The Lack of a Home

It struck me as I was recounting all of the places that Leif lived in his 33 years, and came up with 24 of them, that such instability of a home wasn't a good thing, either. As a military family, we usually had three years in one place, sometimes four, and only once, two. That meant that for the first 20 years of Leif's life, he lived in 9 places with us, and one of them was the old stone house that remained a kind of rooted base for us, that he lived in two out of the nine times I'm counting. It was after her left home that he really became peripatetic, and each time he moved it was either to find a better or cheaper place. Probably the nicest place he lived in his adult life (other than the houses we owned at 710 N. 9th Street in Manhattan or our home here in Florida) was the apartment he and Nikko had in the army housing area in Watertown, New York, but it was also one of the places he was unhappiest.

The stability in his life was always us. Nothing else remained constant or anything he could count on. I hope he felt he could count on us, but I know as a grown man he didn't want to have to.

Living in 15 places in 13 years is too much change, even if he initiated the moves. It means there is no real home, no identity or the sense of place.

Once of the things he and I once talked about was that when I was growing up and in earlier generations, girls and young women were taught that it was their responsibility to make a house a home. I know there are those who would now say that was sexist and is outmoded, but I don't think so. I do believe that it is also a man's responsibility to be a part of that, making a house a home, and I don't think what I'm talking about has much to do with whether one sex or the other does the cooking or the laundry. Household chores ought to be divided equitably and by who does them best . . . or is most willing to do them. But making a house or apartment FEEL like a home is something I still think a woman needs to do. Otherwise, a man and a woman living together are really just roommates, regardless of whether they are married or having a sexual relationship. A home is different than just sharing living space. I don't think Leif ever felt he had that kind of home. The PLACE one calls home is less important (even with a lot of moves) than the atmosphere within it.

A part of that (not the most important part, but a part) is housekeeping. As I've mentioned, Leif was a terrible housekeeper if left on his own, but would willingly work WITH someone else to clean and straighten a place up. I have a threshhold of clutter that drives me nuts and makes me depressed if I don't do anything about it. I think Leif would pass way beyond that to the point where he was depressed and it looked like such a horrible task to try to tackle the mess that he just ignored it unless he thought a new woman in his life might be coming over and then he would clean it up.

I once gave him a certificate I made up on the computer for his birthday, which was good for eight not-necessarily-consecutive hours of housework cleaning up his place. He laughed, but he made good use of it, and he did work while I was there working. We got a lot done.

Each time he moved into a new place, he would fix it up pretty nicely and had some pride in how it looked, but it didn't take long for clutter and apathy to take over, and without a mate to either clean it up or engage him in doing it with her it just looked like to enormous a task. Leif would insist he didn't even see the mess, that he had a male "target mentality," so that he only saw what he was looking for or working with. Maybe, but I don't think so. i think he just ignored it and lived with it, but I can't believe it was the way he wanted to live or would have if he'd had the right companion.

It makes me sad to think that he never really had a home as an adult. Places to live, yes, and brief periods where he liked them and was happier, but living with someone you aren't getting along with, or living alone and being lonely, is not having a home. How I wish he had had at least that. It might have made a difference.
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The photo of Leif was a self-portrait taken on April 26, 2003 at the 710 N. 9th Street house in Manhattan, Kansas.

Leif's Twenty-Fourth and Last Home - Tampa, Florida - June 2007 - April 10, 2008

In June 2008, Leif followed through on his decision to move from the two-bedroom apartment on Del Prado to a one bedroom in the same apartment complex, on Bonita Vista Way. He said it would save him $200 a month. He also cut out cable television (may have done that even earlier) in another attempt to lower his expenses. He was struggling financially and was also trying to make it possible to pay his expenses on his own, as he had decided that although he wanted to remain friends with her, his romance with Donna was not healthy or wise for the two of them. He told me they reinforced each others bad qualities.

I had been concerned about them and thought it was for the best for both of them, and hoped that he would begin a new chapter of his life. He did, but it was not a happy one. Initially, Donna was still living with him and he said I should treat them like good friends who were roommates, but he started dating again and she was hurt and moved out. It wasn't for long, because on July 12, 2007, two years ago today, Leif had a motorcycle accident on his way back to work from a late lunch. He had a badly broken collarbone, scraped up hands and head, and was bruised up. Luckily it wasn't worse. He was released from the emergency room late that night. Donna volunteered to come back to his apartment to help take care of him and he accepted rather than come to stay with us. I thought that was a mistake but neither of them would listen to me. Things did not go well for long and on September 16, 2007, it was over.

He had surgery on July 27, 2007 to repair the collarbone, but was in a lot of pain. I begged him not to ride again, and we had a long text message discussion about it, but he ultimately got his bike back, which hardly had a scratch on it and started riding again.

He decided to try to help out his financial problems by using his GI Bill benefits and going back to school, so while he was laid up for a month and couldn't work (and luckily had short-term disability insurance through his work to support him) he applied to and was admitted to the University of South Florida, which wasn't far from where he lived. He enrolled in the fall semester of 2007 as a philosophy student, taking two evening courses.

I thought he was depressed, but he denied it. I sent him some online tests for depression that fall, but he insisted he passed them with flying colors. Of course, as smart as he was, and having been a psychology student, he knew what answers to give or not give. I think, though, that it was only partly trying to fool me. i think he was also fooling himself.

He began to spend money that fall in large sums, money he claimed he had from his insurance from the accident. When I questioned how he could afford what he was doing, he said it was "wheeling and dealing" and that he had sold some of his belongings, a computer, a gun, a monitor, maybe more but those are the things I remember him talking about.

The thing was, he didn't have all of the medical bills come in for months, and when they did, they piled up on him. Even with two types of health insurance, he still had large amounts of deductibles he was responsible for. But, typical of Leif, he did not volunteer this information to us. He undoubtedly didn't want us to know he was in over his head again, and as usual, thought he could solve his problems himself. Selling things was one way to do it. In addition to the things he sold others, he also sold a computer to us and one to his grandmother.

The closest he ever came to really admitting he was depressed was in November, when he sent that email to me that he was struggling to find meaning and purpose, and that he needed to be needed by someone.

I think things might have limped along and he might have been able to get through the financial crisis if he hadn't waited until the last minute (literally) to sign up for his spring 2008 semester classes at USF. He hadn't gotten an advising appointment, thinking that since he had already been through four years of college and knew how to pick degree requirements, he didn't need help. Leif was always doing things at the last minute. I'm not even sure he would have gotten enrolled for the spring semester if I hadn't asked him what he was taking. When he told me he didn't know, I was razzing him about it and he decided to sign on that night and check. That's when he found out he had barely a half hour, or something like that, to enroll. He chose two classes that he thought were sufficient.

He had attended about six weeks of classes and already paid his tuition and was past the point where he could withdraw and get it back when he got a notice that the GI Bill stipend was going to be discontinued because according to someone at USF the classes he enrolled in did not fulfill degree requirements. He was livid and quit school. He said they would not approve the classes, but he didn't try to appeal the decision. By the time he told us about it, he had already withdrawn from school. He didn't want to continue without the monthly support. His dad had a similar problem when he was using his GI Bill at KSU but he appealed the decision to a higher office and they sided with him. Peter W. told Leif that's what he should have done, but since Leif had already withdrawn, it was too late, and he was too upset and angry to care, or so he said.

However, that was the beginning of the end, I think. This was around the first of March 2008. He had to try to come up with an alternate plan to pay his bills, but he still didn't tell us how desperate he was, or even admit that he needed a lot of money. He would talk about being broke until payday and when I asked him how bad off he was he would say he was "broke but not broke-broke."

Sometime in March he decided to apply for personal loans. Every time in his past that he got into financial difficulties, he had either figured out a way to weather them or we had come to his rescue. I don't think he realized that he had gotten so far in debt that he couldn't get a loan. After all, he had gotten loans for cars and motorcycles before. However, he was turned down for the loans. The rejections letters were dated March 22, and we found them on his desk after he died.

The last time we saw him was March 23, 2008, which was Easter Sunday. I asked him to come to dinner and he said he couldn't afford the gas money. I told him I would give him gas money, and he came. We had a really wonderful visit and evening together. He probably still had some hope then, because he hadn't gotten the loan rejections yet, and had met a woman he had virtually fallen in love with at first sight. He sounded happy and hopeful, and we were so glad for him. We had no idea what his situation really was, and I don't think he did, either. If we had, I would certainly have given him far more than the $15 I gave him for gasoline!

Two and a half weeks later, he was dead, in this apartment, on April 9, 2008. This was the last place he lived.

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The photos are:
1. Leif took this photo of himself with his iPhone on March 7, 2008, almost exactly a month before he died.
2. The building where Leif lived his last ten months of life, on Bonita Vista Way in Tampa.
3. Part of Leif's living room, taken by him with his cell phone, on July 25, 2007.
4. Leif's computer desk, taken by him on November 2, 2007.

Leif was not a good housekeeper. His apartments were usually a cluttered mess. There were a few parts he kept relatively neat. this end of his living room was one, but what you can't see in front of that were the boxes of stuff heaped on the floor, clothing and towels strewn on the couch and floor, the clothes on the floor in the bedroom by the unmade bed, and the cluttered up kitchen. About the only place that he consistently kept pretty neat and nice was his computer desk. He liked to have more than one monitor because he was both an avid online gamer and a multitasker. He liked to have more than one thing going on at a time on different monitors. By the time he died, he had sold some of this equipment.

This was a fairly nice apartment, but one thing about it that I don't think was good for a man who was depressed was that it was dark. It lacked the bright light that might have been better for him. That was made worse by his work schedule which had him working late nights, so that he came home in the dark, stayed up late online, and then slept late with his bedroom window covered up so the sun couldn't shine in a wake him. He spent most of his time indoors in dimly lighted places at home or indoors at work in a call center away from natural light. I don't pretend that more natural and brilliant light would have saved his life, but it would certainly have helped his moods.

Leif's Twenty-Third Home - Tampa, Florida - October 2006 to June 2007

When Leif and Donna first moved from the apartment on East Sligh to the two bedroom apartment on Del Prado in a different apartment complex, they were ecstatic. They had far more space and it was a nicer place. Leif also was smart to get a second floor apartment, which was harder to burglarize. They lived in the apartment on the right side on the second floor of this building.

With the insurance money he got from the burglary, he purchased some new furniture, including a dinette set, which they had never had before, and replacement computers, but he also replaced his guns. We had tried to talk him into saving some of the money for emergency expenses, but he claimed that he had bills to pay and needed to replace his guns. I knew that Leif loved firearms and would buy some, and he felt he needed some for protection, but he certainly didn't need all he bought. It was one of many financial mistakes he made.

At first, he seemed happier there, but things started to go wrong all to soon. He had to switch jobs due to the restructuring of the pay plan at Alltel as he felt he couldn't live on the new wage scale, and Donna lost jobs, so they were without her income. Their relationship was getting rockier, too. You can see in the photos that he was becoming depressed and gaining weight. The earlier photos are the lower two, taken January 7, 2007. The top photo was taken just four months later. By May, he was having a lot of financial difficulties and although he didn't tell me that, I got the feeling that he was pulling away from his relationship with Donna. He decided to downsize by moving into a one bedroom apartment in the same apartment complex.

Aside from the job, financial and personal problems he was experiencing, he was hit with another theft, a big one. In May, his prize Suzuki motorcycle was stolen right out of the parking lot in front of his apartment. He bucked up and put on a a stoic front as usual, but he seemed down and laconic. He again got his insurance money and purchased the used Honda touring cycle, so at least he didn't have to take on another loan and he still had a cycle to ride.
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The photos are:
1. Leif May 13, 2007
2. Leif January 7, 2007
3. Leif January 7, 2007
4. Riverview apartment building on Del Prado where Leif lived in apartment 201.

Leif's Twenty-Second Home - Tampa, Florida - February to October 2006

When Leif moved to Tampa with Donna in February 2006, his dad asked him whether the apartment he had leased on E. Sligh Avenue was in a safe neighborhood. Leif insisted it was. I don't know whether he really believed that, or whether he was just reassuring us. In truth, I think that he probably did think it was safe, since he had lived in so many different places with some many different kinds of people safely. It looked like a peaceful enough neighborhood.

However, he began to have problems not long after he moved in. He wanted to keep his car and his cycle in pristine condition, and was vastly annoyed at dings on his car doors. However, that was the least of his problems. Five months after he moved in, in July 2006, I got a call from him saying he and Donna would not be able to come to our house for dinner with the family (his brother, Peter Anthony and family were here visiting) because that afternoon, in broad daylight, while he was gone for only an hour (it was his day off), someone had jimmied the lock on his patio door and broken into his first floor apartment. They had kicked in the locked bedroom door and ransacked the entire place. They stole his guns, a laptop computer, cell phone, jewelry, and more. They broke the door frame, broke the king-sized bed frame upending it looking for loot.

He and Donna were afraid, knowing that the thieves had his guns and could so easily get into the apartment. The management didn't fix the patio door or provide them with any kind of secure way to close it, so Leif jammed a shower curtain rod in the frame to try to prevent the door from opening and piled an extra mattress against it. He had quite a time doing the claim for his insurance, and luckily had renter's insurance that covered his belongings.

Ninety days after the burglary, the management still hadn't fixed any of the damage, not the broken patio door lock, not the splintered bedroom door frame, not the bedroom door with the big hole kicked in it, and Leif had enough. He decided to break his lease, use some of his insurance money, and move out. He thought he had taken care of everything with the management, but not long after he moved out, he was presented with a bill for over $900, with a claim that he had not put down any cleaning deposit, so they wanted to charge him to clean an apartment that had been appallingly dirty when he rented it. He had dated photos to show that, including the electric stove burner burn on the kitchen floor that the were now trying to charge him for. They also were charging him for breaking his lease.

Fortunately, Leif had his copy of the lease which proved that he had paid a cleaning and security deposit, and they apparently couldn't find their copy, or at least they never produced it when we requested to see it. He also had documented the break-in extensively with photos, and the aftermath showing that things had not been fixed. He felt they had not upheld their end of the lease by providing a safe, habitable apartment.

We spent many hours documenting their negligence in not repairing the damage that was dangerous to human habitation and contesting their charges. They continued for nearly a year and a half to try to collect the money, finally sending the account to a collection agency. When we sent the collection agency the entire file with photos and all the communications, they dropped the attempt to collect, but this went on until just a few months before Leif's death.

He and Donna lived on the first floor at the back of the building on the left. The other photo is of the damage to the sliding glass door. You can see all of the pry marks that completely bent the metal and destroyed the lock.

Leif's Twenty-First Home - Sun City Center, Florida - March 2005 to February 2006

In March 2005 we moved part of our household goods and all of Leif's, including his Yamaha motorcycle, to the house we had purchased in Florida. Since I wasn't going to be able to move there permanently with the rest of our things until September 2006, we had two extra bedrooms he could use and live with his dad while looking for a job and a place to live. He set up one room as an office/entertainment area with his computer, stereo system, television and a love seat, and the other as his bedroom. He spent a lot of time in his office area online, looking for jobs, playing online games, and searching for women to meet and date. Peter W. appreciated having someone there for company, at least part of the time.

Leif found a job working for Amscot, a financial services company that makes payday loans and offers free money orders. He had hopes of moving up in the company and was promoted to assistant manager at one of their storefront locations, but a fellow employee had it in for him and he ended up leaving the company and going to work for Alltel in their Tampa call center. Since Alltel had purchased Western Wireless, the cell phone company he had worked for in Manhattan, Kansas, he came on with some seniority and a little bit better wage than a new hire would have gotten, and again hoped to move up.

He still seemed depressed to me, but not as much so as he had in Manhattan. However, he still would get down in the dumps, couldn't sleep, and would take his back pack out on his cycle and get a couple of six packs of beer and sit in front of the computer drinking one after another until in the wee hours he would finally manage to drink himself to sleep in his chair.

During his time living in this home with his dad, Leif sold hjs Yamaha cycle and bought the fast yellow Suzuki you've seen photos of. That seemed to brighten him up. He knew that we disapproved of his taking on a loan for a more expensive cycle (he had paid the other one off) when he still owed us a lot of money, including the money for the Dodge Stratus we loaned him the money for when he graduated from KSU in May 2003. Despite the friction over that, he loved riding that new cycle around the Bay area at terrifying speeds, making us terrified that he would kill or maim himself or someone else that way.

He also totalled the Stratus in an accident in Tampa in December 2005 on his way to a date and then bought the silver Mazda RX-8, saddling himself with large monthly payments for two vehicles. He loved that car, too!

We had hoped he would be able to save up a nice nest egg while living here, since he had minimal expenses, but he kept spending money wildly, another symptom of depression. He could been in good financial shape, and we tried to talk to him about it and about how he was going to have to move out when I finally moved down to stay and would need money for a deposit on an apartment and money for more furnishings, but he insisted it would be "no problem." After he died, I found an email he wrote to someone else that said he had saved up a thousand dollars before he moved out of our house. I didn't know he had managed to save up even that much, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to what he should have saved.

In January 2006, right around his 31st birthday, he met Donna and was captivated. They knew each other barely six weeks when they decided to get an apartment together in Tampa. He moved out of our house and into that apartment in February 2006, and lived barely two years longer.
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The photos above are:
1. Leif showing his grandmother, Marion S. Kundiger, her first (surprise!) cell phone, which he and I got her for Christmas, on December 25, 2005.
2. Leif in his "office" in our house in Florida, March 13, 2005, only a few days after moving in there.
3. Our home.

Leif's Nineteeth and Twentieth Homes - Manhattan, Kansas - August 2001 to March 2005

When Leif moved out of the old stone house for the third time in his life, in August 2001, he moved into the first floor of a small house on 11th Street in Manhattan, Kansas, where he shared the place with a college student named Bonnie. It was the first time he'd had a female "roommate" and he said she was "perfect" for him because while they got along great and she was a good companion, he had no interest in her romantically. Leif lived better with someone, and although they lived like messy students, the two of them would set aside time to clean up the place together. Leif wasn't much on cleaning alone, but if someone else was there working with him, he would get busy and get things done. Companionship meant a lot to him.

It was a small place and he had moved back to Kansas with an apartment load of stuff he'd had during his marriage (though at this time he and Nikko were still legally married, she had left him a year earlier). Other than what Nikko came and picked up, a lot of his things were stored in the garage.

He had the place with Bonnie during the 2001-2002 school year and then she developed a brain tumor and wasn't coming back. He decided he couldn't afford the apartment by himself on his GI Bill and small salary as a school crossing guard employed by the Riley County Police Department, but the basement apartment, which was really tiny and crowded, was available, so he signed a lease on that and moved himself downstairs.

It was about that time when Peter W.'s mother, Ellen, fell and crushed her femur. By July 2002, it was clear that she was dying of complications due to years of undiagnosed and untreated diabetes which made healing of her leg impossible. She had been living for five years in a house we bought for her at 710 N. 9th Street in Manhattan, on the same city block as our old stone house, and because all of her things were in the house and we didn't want it to stand empty, we asked Leif to break his lease and move into the 9th Street house. We paid the fee for the broken lease. The house was a far nicer place to live than the cramped basement apartment but since we owned it and it was just around the corner from us on the same block, he also had to put up with our complaints about how he took care of it and mow the lawn. I had all my stock of books over there in the large basement, and had to go there to get books to sell, so I was in the house frequently (but always well announced). It also made it easy and convenient for Leif to walk over to our house for dinner at least on Sunday nights, and sometimes during the week, or for help with his Spanish, German or algebra homework.

Ellen died on September 22, 2002, just over two months after Leif moved into the house. It took me the better part of a year to sell and give away her belongings and he was very tolerant about me coming over there to work on that and have garage sales.

It was a great place for him to live, with a large living room-dining room area, nice kitchen, two bedrooms and bath upstairs and a full basement. Here he could spread out all his things, work on projects such as the fifty-pound chain mail shirt he made, the wooden guns he designed, cut out and sanded, and much more.

It was also where he lived for a few happy months with J. and her daughter, probably the happiest months of his life.

The 9th Street house was where Leif lived until we moved him to Florida with his dad. We started taking trips to Florida to see where we might like to settle. I think the first one we took was to the Tampa area and up the northwestern coast to the panhandle in March 2002. It was there that Leif rented the white Mustang convertible for a day and fell in love with the Tampa Bay area, especially St. Petersburg and Clearwater. He was just beginning to recover from his depression, as I think you can see in the photos of him above, taken in February 2002. He hadn't yet graduated from KSU or met J. yet, and he was beginning to have hope for his future again.

We continued to make trips to Florida during spring break when he was out of classes at KSU and Peter W. wasn't teaching German at the high school or middle school, looking for the right community for us. Once Leif had gone through the elation and heartbreak of his relationship with J., and found he was miserable in Manhattan where job prospects for a college grad (a dime a dozen in Manhattan) were dim, he was anxious to leave, needed to get out of there to survive. He and Peter W. had nothing holding them in Manhattan, once Peter W.,'s German teaching job was eliminated and Ellen was no longer living, and both of them wanted to move south for their health. Both of them suffered from SAD, seasonal affective disorder, and Leif suffered from cold weather asthma. Peter was miserable with allergies to Kansas plants. They wanted warmer climes and needed them.

The fall of 2004, we planned a Thanksgiving trip to Florida, and although Leif was going with us, I think he had given up on moving there with us because he wasn't willing to wait until we did it. At that time, we were planning to wait another four years to make the move. There was a variety of reasons, but some of them were my job, my publishing adventures, my mother, who I refused to leave alone in Kansas, and all that we had to do to get ready for such a move . . . plus we hadn't found the right place to move to yet. Leif felt he couldn't wait another four years and he couldn't afford to move that far on his own. At that time his friend Michael was living in Tulsa and he had visited him there. He decided if he couldn't move to Florida he could at least rent a truck and move to Tulsa, so he put a deposit on an apartment there that fall. I think that was in late Otober.

To our surprise, during our Thanksgiving trip, when we revisited the Melbourne and Sun City Center areas to try to decide between them, we made a decision and found a house. We all liked it, and it seemed like the right decision to go ahead and buy the house. One of the considerations Peter W. and I took into account was Leif. We felt it was critical to give him a chance at a new life in the place he really wanted to be. The town we were moving to wasn't his ideal place, a retirement community with no young people, but it was near many places that were full of them, particularly Tampa and Brandon, near his beloved St. Petersburg, and in a growing job market. We bought the house in December 2005. Leif canceled the apartment in Tulsa and lost his deposit, but gained the opportunity to move to warmer, sunnier climes.
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The photo are:
1 & 2. Leif in Manhattan, Kansas, February 2002, with and without glasses, which he wore for distance vision only.
3. Leif on Bellaire Beach, Florida in March 2002.
4. Leif on a beach in Florida, March 2002.
5. 720 N. 9th Street house in Manhattan, Kansas where Leif lived twice, once briefly with Nikko from about March to July 1997, and then again from July 2002 to March 2005, a few months of which he lived there with J. and her daughter.
6. The house on 11th Street in Manhattan, Kansas, where Leif lived on the first floor with Bonnie for about nine months and alone in the basement apartment for about a month from August 2001 to June 2002.

The Sense of Place in Memories, and Seeing the World Through New Eyes

Everything happens in a place, and location, place, is such an important part of memories. One's home, the place one lives, is a key to so many memories. That's why I spent so much blog time on the old stone house. It was such a large part of our lives for so long.

But every place one lives has significance and memories attached to it, and as a child in a military family, and then as an infantry soldier, Leif lived in so many places. For those of us who have that peripatetic lifestyle, we keep track of where and when things happened in our lives by attaching the memories to where we lived at the time.

I find myself often thinking that Leif lived here, in this house, where I now live. He slept in this room, ate at this table, washed his clothes in this washing machine, showered and got ready for work in this bathroom, parked his car in this garage, watched movies with us in this living room. It's so hard to come to grips with the fact that he will never do those things again, though the memories live on without him.

Today the sun was streaming in behind a curtain and then a cloud passed over the sun, the room suddenly darkened, and I thought that is how long term grief feels. You go about life, finding a sense of normalcy, even, at times, a bit of the old joy you once felt, and then a shadow passes over you and blocks out the light, blocks out the happiness, even if only briefly, though it isn't always fleeting. Sometimes is lasts and lasts, like the clouds that come to stay on a dark dreary day.

Tonight Peter Anthony's friend Dave was here for dinner with his family. We had a great visit, lively conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even remarking how Leif would have felt about some of the things we discussed, remembering how much he would have loved participating in that discussion. Then, because Madeleine and Dave's son Andrew came in with a butterfly she caught and put into her bug cage, and Andrew's interest in it, I recalled a time in Japan before Peter Anthony had children when he asked me why someone would want to have them. I had begun to answer him that one of the greatest joys of having children is the opportunity to see the world through new eyes, to relearn the marvels of the world that have become commonplace to us as adults.

Just telling that got me choked up and misty-eyed, Peter W. told me not to cry, and I didn't. I managed to keep it under control, but I couldn't help but remember how much that meant to me, seeing the worldl through the new eyes of my sons . . . and how I continued to do that all their lives, as they grew into men and kept showing and teaching me new things. Peter Anthony still does. I miss it so that Leif never will do that again.
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The photo of Leif above was taken on New Years Day 2007 when he was visiting here and playing with Madeleine and Aly with the video camera of his cell phone. They had such fun.