Eleven Months Since Leif's Death. Remembering Leif - Oahu, Hawaii - August 1987 - Age 12

How can the months go by so fast. Today it is eleven months since we drove to Tampa and found Leif dead on his kitchen floor. It seems like yesterday and yet it seems like an eternity without him. I still ask why. I still wonder what I could have done differently, or if it would have made any difference. I still remember his life, the whole of it. I still talk to him as though he can hear me and see me, even though I don't believe he can.

I remember times we had together, like this trip to a lookout above Honolulu, Oahu on one of the trips we took back to Hawaii from Chicago, this on in August 1987 when he was 12 years old. I wonder if that was the trip when he was so engrossed in "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card that he didn't even care about the beach at our favorite Bellows Beach, where we were staying in a cottage. He could talk for hours about that book and it's sequels. He read them all, through last year.

I wish he were here for a scintillating discussion, a hug, dinner.

I started reading "Outliers" tonight, The first chapter, about a town in Pennsylvania settled by Italian immigrants who nearly all came from the same village in Italy, a town where there was virtually no heart disease, no ulcers, no suicide, no crime, made me wonder where our society has gone so wrong, and how it fails men like Leif. The researchers concluded that this town is so healthy not because of a special diet, or exercise, or even genetics. These people are healthy because of their community and the way it functions, the social aspects of it.

Suicides are often detached and feel alone in our society. I wonder, would Leif have been happier in another milieu? What about the rest of us?

The book talks about neighbors stopping to talk with each other, spending time together, three generations living together, family meals, social organizations. Leif didn't know his neighbors, didn't have real friends in Tampa, lived alone, didn't join organizations. The only family meals he had were with us about once a month. The loneliness wasn't only the lack of a wife, it was a lack of human companionship, and I think that although he craved it, he didn't know how to make it work and eventually shut himself off from all but seeking the love he needed.

What happens to shy people, lonely people in our society? Do they just fade into the background, unseen and ignored by those around them?

I don't think Leif had a clue how many people were impressed by him, looked up to him, found him interesting. He may have intimidated them with his size and his mind. What a pity he didn't know how many people cared.

Leif Reading on a Boat in Subic Bay, August 1982, age 7

Leif claimed he didn't like to read but that was misleading. Given a choice of things to do with his leisure time, reading would not usually have been high on Leif's list of choices, and yet, if someone managed to get him started reading a good book, comic book or magazine, he couldn't put it down. Like many children, most particularly boys taught by women teachers, he was turned off to reading by being required to read books and material he didn't have any interest in or found boring, in school.

Most of the kinds of books that appeal to girls (and thus to women teachers, who were girls) don't appeal to boys, and in my experience (as a children's librarian), very little effort is made in schools to provide boys with reading material they will find gripping and fun to read. Thus, they get turned off.

Leif certainly experienced this. I remember him hating books he was forced to read, such as the Newbery Award winning "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," a fine book, but not fine for him at that age, in junior high.

However, Leif did find many books he loved, and spent money on books. His favorite series of books was the Ender series by Orson Scott Card. He was introduced to the first book, "Ender's Game," by his older brother, Peter A. Garretson, who had read it in a class on science fiction literature at the Air Force Academy. Leif was in junior high at the time, and he was so engrossed in reading it that when we took a trip to Hawaii he would hardly leave the beach cottage to go to the beach.

The Ender series is a challenging one, dealing with deep philosophical questions, exciting action and superb examination of the qualities of leadership and strategy. Leif found this immensely intriguing. He read all of the books over many years and could talk about them endlessly.

When he was younger, like in this photo, he loved comic books such as the Richie Rich series, and continued to enjoy the more adult comics as a teen and adult, such as the X-Men series.

He had to do book reports for school, like most kids, and he hated that, especially when he had to choose books off a list of books he didn't care for. However, I could usually "trick" him into reading a book I knew he would enjoy if I picked it out and read the first chapter aloud at the dinner table. Since I read to my sons until they were in junior high, and to the family all along, this wasn't anything unusual. Then I would leave the book in the bathroom. Best place to find a "captive audience." He'd pick it up and start reading and then he couldn't quit.

That was one of my specialties as a children's librarian -- finding books to captivate reluctant reader boys.

This photo of Leif was taken on a Navy PT boat in Subic Bay in the Philippines during our ill-fated vacation at Grande Island in August 1982. Leif was 7 years old.

Leif's Copper Penny Space Ship

Leif had his iPhone for about 5 or 6 months. The only photos I could find that he took with it were of his car, his motorcycle, himself (in cycle gear and in his work cubicle) and this space ship me made of pennies on the desk surface of his work cubicle at the Humana call center where he worked.

Leif loved science fiction and was absorbed in such sagas as Orson Scott Card's Ender series (books beginning with Ender's Game), and Battlestar Galactica. He played Planetside and other online games, and as I've written before, was deeply involved in the development of the ZAON game.

Leif needed to be in a job where he dealt face-to-face with people and wasn't confined to a cubicle on the phone, but he never had that kind of job, unfortunately. This space ship is something he carefully and exactingly constructed while doing customer service for Humana Medicare clients on the phone.

I never would have known about it if I hadn't been able to access the photos on his iPhone, but when I first saw the photos, I didn't realize where the space ship was or that he had built it. I thought it was something he photographed elsewhere.

Then, when his dad and I picked up his belongings from Humana, among them was a very heavy, huge Alltel drink "jug" that was full of pennies. Those were the pennies he used. There were over $16.00 worth of pennies in that jug.

That reminded me once again how small things add up. They say most people these days won't even reach for a penny on the sidewalk or parking lot. Not worth their time. I always do.

I tried his whole life to teach Leif to save money, but I never succeeded. Intellectually he knew he needed to do it, but he was unable to resist cool cars, motorcycles, computers, phones and gadgets, and as soon as he got a bit of money, he spent it on some new cool thing he just had to have, though it was truly an unnecessary luxury. I understood that because he didn't have a satisfying home life, was lonely, and didn't have the kind of job he needed, he found his pleasure in these things and in pasttimes like online gaming, riding his cycle, and movies, but ultimately, his spending got him into debt too many times. He then had trouble paying his bills or handling an unexpected expense like a car repair.

Saving pennies by throwing them in a jug netted enough for a couple of decent meals (more if it was home cooking), and I found coins all over his apartment that he could have thrown into a jar as well. It's true that these small amounts wouldn't have solved his financial problems, but the willingness to save even small amounts here and there (like taking a sandwich to work instead of buying lunch, for instance) could have added up substantially in the long run.

I have learned since Leif's death that compulsive overspending is also a sign of depression, a form of "self medication" to bring the depressed person some brief happiness . . . yet eventually, that same spending brings more depression because of the debt incurred.

How I wish Leif had gotten help for his depression and had been able to curb his spending.

How I wish his talent for artistic design and precision had been put to some creative uses. He had remarkable artistic talent as a child, but it wasn't something he chose to pursue.

More about art and choices later.

For now, imagine a beautiful copper space ship rushing through the universe, carrying Leif into the sci fi adventures of which he so avidly dreamed.

Leif's "First Car" - the RC-10

When Leif was in junior high school in Highland Park, Illinois, he was too young to have either a car or a driver's license, but too old for the Matchbox cars. That's when he discovered radio-controlled cars. He save his allowance and gift money to spend on them. The first kit he bought was made in China and in those days (about 1986) the "English" instructions were nearly unreadable. With his mechanical skills, he figured out how to put it together and soon had it racing up and down the street.

Of course, typical of Leif, he had to have a better one . . . and a better one. The top of the line in those days was the RC-10. It was expensive and it took him awhile to save up the money, but boy, was it fast and sleek! Not content with the "out of the box" version, he spent what seemed to be an endless amount of money on different gears, wheels, bodies, and then modified the body. You can see in this photo that he drilled numerous holes in the aluminum chassis to make it lighter and therefore faster.

The RC-10 proved to be his ticket to two outstanding science fair projects. First, in seventh grade, he designed and carried out an experiment on how different tire treads affected battery life and the length the car could go on a single charge. In 8th grade, he went all the way to the Illinois State Science Fair with his intricate and excellent experiment on how different gear ratios affected speed and distance. Perhaps in the next couple of days I'll post photos of him with his science fair displays.

The obsession with radio-controlled cars had an added benefit. Leif had always maintained he didn't like to read, and getting him to read school assignments and books for book reports usually was an unpleasant chore. However, he loved reading about model cars, sports cars and radio-controlled cars and subscribed to several magazines about them, which he read avidly.

Actually, it wasn't that Leif didn't like to read, just that he didn't like the kind of reading he was required to do. Hand him the "right" book, like Orson Scott Card's Ender series, beginning with Ender's Game, and he couldn't put it down.

One amusing thing about his subscriptions was the other mail he got because of them. Evidently the profile for someone subscribing to Car and Driver magazine, for instance, must have been for a yuppy, or at least a young man with some cash, and of age. Leif got frequent credit card offers at the age of 13 or 14. We had no success in stopping the flood of them until one night he sat down and filled out one of the applications . . . truthfully, stating his occupation as "junior high school student," and his income as his meager allowance, etc. To bad we couldn't have seen the face of whoever opened it.

I don't know what happened to his RC-10. I think he had it at least until he went into the Army in 1998, maybe even after that.

Among his things when he died was a radio-controlled car. Still having fun. Now his nephew will enjoy playing with it.