It could have been him

Today we went to a "showcase" performance, one where nine professional acts (eight musical and one magic) gave twelve minute performances to be rated by the large audience to give local entertainment directors as sense of what their audiences might like to have booked. In the audience were also entertainment directors from the surrounding area. These acts were all talented and varied, and several had bands that had guitarists. One even had four! Two acoustic, an electric guitar and an electric bass guitar. 

I couldn't help but remember Leif playing his four guitars, starting with a blue one he got in high school when he first got interested and started taking lessons in Highland Park, Illinois. That was his "starter" guitar, a decent instrument which he kept the rest of his life. He added a a green Kramer Floyd Rose guitar, the guitar he designed and made himself, and the blue bass guitar he is playing at left. That was the only one he ever played (briefly) in a band while he was a student at Antilles High School on Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico. This photo was taken when that band was performing at school. 

Leif loved music and had a huge collection of CDs, spent a lot of money to put a top of the line stereo in his car, and loved playing his guitars. He would practice for hours, learning some of the famous riffs and guitar solos, though never to his desired standards. I still hear them played on the radio or in television shows or movies and always remember Leif playing them.

The groups we saw today had some excellent singers. Leif could sing, too, though we didn't even know that until he turned up on the Antilles musical stage acting and singing the part of Kenickie in "Grease."

So,  couldn't help but think, if he'd had the burning desire to be a musician, he could have been on that stage. 

When Is It Time Let Let Things Go?

In April it was fourteen years since Leif's death. We had to clean out his apartment quickly to avoid paying another month's rent, sold his furniture and many of his belongings, gave others away, and brought more home to figure out what to do with them. Over time, we chose a few to keep, some because they were useful, some because we had sentimental reasons, and some because they seemed so personal and part of his identity that it seemed just plain wrong to dispose of them. 

Some of these were his wallet, which until today remains in exactly the same way he left it on his desk the night he died, with the single exception that we returned his retired military ID to the military, as is required. All this other cards remain, and the $12 in cash that was in the wallet. Of course, we reported his death to the accounts for his credit cards, and his licenses have long expired. At first, I just couldn't let go of this because, as totally illogical and foolish as it sounds, even to me, I had some sense in the back of my mind that if he came back, he would want and need it. Of course he was not coming back! We found his body and watched it being taken away in a body bag, but the unconscious part of our human minds are capable of such wishful and crazy thinking, even when our conscious minds know better.

I also kept two of this army uniforms, his "dog tags," and his combat boots. I knew he wasn't going to ever go back into the army, and he also could never have fit into them, but the military was so much of who he was, his identity, that HE had kept them, long after he was medically retired from the army. I knew they meant a lot to him. Those combat boots carried him a long way. I wonder how many miles he walked or jogged in them. After he was medically retired and sent "home" he wore them and still walked miles, miles to the university for classes when he was finishing his degree, and even, one day over ten miles round trip from our house to Tuttle Creek Lake. 

 This photo was taken on a military exercise in 1999. It looks like he's wearing the same boots I saved. The photo below are the ones I've kept for over 14 years. 

Now I am ready to let go of these things, all but the dog tags. I'm keeping those. It should be easy to discard a pair of well-worn combat boots with a hole in one side that no one wants, but it's not. It somehow still seems like a betrayal. There's no logical reason it should feel like that, but it does. 

They will go first. Next will be the wallet. Then, when I have more time and can remove the sewn-on insignia and nametag, the uniforms. I know it's time, but it still hurts. 

Hurt or not, for some reason, after fourteen years, it finally feels like the time has come. The boots aren't going to walk any farther. 

Fourteen Years

There are days in the year that are harder; the day he died, the day we found his body, his birthday,  Mother's Day, Father's Day, Fourth of July (since he loved it so), Veteran's Day, Christmas. But April 9 & 10 are the hardest, with the worst memories. It's still difficult to believe he is really gone, even after fourteen years.

How would he want to be remembered? Today, Peter W. Garretson and I looked at a myriad photos of his life, grateful we have them, grateful for the years we had him. From the baby to the toddler, to the schoolboy to the teen, from the college student to the soldier, from his SCA days to life in Florida. Ever changing, but still the same brilliant mind, the same sense of humor, the introspective frame of mind. To remember the 14th anniversary of his death, I chose one he took of himself in his SCA armor. I think he wanted to see himself as a knight in shining armor, a soldier for right. We will miss him and love him the rest of our lives.

He would be 47 years old on January 28

 

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.

Leif as Kenickie in Grease

It's been over thirteen and a half years since Leif departed this earth. What can one say that hasn't been said in all those years? And yet, as I go through all the old videos, photos, slides, and negatives, I find new images. I love to see them. I digitized our amateur video of the Antilles High School production of Grease in May 1992, in which he played Kenicke. I was surprised to see that we had some pretty good close-ups of him (that Sony camcorder had a great zoom lens) and I could grab screen shots of him, and am including three of them here. He surprised everyone, including us. No one, not his classmates (except those in the cast as they rehearsed), not us, knew he could act and sing until he got on stage. How I wish he had found a way to use that talent after this performance! He did play electric guitar, but I don't think I ever heard him sing again. He was 17 years old in these stage photos. The high school is located on Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico. 

 

Nine Months Old

I love it when I find photos of Leif I have never seen before. I found this one when I scanned more of my mother's slides, ones she never got prints from and never projected. This was taken in our yard in October 1975 when Leif was nine months old. It was lovely "Indian summer" weather, and she took quite a few photos of our family outside in our backyard then. I was surprised to see how short my hair was then, and although it looks like it was streaked, the color was totally natural. Leif looks serious. I wonder what he was thinking about. How I loved that baby!
 

Leif and the "Little Professor"

 

Way back on February 18, 2009, I wrote about Leif and the "Little Professor" as part of my post about me not being tested in the way he was and posted a link to a page about the device. Now I have a photo of it to post, courtesy of Joe Haupt on Flickr, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0 (links at the end of this post).

What I wrote in 2009 was:
" In kindergarten he was referred for testing to find out just how smart he was. The school psychologist was astonished at how high he scored and asked Leif where he learned all that. Leif's reply was that he learned it all from a "silly little game called the 'Little Professor.'"

"This, of course, wasn't true, but what was a five-year-old to say to such a question? The Little Professor was a children's math "trainer" that looked like a calculator with an owl on it. The instrument would give the child a math problem and the kid would have to key in the answer. Leif was quite good at this early on. (For those of you who never saw a Little Professor, I'm posting a link in the links section to a site that has a photo and explains it.)

"Electronic learning toys are much more sophisticated now, but I don't know whether kids learn any more than ours did from the early examples they encountered when we got to Japan."

It still hurts to know how intelligent he was yet found no job that allowed him to make use of his mind. It was always searching, always analyzing, synthesizing, and he could explain complex concepts in simple terms to just about anyone.

This photo was taken in 1981, around the time he was taking the tests and telling the counselor that he had learned everything from the Little Professor. It was taken in Kamakura, Japan and he was six years old.

Link to Joe Haupt's Little Professor photo on Flickr

Link to Creative Commons License for the photo

Thirteen years

Thirteen years ago today we got a call from Leif's boss. He was concerned. Leif had not showed up for work, nor had he called in sick. His boss told us that this was not like Leif, that he was completely reliable, and he was worried because, he said, "He rides that motorcycle."

I tried to call Leif. I tried to text message him. I sent him email. At first, I wasn't terribly worried. I thought perhaps he was ill, or asleep with a hangover....not like him, but I wasn't ready to think something terrible had happened to him. Maybe he had gone to see the woman he was interested in, in Orlando. He had planned to see her earlier in the week .

As the afternoon wore on, I started wondering if something had happened to him.. I worried that he had a motorcycle accident and might be in a hospital either in Tampa or on the way or, or in, Orlando. I started calling hospitals all through this area. No one had a patient by his name.

Leif was an excellent driver...wanted to be a race car driver, and that was the problem. He drove like a bat our of hell, to use my mother's expression. I wondered if he had been arrested for speeding or some other offense and was in jail but didn't want us to know. The county arrest records are online. I checked them. Nothing

I continued to call him, text him, email him. Nothing. I wondered if he was very ill and wasn't responding. But by evening, surely he would have responded to multiple messages or calls from his mother. He had never ignored communications from me before. 

He was a grown man. He was entitled to his privacy and his own business. I didn't want to anger or embarrass him by showing up at his door with all my fears, and yet, I was becoming more and more afraid.

Peter thought we should wait until morning and if we still hadn't heard from him, drive to Tampa. We heard nothing. I put on my pink "Worrier's Manifesto" shirt, one I had designed as a joke, thinking that if we found him, I would try to make light of my concerns. But Peter was too nervous to drive, so I drove the half hour to his Tampa apartment.

On the way, we talked about what could have happened. We agreed that if we got there and one of his vehicles (he had a motorcycle and a Mazda RX8) was gone, he must have left. If both were there, he had to be in his apartment.

As we drove up, we could see both vehicles were there and didn't know whether to be relieved or more scared. If he was there and okay, would he be upset with us for showing up? But there was no answer when we knocked and rang the doorbell, over and over.

Finally, I went to the apartment building office and explained our fears, that something had happened to him, that we were his parents, that we wanted them to let us into his apartment. I was afraid they would refuse, but the young woman escorted us back to the building and used her master key to let us in, asking us to let her know what we found.

We came in and called his name. No answer. We passed the doorway to the bathroom and bedroom, and saw that he was not in either of them. We came into the dining area where he had his computers set up. Everything on his desk was neat. His billfold and keys were there. 

And then we looked to the right into the kitchen. There he was in a pool of blood, brains and bones on the floor, slumped against the lower end of the refrigerator door, fingers turning blue. The gun was on the kitchen counter. 

I will spare you our emotional reaction. I still want to cry out, "NO, NO, NO!!! 

I knew we could not touch anything. At that point, I felt certain it was a suicide, but the police and coroner would want to determine that. It was potentially a crime scene. I called 911. Then I found his iPhone and used it to call his insurance company about his vehicles and belongings and report his death. We waited for the police. 

When they came, we were told we could not stay inside while they did their investigation. The detective (a woman) was working the scene and she had others with her that went to neighbors to see if they had heard anything or knew what happened. When she finished, she told us she thought it was an accidental shooting. She had worried about the possibility of a murder or homicide, but the evidence did not support that. Two men came and brought Leif out in a body bag. I still wonder how they got his heavy, large body into that body bag, with the mess on the kitchen floor, and down from the second floor. I wanted them to open the body back so I could hold him and say goodbye. None of them wanted to do it. They didn't think it was good for me to see him, and I knew it wasn't good for Peter, so I didn't fight them about it, and I have regretted it ever since. I just put my hands on the body bag and that was as close as I got to holding my son. They took him to the county morgue. It was a violent death and required an autopsy. 

They told us we needed to take all his valuables out of the apartment right then, and take his vehicles, or they feared they would be stolen. We went back inside and started gathering things, and realizing we could not drive his vehicles to our house. Neither of us was capable of driving a motorcycle. His car was a stick shift. I can't drive one of those, and Peter hadn't driven one in years, and was in no shape to drive. I called a neighbor who had a pickup truck and asked if one of them knew how to drive a stick shift. To this day, I don't know what their plans were for that day, but they dropped them and came. They helped us take belongings and drove his car to our house. We found someone with a trailer to load up the motorcycle and drive it to our place. We took the rest of his keys, went to the apartment office and told them about his death, what had transpired with the police, and that we would be back to clean out his apartment. 

We were in shock. Luckily we made it home safely. On the way, we called my mother. Through the evening, we were calling family members to let them know. 

It was the saddest, most horrifying day of my life. 

I miss him every day of my life.

I never wore my pink "Worrier's Anonymous" shirt again. I couldn't bear it.

The photo above was taken almost exactly 28 years ago, in April 1993. He is dressed as the "GQ Pirate" for the Society for Creative Anachronism.  

 

It would have been his 46th birthday

 

This is the thirteenth of Leif's birthdays we have spent without him. Not a day goes by that we do not think of him and talk about him, or even talk to him, though there is no answer. Our lives are still full of memories and things that remind us of him. 

As I scan more and more old slides and negatives of ours and my mother's, I find photos of him I have never seen before, or that maybe, I saw when a roll of slides was first developed and not since then, as we had only a select few developed and haven't projected slides in many years. These "new" photos are special surprises. This is one of them. I've posted photos of his birthdays, but never one of his first birthday. 

It was a small birthday party, with the four of us and the boys beloved babysitter, Rhonda. The cake was an almond cake with green frosting, and it sure did look homemade. It had a big thick candle in the middle (it had been backed in an angel food cake pan) and Leif was a little scared of it. Once the candle was blown out and removed, he enjoyed his cake and did pretty well with a spoon for a one-year-old.

We were happy that his hand was no longer bandaged that day. The poor little guy had gotten horrible third degree burns on his left hand at the old Occupational Therapy Department at Fort Riley when he grabbed an unprotected live steam pipe that fed the heating system. He had a lot of painful medical treatment and physical therapy but luckily his hand healed with no permanent injury, and the bandages were off for his birthday.

I look at those bright little eyes and know how he took in the world, figuring things out, testing them, how his mind was always working. I wish I could have made him a cake today.

Taken January 28, 1976 in the old stone house on Moro Street, Manhattan, Kansas. With him are his dad and his brother. 

Twelve Years

You would think twelve years would diminish the pain, dim the grief. It doesn't. In some ways, yes. It is not the constant terrifying companion it was in the first years. We get better at closing the door on it and keeping it at a distance. We go on with our lives, and learn to live without him. We learn that we can be happy. We learn that we can keep grief under wraps most of the time.

But the there are those days that memories flood back. Mostly, they are cause for joy, amusement, delight. We love remembering Leif and his life. We think of him every day. But sometimes memories bring back the pain.

There is no way I can ever forget the details of April 9 and 10, 2008. I manage to keep them at bay most of the time, but when the date rolls around on the calendar, I can't do it. It all comes crashing back.

I am supposed to be strong. I was always supposed to be the strong one, beginning when I was a child. And I try. People think I am. But sometimes, it's too hard.

Twelve years is a long time. And yet, it seems like yesterday. And yet, it seems like forever.

I miss him.