We were at sea on the 16th anniversary of his death

 

Leif died sixteen years ago on April 9, 2008. Not a day goes by when we don't talk about him and miss him. This year, we were at sea on a transatlantic cruise and I couldn't help but remember how much he loved the sea. He would have gloried in the waves and wind. How I wish we could have given him that pleasure.

I am always happy when I discover photos of Leif I didn't know existed. This one was taken by my mother in November 1975 when Leif was ten months old, in the old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas. What a joyful moment.  

This Corona's for You

It's hard to believe it has been so long since I've posted on this blog. Life has overtaken me. We were gone on a 17 day cruise, during which I had little internet access. Never-the-less, I did write a blog post and said to publish it . . . and somehow, it just disappeared into the ether and was gone. I doubt that I can ever reconstruct it.

We thought about Leif a lot on the cruise, knowing how much he had enjoyed the two Caribbean cruises with us. There were so many things we remarked on that we know he would have enjoyed.

He would have loved Cabo San Lucas, "party town," probably would have liked to have taken a long vacation there. In honor of him, and of his love for beer, we had ice cold Coronas at Tequila Shark overlooking the harbor. There I am, red-faced and sweaty from a long, hot walk, enjoying that beer and wishing I was buying one for him, too.

Since we've been back, I've celebrated my fifth Mother's Day and birthday without him, and yes, I still miss him, still wish he were driving up the driveway with the bass thumping, coming in to give me a bear hug.

Life should not be so busy that there is no time to reminisce here, no time to write a post of memories that come to me or thoughts I want to record. I still want to write about destiny, about honor and suicide, about little things that come to mind as well.

But for now, here's to YOU, Leif. That Corona's for you.

Forty Months of Memories and Missing Leif

Today it has been forty months, three years and four months, since we found Leif dead in his apartment. In some ways we have healed. The deepest, raw grief has passed. We live our lives. We find enjoyment in our family, our travels, our friends and home. But there isn't a day that we don't talk of Leif. Every day there are reminders of him, and reminders that he is not with us.

Grief is like the tides. It subsides and then it rolls back in again. With all the trips we've taken since Leif's death, I've come to see a pattern. Coming home brings the realization that Leif is not here. Driving past the exit to go to his apartment on the way home from the airport or elsewhere in Tampa, walking into the room that was once his bedroom or the one that was his den, seeing all the things he helped put up on our walls, the German cabinet and my office furniture he helped put together, the phones he installed, the flag case, possessions that were once his; each of those brings a flood of memories, most of them happy, but the overall effect is overwhelming sadness that he isn't here. There are the inevitable tears, the questions why that come back to haunt us, the realization again what a hole his death has left in our lives.

Luckily, this depression doesn't last more than a few days. It seems remarkable to me that even forty months after his death we still feel it so deeply, that although we have managed to move forward in our lives, this tragedy continues to extract a toll and always will. I am thankful that family, work, and love get us past the hard times when the tide rushes in.

This time, we came back from a cruise where we went to Cozumel. The last time we were in Cozumel was in 1993 on an NCL cruise with Leif. He loved it so much! Of course we were flooded with memories even while on the cruise, and each day we were talking about how Leif would have loved it, what he was like on that long-ago cruise, how we wished he had been with us. That cruise was one of the highlights of his life, and I'm so glad we were able to give that to him then.

I was moping around when we returned and was so glad when we had company visit us, cousins with a darling four-month-old baby. The day of getting ready for them provided a focus on work and their afternoon visit was joyful and a wonderful distraction that lifted us out of the wash of the tide.

As I have written before, when we are depressed, we don't feel like doing any of the things that will help lift the depression, so it takes either a personal will to make oneself do them or something external that forces it. I've learned that allowing myself to be lethargic and mope is destructive, and I try to make myself get involved in something that needs to be done or a new project. That invariably helps. Sometimes I am not able to do that and I find myself sitting and playing endless rounds of computer games or compulsively checking email and Facebook to try to distract myself without expending any energy. That's another thing I've realized. If I find myself doing that for a couple of days, it's time to get up and make myself work. Work of ANY kind is the best therapy. Not only does it distract me from sadness, I feel better for having accomplished something, crossed something off my endless list of things that either need to be done or projects I want to do.

I love my home. I love that Leif is a part of it, forever. I am grateful he was my son. However, after forty months, I think I see the pattern of my days and I know that it is possible to be happy and sad at the same time. I know that I will continue to experience the tides of grief. And I know that love, my family and friends, and work are the antidote.
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The first photo of Leif, Peter W. and me was taken on our 1993 NCL cruise. The second is of the Carnival Legend in the Caribbean in July 2011.

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.

Leif on the Tropical Cruise at age 17

For some teenage boys, life seems to be a confusing mix of teenage foolishness and poor choices, developing talents, friendships, and a desire to be grown and sophisticated. Leif certainly fit into that mold. I thought Peter W. would be horrified at the story I posted yesterday about the candle-burning prank Leif's friends (with him along enjoying it) played on a teacher they liked. He pointed out that it could so easily have gone wrong, with a car accident, an arrest, being expelled from school, or worse, shot by a neighbor who thought they were doing something dangerous or illegal. The boys certainly never thought of it that way, but teens egging each other on to dares or pranks seldom think of those possible consequences and make foolish choices and use poor judgement.

That kind of incident, and the boys being out in a car on the loose in San Juan was one reason I was happy to have the opportunity to move Leif away from Puerto Rico when we did, even though I knew it was going to be hard on him moving away from his friends. I wasn't happy about him being out there in a car with someone else driving doing who-knows-what, and I wouldn't have been any happier with Leif driving our car and taking a load of boys with him. Leif didn't get his driver's license until the summer of 1992 back in Kansas. Although he continued to make poor choices (such as buying a motorcycle after he had moved out of our house, when he couldn't afford it, and driving it too fast), we at least avoided a disaster.

However, at the same time he was doing silly things that could have been disastrous, he was also wanting to be the sophisticated man-of-the-world. When we went on our first cruise, out of San Juan on the Carnival ship Tropicale, he was quite a handsome sight dressed up for the formal night on board. We took this cruise in April 1992, when he was seventeen, just three months before we moved him from Puerto Rico back to Kansas to stay with his grandmother and take driver's education in summer school. We moved back in August.

Dimensions of Sadness - Missing Leif

It's been a hard week and I've been posting simple posts of happier times, reflecting the way I wish life still were, not the way it is right now.

My sisters were coming to visit and I got the bright idea to take each of them on a cruise, with my mother. None of them had ever been on a cruise before and my sisters had always wanted to go. Mom is a world traveler that hasn't been on a trip outside the USA since November 2007, so I found a couple of inexpensive (great deals this time of year) short cruises to the Bahamas and booked them. I told everyone my one worry about it was the step up (or down when you come out) to the bathrooms in the staterooms.

We started the cruise with Mom and Lannay with very chilly weather, not at all like you'd expect for a cruise to the Bahamas, and we got to Nassau two hours late because right after we left Cape Canaveral, the ship had to return to port to disembark a passenger who had a life-threatening health crisis. We had a good time in Nassau, and at Coco Cay the next day, but Mom's back was bothering her and she seemed to have trouble walking at Cocoa Cay. I thought it was because she had stepped down a large step onto a water taxi too hard.

That night, the last night of the cruise, she got up in the night to use the bathroom and lost her balance. She fell into the bathroom hard and injured her back, but she didn't tell anyone. My sister Lannay, who was sharing the cabin, heard a noise but didn't find anything when she checked and Mom didn't tell her. She later said she didn't want me to know because I'd "have a hemorrhage."

We returned to Cape Canaveral the next morning, Monday the 23rd, and Mom was still having some back pain but not admitting she had fallen. We went to see the Bodies exhibit at MOSI, the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry, and had her in one of their wheelchairs she she didn't have to walk, but didn't know how bad off she was.

The next day, without our knowledge, she went to her doctor and told him about the fall, and had her back x-rayed. It wasn't until the next morning, Wednesday the 25th, that she told Lannay about her fall and by then she was in severe pain. I got another appointment with the doctor that afternoon and we found out she had another compression fracture in her spine. The doctor ordered her to lie flat on her back and to be up as little as possible, but she didn't follow orders and by Thursday she couldn't get up on her own and was in excruciating pain.

I had taken care of Mom when she broke her back with two compression fractures in 1992 and remembered how to get her up and walk her, and I got a wheel chair and walker checked out, but even with me staying there and helping her, by Friday evening the 27th, she was in such terrible pain that we had to call the Emergency Squad to transport her to the South Bay Hospital emergency room. She was admitted to the hospital and put on pain medications, given a CT scan, and the next day an MRI.

On Monday, March 2nd, she had a procedure called kyphoplasty to stabilize the fractured vertebra, but she was still in immense pain. By Wednesday they transferred her to the rehab center at Plaza West here in Sun City Center.

My sister Sherie arrived February 28th and has been so helpful in all the things we had to do for mom at the hospital and rehab center and at her house. I don't know how I would have gotten through this time without her. She was terrific.

All through this, I've been sick with a sinus infection, cough, and nasty sore throat. I've been exhausted, but had to keep going with so much to do. I still haven't unpacked from the cruise.

Today, I took Sherie to the airport. I was so sad to see her go. I really appreciated having her here, not only for all the help, but for the moral and emotional support. She had taken vacation to come here to go on the second cruise, and instead she helped rearrange and clean up at Mom's, visited rehab centers with me, made her own breakfasts and lunches, did dishes, and so much more. I knew I'd miss her when she left, but I wasn't prepared for how all the emotion of the past week and a half would hit me then.

Not only did all my worries about Mom, which had been buried under the work that had to be done, surface, but as it always does when I'm driving alone, the bottomless sadness about missing Leif came pummeling through. I cried all the way home, especially when I passed the exit that would take me to Bay Pines National Cemetery. I've been crying on and off all evening. I just can't shake it. I miss Leif so much! How could nearly 11 months have passed since he died? He helped me out so many times. Who will be there, now that he is not?

We will manage. We have family. We have friends. We are so much more fortunate in so many ways than many in this world, and we know that, but that knowledge doesn't take away the loss.

And I'm so worried about Mom living alone when she gets out of rehab and whether she's going to be able to manage, whether they can get her pain under control, what her future holds. I miss my sisters and having them here to buoy me up. I am so tired, emotionally and physically, still sick.

It will pass. I'll get well. Life will go on.

But so will loss.

I go along, busy, and being busy keeps my mind off things for awhile, but it always floods back. There are two times that it happens most often, when I am driving alone, and when I go outside at night, like taking out the garbage, or going somewhere, and I can see the sky. The night sky and the stars always remind me of Leif and I miss him terribly then.

I miss him terribly now.

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The photo above is of Leif and my mother on December 25, 2005 when he was showing her the cell phone we got her for Christmas . . . his idea.

Leif - NCL Caribbean Cruise - August 1993 - Age 18

We just came home from a three night cruise to the Bahamas. We were remembering each day how much Leif enjoyed the two cruises we took him on when he was a teenager and how we wanted to take him again. I had asked him about a year ago whether he still had a passport and whether he had any vacation time at work, because I wanted to schedule a cruise (but I didn't tell him that part because I wanted it to be a surprise). He never answered me about the passport, and I didn't find one among his belongings after his death, but he said he had no vacation. I'm sad that we weren't able to take him on another cruise, or find a way for him to go on one with his friend Michael. I think it would have been a great time for the two of them.

These photos were taken on the cruise we took the summer after Leif graduated from Manhattan High School. He was eighteen, tall and handsome with very long hair. He looked like Tarzan and could have graced the cover of romance novels or been a model.

Leif had a great time on the cruise and had a shipboard romance with a lovely young woman from England who was a dealer in the casino. Her name was Jacquie and he was quite enamored of her. He had quite a few photos he took of the two of them together. After the cruise, she wrote to him a few times, but he didn't answer. I used to think that Leif didn't answer people because he was either to lazy to write back or didn't care, but at some point he made it clear that it was too hard emotionally for him to try to keep contact with someone he cared about who was so far away he would likely never see them again. When he was older and email became established, he did keep contact with people, but not in 1993.

Two of these photos were taken during the "formal" night on board ship, at our dinner table. The one at the top, with him in his purple silk shirt, was taken at Playa del Carmen on the "Mayan Riviera" near Cancun and Cozumel. He was fascinated by the Mayan Ruins and he loved Cozumel.

Leif - Caribbean Cruise from San Juan 1992

In January we planned a trip to Alaska, another one of those travels we promised ourselves in retirement. Little did we know when we paid for it that we would be going a couple of months after Leif's death.

We hoped that we were ready to get away and try to find some happiness in life again. And we did . . . but only sometimes. How I wished I could share the experiences with Leif, show him the beauty, talk with him, text message him, find him waiting to pick us up at the airport.

Instead, I had to keep remembering his death.

I marveled at the glaciers, the mountains, the lakes, the beauty of Alaska, and enjoyed the entertainment on the ship, but it was all so bittersweet. I kept remembering the two cruises we took Leif on, both in the Caribbean, and how much he loved them.

I kept wishing he were going to be here when I got home.

The photo above was taken when Leif was a junior in high school in Puerto Rico and we took a cruise in the Caribbean on Carnival. We had a great time. He loved it.

We had wanted to take him on another cruise, and it wasn't long before he died that I asked him whether he had any vacation time and whether he had a valid passport. He said no to both. How I wish we had taken him on another cruise!

It was hard for me to come home to see the places where he lived, slept, sat, played chess with our granddaughter, to see his things.