visited Leif's older brother at the US Air Force Academy in September 1987 and when he graduated in May 1991. How clearly Leif has gone from being a child of 12 to a young man of 16 (with his Oakley sunglasses hanging around his neck).

In the younger photo he is leaning on the balcony of his brother's room, wearing Peter A's squadron jacket, which he wanted to try on. I'm sure he was dreaming that he, too, might wear such a jacket, go to the Academy, become a pilot. Being a pilot was his dream, the one that was not to be because his eyes weren't good enough. He didn't have the drive to get the kind of grades needed to be competitive for the Academy, though he certainly had the mind for it. At the age of 12, though, he could still innocently dream of charging through the skies.

Leif and Peter Anthony had been close brothers all the years of Leif's young life until, when he was 12, Peter A. (six years older) left for the Air Force Academy. While he came back for Christmas visits, sometimes at spring break, and perhaps for a brief visit in the summer until 1990, they rarely saw much of each other and the bond between them slipped away.

Peter was so busy with his cadet life that he didn't have time to cultivate that relationship and it was quickly replaced by others. Leif didn't talk about it, but I believe he both felt that loss, and was also newly empowered at home and at school by not being in his brother's shadow. He blossomed, but his dream faded as he found out he could not fly.

We moved to Puerto Rico in the summer of 1990, and between then and when Peter Anthony graduated from USAFA in May 1991, we only saw him once when he came to Puerto Rico for Christmas in 1990, if my memory is correct. Then we went to Colorado Springs for his graduation.

Peter A. now says that it seemed to him as though Leif had suddenly grown very tall and slim and had jumped from being a kid to a young man in one giant leap.

It wasn't that fast, and there were several times between these two photos when they saw each other, but it was the Leif of May 1991 that impressed Peter A. with the fact that his little brother was growing up.

I know Leif looked up to Peter. When he went to college, even though he could not be a pilot, he became an Air Force ROTC cadet, hoping for an Air Force career. Even that was not meant to be. He was acing the coursework and summer camp subjects but was sent home when he pulled a muscle in his groin and could not do the sit-ups required for the physical fitness test.

He didn't show his disappointment to us, as ever putting up the good front, but I know it must have been another heavy blow to him. He could have put himself a year behind in ROTC and tried again, postponing his college graduation (which was eventually postponed, anyway), but instead he dropped out of ROTC. Who knows how his life might have been different but for a pulled muscle and that decision not to stay with ROTC. Leif would have been an outstanding Air Force officer if he had made it.

Unfortunately for both our sons, they never again spent much time in each other's company after Peter Anthony left for the Academy in the summer of 1987. The bonds that loosened were never taken up again. Although the two men had much in common, including deep interests in technology and science fiction, they rarely explored it. It was a loss for both of them.

But here in this photo of Leif at 16, you can see a young man who still was looking forward to a good life, a vital teenager coming into his own.