Quote from "The Little Prince"

Today as I was straightening up my office, I came across the guest book for our wedding. Inside it was a paper on which I had written a quote from the book, "The Little Prince," by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I no longer have any idea why I wrote it down or what it meant to me at the time, but it is so terribly true.

"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."

Is it ironic that right under the guest book were two cassette tapes which contain a recording of my father's funeral in 1960 and some of his piano compositions? It's undoubtedly a coincidence. They were not "together" in the sense of meaningfully having been placed that way, but they belong together, just as they belong in a thematic way next to the red little metal bucket with the white polka dots that came from Leif's office and holds some of his things.

The land of tears IS a secret place, a place where no one else can really go with us, and from which we can only emerge by ourselves, though often with the help of the love of others.

I'm glad I found this today and not three years ago. Today I can say that I do not live in the land of tears. Today I can smile.

Putting a Face on Suicide Project

Mike Purcell lost his young son to suicide in 2008, the same year Leif died, and started the Putting a Face on Suicide Project. He is creating tribute pages for those who have died by their own hand, submitted by family members and friends, and plans to continue this for 365 days. Each photo submitted is shown on a tribute photo page in an album for that day. Leif and my father appear in Day Four. There is a separate album of tribute pages for those who served in the miliary, and Leif appears there as well. He also makes videos of each day, and the videos are available as links from the project video page on Facebook, or from the pafosproject page on YouTube.

Leif and my father appear in "Day Four." The links to the photo album page and YouTube video for Day Four are below.

Putting a Face on Suicide Day Four video

Putting a Face on Suicide Day Four photo album

The project makes composite poster pages from hundreds of the photos submitted, creating a face from faces. These are available as posters that can be used for suicide awareness.

I have always felt, ever since my father died in 1960, that it is important to be honest and open about suicide and it's terrible impact on those left behind as well as the deep need to help those who are in such despair that they contemplate taking their own lives.

If you go to the Putting a Face on Suicide page, you can't help but be struck by the smiling faces that look happy . . . at least in those pictures, at least for the camera, by the misery and grief of those left behind, and by the many projects that families are doing to memorialize their lost loved ones and educate people about this silent epidemic. I thank Mike Purcell for creating this poignant and important project. Only someone else who has gone through the pain of losing a loved one to suicide can understand what he went through and continues to suffer. Creating a project like this is a tremendous way of helping others cope with the loss and emotions they likely have few other places to share.

If you want to know more about Mike Purcell's son and how he died, visit the Christopher Lee Purcell Memorial Page on Facebook, and if you are a suicide survivor, or know those who are, recommend the Putting a Face on Suicide Project to them.

How Much Did Heredity Play a Part?

When I saw this photo of my father when he was about eight years old, I was struck once again by the resemblance to Leif at the same age. My dad's home haircut was a bit more jagged than Leif's, and the color photo of Leif makes it harder to compare the two, but I still see such a similarity. They both are beautiful children, and both have a certain vulnerability about them, a certain tenderness.

Were there any signs, in either of them, at this young age, that their adult lives would end in suicide?

Beyond that, what else did they have in common? Both were extremely intelligent. Both had only one sibling, another brother, six years apart, though my father had a younger brother and Leif had an older one. Both were dreamers and described as moody. Both liked to take photos when they were teens. Both liked music, though their musical tastes only overlapped in a few areas. Both liked pie, good food, stage plays and movies. But most of those things are superficial, things many people share and they aren't connected to suicide.

Leif had a harder and sadder adulthood than my father did, from a repeatedly broken heart to financial difficulties he couldn't solve, from being robbed to being injured in a motorcycle accident. He served in the army, which my father never did. He was divorced, which my father never was. He had no children. My father had four. He had no faith. My father was a professed Christian, though I think some of his views were less than properly doctrinaire.

But despite the lack of some strong and obvious characteristic that linked their fate, I believe there was a link. Was it genetic? Was it example? Was it both?

I will never know, but it is so hard to look at these beautiful and hopeful young faces and know that despair ended their lives. Grandfather and grandson who never knew each other but shared a common fate.

I miss them both. My father has been dead for 51 years now, and I don't associate him with Florida and my adult life, so I don't miss him acutely and daily, but I do still miss him and deep down in my heart, when I open that door, I grieve for him. He was only a part of my life for twelve years. Leif was mine for thirty-three, and though he has been dead for over three years now, there is no day that goes by without us talking about him, remembering him, no day that I don't miss him, no day that I don't still ask why.

What was the link? Why did they both take their lives? No matter how many reasons we can give, it is still no explanation. It still doesn't reveal how a man can consciously decide to drink cyanide, or knowingly put a gun to his head and pull the trigger.

Doomed by a Gene for Depression?

Today is the 51st anniversary of my father's death. Donald Gerald Kundiger took his life by swallowing cyanide around 2:00 a.m. on February 10, 1960, in the bathroom of his home. I heard him fall and found him on the floor.

Forty-eight years later, my son, Leif Ashley Garretson, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning of April 9, 2008, put a gun to his head and took his life. I found him the next day.

Were both these men doomed from the start by a gene for depression? Or did they have it and it was "activated" by some trauma? so many unanswered questions, but some things they both had in common include brilliant intelligence, the ability to concentrate piercingly, excellent memories, winning smiles, thinning hair, brown eyes, an interest in music and world politics, a fascination with science . . . and death.

Do you think they resemble each other? I do. I think the resemblance is striking. It's hard to find them in a similar pose at the same age so that the comparison is easy, but these two photos show it. Leif would even more like him if he hadn't started shaving his head when his hair got thin on top. The one of my dad was taken on February 27 1954 when he was 41 years old. You would not believe that in six years he would be dead. The one of Leif was taken on May 31, 2003, when he was 28 years old. He would be dead five years later.

They each chose a method they knew a lot about. My dad was an organic chemistry professor and poisoned himself with a deadly chemical to which he had access. My son was a trained military armorer who had many guns and know how to choose a weapon and a type of bullet which would accomplish his task fully.

But there are startling differences. My father lived 13 years longer than Leif. Was it because he had a real career in a field he loved, a wife and four children, a home? Leif had none of those things. Yet in the end, they did not keep my father happy, healthy and alive. In the end, he chose to exit this life.

I wonder, sometimes, if all these years later anyone but me remembers the day of my father's death. His birth family members and cousins are no longer living. His other children were so young when he died they don't remember him, only the stories we tell about him. There are people who remember who he was, but I think I may be the only one who, in my heart, thinks of him on this day and on his birthday and still wonders why, even though, like in the case of Leif, I can name and tick off reasons. They are not sufficient for me.

I wonder if they would have liked each other. How sad they never had a chance to get to know each other. The surely could have matched their wits against each other.

I miss them both, these two men who were closest to me. I will always miss them and wonder why they could not live.

And I am thankful I did not inherit whatever terrible gene that took the joy from their lives, made them say they felt dead inside, made them want to end it all. How sad that I passed it on to my son.

Dreams

The mind is a strange thing. It has it's own logic and memory in dreams and creates stories and realities all it's own. And it apparently does not accept death. I say that, because although my father died in 1960, I still occasionally dream about him, and it is never in the past. It's always in the present, and he is an old man. He's been lost, and I've found him.

I don't often remember my dreams, but I woke and remembered I had dreamed about Leif a few days ago. It was a vivid dream, though the details quickly grew misty. In my dream, Leif was a young adult, maybe in his mid-twenties. He had gone on a trip with us somewhere (as he often did) and for some reason he didn't what to go wherever I was going, in a strange city. Like so many dream locations, it was not someplace real, not someplace I have ever actually been.

So he took off on his own, so like him. I was wandering around a business area looking for something, met some friends, and we went to dinner. Leif called me on our cell phones and he sounded lost. Not physically lost. He knew where he was, but he didn't know where I was and what I was doing, and he was suddenly lonesome and sad. He asked, "Why does everything have to turn out wrong?"

I remember feeling bad for him in this dream, and telling him how to come join us for dinner.

That's all I remember of the dream, except for a few details about how the location looked, but the dream seems significant and telling to me. Leif wandering around alone, asking why things turned out badly. And alive.

Perhaps I have dreamed of his death. Perhaps I have dreamed of my dad's death. If so, I have not remembered those dreams. So far, in the only ones I ever remember they are alive. Not happy. Not well, but alive. And so real.

I find myself now thinking of Leif more and more as a child and not as the man he was when he died. Why is that? Is that because he was "mine" then? Is it because those were happier days? It is because in those days I could solve the problems and keep our family whole? Is it because he was such a beautiful child?

I don't know. He was a man nearly as long as he was a child, in his years on this earth, and when I picture him and am not looking at photos, I picture his tall frame coming through my front door.

So many memories, good ones, bad ones, happy and sad ones, but he lives only in my dreams.

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This photo of Leif and me was taken in Hawaii in 1983, he was eight-and-a-half years old.

Forever Changed

It is proving far harder than I thought it would be to give up writing this blog regularly. I knew I had a lot of emotion invested in it, and I thought I was ready to let it go, but now that I am at that point, I am finding it to be heart wrenching. I know I am not forgetting Leif or really letting him go, but in some deep emotional way it feels as though I am abandoning him, and that makes me terribly sad. It feels like the day of his memorial service, like when it was over and we all walked away from his niche at the cemetery leaving him behind in the place of no life or future. I know that I will never forget him, will think of him every day of my life, but who else will?

Of the 630 posts I've written in the past two years, this is one of the hardest to write, and certainly the hardest one to publish, to click that little "button" that says, "Publish," because it marks an end to an emotional journey that really has no end, and so is hard to give up. It has meant a lot to me to be able to tell Leif's story and to write about my feelings.

Memory is fleeting. Life goes on. I know that's as it should be, but it is also sad. And yet, I will be able to come back here to visit, just as I can go to the cemetery, though as Peter always points out, Leif is not there. It's not really visiting HIM. It's visiting memory and love. It's a kind of symbolic pilgrimage. Although we are often sad at cemeteries, I don't see them as frightening or sad places. They are monuments to love and memory just as this blog is.

I think of my father and I wonder who remembers him and how often they think of him. Like Leif, he lived. He had a life and contributed to the world. At least he left four children behind who, though some were too young to remember much, were a part of him that lived on. There is no blog about his life, no book, and no burial place. There is no place of pilgrimage except in my mind.

Leif had no children. What survives but memory? And how long will that survive? Not long for most people, I suspect, except if some reminder evokes a thought of him. This blog was my way to keep that memory alive, though of course I had no idea who would read it or if anyone but Peter and I would. That didn't matter so much as the preservation and the continuance, and now that I am ending it, it feels like I am again walking away and leaving him behind in that place of no life or future, which of course is what death is, and what we don't want to face.

I have always felt emotions deeply and strongly, and Leif's death has brought me torrents of tears and sadness, and I can say, like the Tin Woodman in the "Wizard of Oz," "Now I know I have a heart because it is breaking."

Yesterday I saw another reference to that saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Like many sayings and platitudes, it has a valuable message, but some lemons are beyond the possibility of lemonade. Some things life dishes out you just have to endure and survive. How does one "make lemonade" out of the suicide death of a cherished son?

When Leif died, he not only erased his future and his pain, but he changed our lives forever, not only our lives, but the lives of his family and friends, and all who knew him. For some of them, the changes were likely temporary without live-changing consequences, but for those who loved him, the changes are not only enormous and emotionally wrenching, they are quite literally life changing.

There are so many things we will not do with Leif or because of Leif now. We will never have grandchildren from him. He will not be there to help us or see us through our old age. We will not have the joy of his company. Our focus and identity is changed forever. Our emotions will never be the same, and there will always be the undercurrent of sadness, loss and grief no matter what else our future holds. This is not the retirement and old age we envisioned for ourselves, but what it now is has in part been created by Leif's act.

We must not forget, though, all the wonderful ways in which our lives were changed by having him as our son, the years we did enjoy his company, his help, his laughter, his intellect, his love.

We must not forget all the things we did with him, all the experiences of the thirty-three years of his life.

I have chosen the last images of the main blog to be all of Leif on beaches. Somehow, even though he seldom actually went to the beach once he moved to Florida (because even the beach isn't as attractive when you go alone), I will always associate Leif with beaches.

Partly this is because as our sons were growing up, we planned a beach vacation every year. Leif had wonderful times on beaches in so many places; Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Japan, Hawaii, Thailand, Italy, France, England, Texas and more places I can't think of to name right now. I remember him glorying in the waves when he was just a tiny tot, and how he loved sailing in the British Virgin Islands and SCUBA diving in Puerto Rico. Somehow for me, beaches will always be associated with Leif's happiness, the places he felt alive and free . . . beaches and motorcycles and cars.

I wish I could have a picture in my mind of Leif walking on a sunset beach with someone he truly loved who was the guardian of his heart that he so deeply desired. That would be the photo I would like to cherish for the rest of my life, but that does not exist and is a big part of the reason he is no longer here.

So, I will have to keep in my mind a picture of my tall lonely son alone on a sunset beach, as though the sun of his life was setting, and remember the beauty that once was.

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The photo was taken by Peter W. Garretson in Puerto Rico in 1992. Leif was 17 years old. Who would have thought, seeing that tall, handsome young man, that half his life was already over?

At this time, the blog has 630 posts, 977 photos, and has been visited 10,127 times since May 15, 2008.

Fifty Years of Remembering - Fifty Years of Wondering Why

Today it has been fifty years since my father died. On that cold winter night of February 10, 1960, he got up around two o'clock in the morning, went into the upstairs bathroom next to his bedroom, and took cyanide. There hasn't been a February 10th in those fifty years that I haven't thought of him and wondered why, wondered what my life and that of my family would have been like if he hadn't been depressed and decided to end his life, wondered what it was that made him decide to do it the night he did. What was the catalyst? What was the last straw? Or did he plan it for a long time and then just get up the courage to go through with it?

Like Leif, he gave no clues he was planning it. He left no note to explain it. Yet he had everything that Leif did not, a wife and family, a profession, an advanced degree, a home, friends, and he was not in debt, nor did he have any problems with substance abuse. And yet he was still so unhappy he took his life at the age of 46. I mourn for him and for the misery he must have felt, and wonder how he hid it so well from everyone around him except our mother, to whom he had said he felt "dead inside" and that he felt he wouldn't continue to succeed at his job because he couldn't concentrate and think up new research problems for his graduate students. The eternal question why will never be answered.

Did Leif inherit the genes for depression or bipolar syndrome? Was he doomed by some twist of genetic fate?

He looked like his grandfather. The photo of my father was taken in 1938 wen he was twenty-five years old. When Leif was twenty-five, he was in the army and I don't have many photos of him at that time that are straight-on head shots that I could compare with his grandfather, so the one in this post is from 2003 when he was 28. If you can imagine him with hair and without the beard, maybe you could see the resemblance.

They never knew each other. My father never saw a grandchild. I was his oldest child and was only twelve when he died. He died fifteen years before Leif was born, and yet in some minute and unintentional way, he may have contributed to his grandson's final fate.

Like my questions about my father's death, the questions about my son's will remain forever. I will not likely live fifty years beyond Leif's death, to be 110, but I will likewise never forget April 10th and never stop wondering what made him pull the trigger in the wee hours of April 9th.

I will always love my father and my son. I will always be glad they were in my life, my father for only twelve years, my son for thirty-three. And I will always miss them.

The Destruction of One's Life's Work

I've been thinking for sixteen months about why the loss of a child is so devastating. When my father died I was twelve, a death I witnessed; it was traumatic and terribly sad. I missed him. I questioned why. It was as though the foundation of my life had been destroyed, washed right out from under me.

I was afraid to believe, to trust, to love, for fear whatever I believed in or trusted or loved would be taken away from me. It took me years to get beyond that and give myself fully to relationships. And yet, that loss was nowhere near as hard for me as Leif's death has been. I have questioned why many times.

There are many reasons I could cite. I only knew my father for twelve years. I knew Leif for thirty-three. I was closer to Leif than I was to my father. We have the expectation (though not the certainty) of our children outliving us and not having to deal with their deaths. We have such hopes for their future. We miss the relationship and seeing the unfolding of their lives. Their death changes our identity, changes our lives, changes the future.

And yet, there was always something more that I couldn't quite grasp, couldn't figure out a way to explain. Now I think I can try.

For someone like me, whose deepest and most important emphasis as an adult has been my family, my children are my life's work. They are, more than anything else, what my life is all about. There is nothing I have done or will ever do that is as important as raising my children. They are the legacy I will leave behind.

There is no analogy that is adequate, but it is rather as though a sculptor has spent years creating a beautiful and meaningful sculpture, and that sculpture represents her life's work, the sum of who she is and her creations, but this sculpture goes beyond the inanimate smoothness of stone . . . it is alive, has volition, intellect, talents, consciousness. It is a child who talks, lives, breathes. It is the ultimate creation for someone like me. It creates itself as well.

It is a delight, a privilege, an honor, and yes, it is frustrating, sometimes infuriating; it is expensive and sometimes contrary. It is not easy to spend eighteen years molding this sculpture, assisting in its creation. It isn't easy to help continue to mold it after it has grown and left one's home and arms, but that process never ends.

So much of who I am is wrapped up in my sons and who they are, who I helped them to become. Nothing else I have done or will ever do will matter as much, be as rewarding, or as heartbreaking.

And that is why, one of the deepest reasons why, Leif's death is so hard. He was a beautiful sculpture, one of only two I created and helped to learn and grow, and now that part of my life's work is destroyed and gone forever. As though someone took a wrecking ball to a beautiful marble statue and crushed it to dust. Half of my legacy to the future is gone. Half of my life's work is destroyed.

And there is the added sadness that somehow I wasn't able to form and create his life so that he could either make better choices or continue to withstand the consequences of the choices he made, that I was unable to give him better luck in life or help him to find a purpose worth living for.

There is both the sadness of losing my beautiful son, my life's work, and the sadness of knowing that I somehow did not give him the tools to continue to create his own life, one in which he could prosper and be happy.

It is a terrible loss and a profound failure.

I know that there may have been no way I could help him achieve that sense of purpose and meaning in life; there may have been no way I could have influenced his misfortunes for the better, though I tried, but it will still feel like a failure. What can be more tragic than to throw away the gift of life? What can be sadder than to have decided to die at 33?

I brought him into this world with love and hopes and tried my best to give him all the tools he needed for a good life. He blew that life away with a 45. All my life I will remember not only all the good times, all the photos, all the conversations, the love, the embraces, but also that horrifying picture in my mind of him lying there in a pool of blood, dead and still, the gun on the kitchen counter.

How thankful I am that Leif was not my only child. How thankful I am that I have Peter Anthony, my first-born son.

And it will always be true that nothing I will ever do will be as important or as all-absorbing as raising my sons.

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The photo of Leif was taken in Kamakura, Japan in May 1981. He was six years old.

Jerri's Depression Test

Leif took this interesting photo of himself in a convex security mirror somewhere in the downtown Chicago "Loop" area when he and I were walking around there looking at architecture one day. I think it shows an interesting eye for composition and even makes a kind of statement. He is in the center with his camera on a monopod. It was in the late fall of 1989, I think, and he was almost 15 years old.
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Jerri's Depression Test

I began keeping notes of possible signs of depression a year ago. A year before that, I had emailed Leif links to some online depression screening tests, and he insisted he wasn't depressed . . . until a couple of months later, when he admitted he was. he took the tests and insisted he scored great, no depression, and as I've said before, he was a psychology student and he knew how to "fool the test." Either he was fooling the test, fooling himself, trying to fool me, or all three. sometimes we hide things even from ourselves.

i wasn't satisfied with the screening tests, either. To me (another psychology student), they seem to be too narrow and some seem to leave out ways that men experience depression. On top of that, popular notions about depression seem to emphasize that a depressed person SEEMS depressed to those around him or her, which often is not true. They often cover it up very well. Leif certainly did. And the idea that a depressed person always seems sad, cries a lot, or can't function, isn't true, either, although there ARE depressed people who express it this way, who truly can't function.

My father was an organic chemistry professor who worked with doctoral graduate students and had many patents in his name. he was teaching classes at Kansas State University and working every day, known on campus as happy-go-lucky "Doc Kundiger," and yet he came home the night of February 9, 1960 with cyanide, told my mother he was going to sleep late the next morning, got up at about 2 a.m. and took the cyanide, apparently thinking he would have time to get back into bed and he'd be found later, as though he had died in bed. The cyanide worked too fast. He never made it to the bed. Only my mother knew he was depressed. He put on a good front for everyone else and only confided in her. Some people don't confide in anyone.

There are numerous stories in the news now about soldiers and veterans committing suicide, and how the military and the Veterans Administration are trying to find ways to help before they die, but it is very difficult and complex. Those with PTSD, depression or bipolar disorder (all at high risk for suicide) don't always confide their problems in anyone, many for the same reasons Leif didn't: pride, a desire to appear strong, and for many, probably a lack of understanding about what they are going through.

Depression is an insidious disease. It doesn't manifest itself the same way in everyone. I am not a licensed psychologist and this is not any kind of official screening test. However, if you take it, or answer it on behalf of someone you are worried about, and you find yourself answering "yes" to even five of these forty-five questions, then I beseech you to seek some professional help. Do not fear the stigma of mental illness. Depression is a physical disease due to chemical imbalances in the brain. There are treatments available, though they are not quick cures that remove all your problems.

As one who has survived the suicide of both my father and my son, and who found both of them when they died, believe me when I tell you that if you are thinking of suicide, you are not thinking clearly and need help, (with the possible exception of a terminal illness or unbearable pain). Your death will devastate your family and friends. Do not leave them that way.

Not all of the things on this test are always signs of depression. There may be other factors involved, other reasons for them. However, each of these is a possible and powerful sign of potential depression, and the more of them you answer yes to, the more you are likely to be depressed.

There may be external causes for your depression, financial problems, relationship problems, job problems, unemployment, health problems, stress, but that doesn't mean that depression is "okay" or doesn't need treatment. You may need to treat the causes AND the depression, before the depression destroys your relationships or kills you.

1. Do you find yourself making excuses not to get together with your friends?

2. Do you drink alone to make yourself feel better?

3. Do you often drink to put yourself to sleep?

4. Do you avoid people and social situations that you used to enjoy?

5. Do you find yourself getting angry or frustrated more easily?

6. Do you go shopping and spend money you shouldn't or can't afford to spend to make yourself feel better?

7. Are you gaining or losing weight without trying?

8. Are you taking less care of yourself physically, your health and appearance?

9. Are you engaging in more risky behaviors in order to make yourself feel something?

10. Do you feel less pleasure in activities you used to enjoy?

11. Do you have trouble becoming sexually aroused?

12. Are you tempted to try, or have you tried, illegal substances to try to make yourself happier?

13. Do you have trouble sleeping?

14. Do you have trouble concentrating?

15. Do you have road rage?

16. Do you drive recklessly?

17. Do you have reckless, unprotected sex?

18. Do you compulsively overwork to avoid dealing with other issues?

19. Do you try to isolate yourself from others?

20. Do you feel like lashing out violently against someone or something?

21. Are you exhausted much of the time?

22. Do you misuse prescription medications?

23. Do you have thoughts of killing yourself?

24. Do you have frequent headaches, stomach problems or other chronic pain?

25. Are you stressed out about your job?

26. Are you thinking about buying a gun, or have you recently bought one?

27. Do you feel inadequate?

28. Do you feel like a failure or believe you are worthless?

29. Do you think people, your family, your friends, would be better off without you?

30. Do you see no way out of your problems?

31. Do you feel that whatever you do, things are always going to go wrong for you?

32. Are you being honest with your answers to these questions, or trying to fudge the results?

33. Do you feel empty, unable to feel normal emotions?

34. Do you procrastinate and not get important things done?

35. Do you think about trying, or have you tried, illegal drugs in an effort to feel better, or to feel at all?

36. Does death seem like an escape from your problems or pain?

37. Are you moody and have emotions that are exaggerated, overreactions?

38. Are you lonely?

39. Do you often feel sad?

40. Do you often find yourself listening to angry or sad music?

41. Does music make you feel sad or cry?

42. Do you feel separated from those around you, unconnected emotionally?

43. Is it hard to motivate yourself to do anything?

44. Have you forgotten how to laugh and never feel like smiling?

45. Do you have recurring thoughts of death?

If you need more information on depression or suicide for yourself or someone else, there are helpful links on the main page of this blog.

The World Through the Lens of Experience

Each of us views life through the lens of our experience. The longer we live the sharper our lens becomes, the more able to focus, and the more it has been shaped by our lives and the life-changing events we have lived with and through. Sometimes we aren't even aware of the importance of certain experiences, or that they are life-altering, until later, and sometimes we know our lives have been forever changed in a flash.

Finding Leif dead was such a moment. Finding my father dead was another. Until my father died, i was a child who look my parents for granted . . . and children should be able to do. They should have that stability and confidence in life. My father's death was as though someone had completely pulled the foundation out from under my life and it had collapsed, as though there was nothing I could trust in any more, and I was afraid to love again, for fear that anything I loved might be taken from me. Although three of my grandparents had died, and I loved them, I was never close to them and only saw them once a year for a few days. They didn't do things with us grandkids they way we do with ours. I missed being able to go and see them, but they were not in the daily fabric of my childhood life. Life went on. Dad's death was different. He had always been there, our daddy, and then, suddenly, he was not. Not only was he gone, it was by his choice, a choice a child cannot understand.

It took me years to come to terms with my father's death and be able to risk loving again, to stop fearing (as me and my siblings did) that we would somehow lose our mother, too. It took me years to be able to give my love wholeheartedly and be willing to risk the possibility of tragic loss. I was immensely fortunate that I fell in love with Peter W., and that for the 44 years we have been married, he has been the foundation of my adult life.

On that foundation, we built a family, and our two sons meant and mean everything to us. We all know there is a chance we will lose those we love to death, and I knew there was a greater than average chance in Leif's case because of his propensity to ride his motorcycle like a demon and drive his car like he was in the Daytona 500, because of his fascination with and ownership of guns. I knew that, but knowing that does not prepare one for death. Nothing prepares you for the death of your child.

The lens of my experience taught me 48 years before Leif died that you can never count on having the people you love always be there, alive. You never know what might take them from you. But nothing prepares you for the death of your child, and nothing prepares you to deal with their suicide. No matter how many times I worried about Leif getting killed in an accident, while I could feel fear, I could never feel grief. That only comes with death, and it is far worse than anything you can imagine.

Peter W. asked me once how long it took to get over my father's death. I told him I didn't remember. I think in part there is a problem with the phrase "get over." If it means the point at which I stopped obsessing about his life, death and loss daily, the point at which it not longer was raw and immediate for me, I can't say with certainty but I think it was around ten years. If that is true, I think it will take longer to get to that point with Leif's death, but because has hard as my father's death was for me, as hard a lesson as his loss was, it pales beside the loss of my son.

Why should the loss of one's child be so much harder to bear than the loss of a parent? I think the answer lies in how much of myself I had invested in having and raising Leif, how hard I tried to bring him up right, give him a good childhood, a good life, how much I loved being a mother and the role I played in my son's lives. I had spent far more of my life caring for Leif than I had spent with my father, and i was responsible for him for over half of his life in ways a child is never responsible for a parent.

Being a parent at all changes the lens of one's experience forever, makes you realize what it means to have another's life in your care, and that's part of the terrible heartache of Leif's death, that all our love and care did not give him the fulfilling and happy life we wanted him to have, that our love and care did not prevent his misery and suicide.

I know that Leif's death is not my fault, not our fault, but it still feels like a monstrous personal failure, that I could not save me son, indeed, didn't know when he was going to take his life. I know he gave no indication; neither had my father. That doesn't make it any less heartwrenching that somehow we didn't know or have a way to save him.

Now the lens of our experience has changed again. Now there is almost nothing that happens in my life that doesn't remind me of Leif, or some experience with him, or some thought about him. It's amazing to me that nearly everything becomes related to him in some way . . . the words to songs, characters in movies, vehicles, belongings, stories.

For instance, yesterday we went to Disney World's Animal Kingdom with Madeleine and Aly. I remembered that three years ago when we took the grandchildren to Disney World, Leif had enthusiastically recommended that we take them to Animal Kingdom and they had loved it. While there this time, we saw the "Nemo" show, a live musical show featuring puppets that retold the "Finding Nemo" story. We had seen the movie about six years ago with our grandson, Marcus, who loved it. Then I enjoyed it as a beautifully animated, heartwarming story about a loving, protective father who was willing to swim across a whole ocean to find and save his son, and a darling little clownfish with one smaller fin who proved he was capable beyond his father's dreams.

Today I found it not only a beautiful story, but for me, inexpressibly sad. We, too, loved our son and wanted to teach and protect him. We, too, were willing to go to great lengths to do so, but unlike in this story, we were not able to find our son alive. We were not able to save him. We had no happy ending. "Finding Nemo" is no longer the same through the changed lens of my experience.
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The photo above was taken of Leif on January 1, 2007 at our home in Sun City Center, Florida.

The Grandfather He Never Knew - Donald G. Kundiger

Leif never met my father, who died by taking cyanide at the age of 46 when I was only 12 years old, and yet Dad may have passed on several characteristics and propensities to the grandson he never saw. My father was brilliant, as was Leif. He taught himself chemistry, eventually studying organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and earning his PhD. He had tremendous musical ability and had studied the piano, playing complex concert pieces. He had the receding hairline that Leif inherited, and that glowing smile. At the time he died, after a couple of years of severe depression, none of us knew back in those days that a propensity for chronic, clinical depression could be inherited, or that the genes for it could be "switched on" by trauma.

Since he died when I was twelve, fifteen years before Leif was born, and I never saw them together, it didn't dawn on me until last fall how much Leif looked like his grandfather. I didn't realize it until I was visiting my nephew, Rick, and saw a photo of him on the wall that reminded me strongly of both Leif (his first cousin) and my dad. Then I suddenly saw the resemblance that Leif bore to his grandfather.

I wish they could have known each other. Leif craved the company of smart people with whom he could discuss ideas. He would have enjoyed my father, though they would likely have disagreed on some things. It's sad that my father never saw his children grow up (my brother and sisters were younger than I was) and never saw any of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Sad that he couldn't find joy in life any more, despite his family of four kids and his "American dream" lifestyle owning his own home, a car, and working as an assistant professor of organic chemistry at Kansas State University. By the time he died, he had patented 28 compounds, though the rights to use them were owned by Dow Chemical Company because they had given him grants to do the research.

Dad used to say, way back in the 1950s, that one day we would discover that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. We are finding that out these days. His prediction is coming true, but that didn't save his grandson. Leif didn't ask for help, didn't try medication, as far as we know.

People have often asked me why am interested in genealogy, family history, saying they aren't interested in birth and death dates and a bunch of dead people, but what they don't understand is that family history is the stories, who these people were, the lives they led . . . and how that impacts or influences us. I am more and more sure that they do, in more ways that we can ever know. After all, we are made from their genes. What have they passed on to us?

I have noticed in looking at generations of photos that often there will be startling resemblances between people who are separated by two or three generations, like Leif and my father, but I never dreamed that one of my son's would commit suicide as he did.

Leif grew up knowing about my father's death, knowing how it had affected me. That was one reason that he didn't kill himself at Fort Drum, New York when he was so devastated, because he knew it would hurt me. I told him always to remember that, and that if he ever felt that way again, to remember it and do whatever it took to stay alive. That was not to be. I don't know, and never will know, what tipped the balance and made him decide to put his new pistol to his head and pull the trigger on April 9, 2008. Even though I know of all the problems and disappointments, heartaches, he'd had, what was it that made death seem like the only way out? Was the depression and the decision to die programmed into his genes, passed down from his grandfather, and set in motion by all the trauma he experienced?
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The top photo is of my father on his wedding day, June 13, 1943 when he was 30 years old, just three years younger than Leif was when he died. The second one, one of the very rare color photos of him, was taken in 1959 when he was 46 years old, less than a year before he died.