Is Leif Free?

Tuesday, March 2nd, as I was resting in the afternoon on board the NCL ship Norwegian Sun, I was thinking how we had hoped to take Leif on another cruise, and how our first NCL cruise with him when he was 18 was such a special experience for him. I was thinking that this particular cruise would not have been a good one to take him on because there are so few people under 60 on board, except for the cadt snd crew, and then thinking how hard it is to realize that the handsome young man who was on that Caribbean cruise was so far from the unhappy, overweight man I found dead on his kitchen floor nearly 15 years later. How could his life, so promising, go so horribly wrong?

At that moment it was as if I thought from Leif was in my head and he was saying, "Mom, don't you know I'm free now? The pain is over. Be glad for me."

In one sense, that was like the lifting of a burden, but my answering thought was that his pain might be over, but mine was not, and I will always be asking why he had such a painful life and found no way out of that pain but death.

How am I to understand these "messages"? Are they from him (though I have never felt his presence after death) or are they the inventions of my own mind, conjured up from all I know of him and what I need to "hear"?

How I wish he had found his soulmate, his purpose, his health in body and soul, and lived to enjoy the kind of life Peter and I have together.
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This photo is of Leif at a woods playground near Camp Zama, Japan called Kodomo no Kuni (Children's Pkayground). It was in 1981, I think, when he was 6 years old.