Seventeen years ago he took his life

Sometime between 2:00 AM and time to head for work in the morning of April 9, 2008, Leif ended his life. We only know that because he was with a friend until around 2:00 AM, and he didn't show up for work. His supervisor called me to see if I knew whether he was all right, because Leif was a dependable employee. We tried to reach him all day, hoping he was either off somewhere (since it originally had been planned for a day off for him), sleeping, ill, or something. No one could reach him. The next morning we drove to Tampa to his apartment. The manager let us into his locked apartment, and we found him dead on his kitchen floor.

I've never written, or even told, all the details of that morning, and I probably never will. It was devastating. The man who lived only until the age of 33 grew from this darling child. This photo was taken in Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany, in October 1979 when he was four years old. I have to smile at the boy almost perpetually needing a haircut. I was the one who cut his hair, and he resisted it until I insisted. But, I loved his soft brown hair, which became a much darker brown when he was an adult, and in high school, when he didn't have Mommy trying to give him a haircut, he let it grow long and luxurious. Unfortunately, as he grew through his twenties, he started to get bald and then decided to shave his head. He was a handsome man with or without hair. 

This is the first year since his death that the years have crossed the threshold; he has now been dead for more than half the years he lived. Seventeen years doesn't seem like such a long time. I can still see him sitting in the kitchen, or at the dining room table, or driving up to the house in his RX7 with the stereo system blaring. I can still hear his chuckle, and his teasing about my driving, "Mom, you've always driven like an old lady."

I miss him, every day of my life. 

 

Leif and Lannay in December 1992

 In December 1992, when Leif was just shy of his 18th birthday and in his senior year at Manhattan High School, his Aunt Lannay (my sister) came to Kansas for an early Christmas celebration with our family. At that time, a lot of us were living in and near Manhattan, Kansas, and she wanted to spend a Christmas with her family. Lannay and Leif always had a special relationship, ever since he was one-and-a-half and we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia for a year. He was more affectionate with her than he was with anyone else and they had a bond.

It's interesting to me to see this picture now, nearly 21 years later and see a family resemblance between them that I had never really noticed before.

Leif was so slender then, handsome with such cute dimples. He still had acne, but it was a lot better than it had been when he was in junior high. His hair was very long, not quite as long as Lannay's but close. In these pictures he had it pulled back in a long pony tail. You can see that even at 18 when his hair was luxurious and long, he had a high forehead and receding hairline.

I remember how important music was to him, always, and you can see one of his guitars hanging up behind him in the top photo. He had quite a collection of CDs. Sometimes the door to his room would be literally pulsating more like a drumhead than a wooden panel door from the deep bass he played on his stereo.

These photos make me smile. He looks happy, really happy. He beams. That kind of unreserved smile was rare from him. I didn't see it often, and I miss it.

Leif in Hawaii - October 1985 - Age 10

This is kind of an unusual picture of Leif, with his hair sort of blowing in the wind. In high school, he grew very long hair but when this was taken, in Hawaii in October 1985, he usually didn't have hair that long. Since I was the family barber, if I got busy and didn't have time to cut their hair, it got longer . . . but more often, it was a resistance on the boys' part to sitting down and getting it cut that resulted in the haircut being put off for awhile.

There's another unusual thing about this photo . . . the look on Leif's face, with his lower jaw kind of jutting forward. It's not a look I remember as typical of him. Those are reasons to treasure the picture, but more than that, there's a kind of eager, confident look about this photo that I really like. I no longer know for sure where we were when Peter W. took this photo (and a series of similar ones), but I think it was on the Big Island, Hawaii. Leif was wearing his trademark black Members Only jacket, though the cloth one, not the black leather one he came to love so much he wore it even in the Hawaiian heat.

Each day I look at photos of Leif and am grateful for all of them. We must have at couple thousand, at least, and I still wonder whether other people have photos of Leif I've never seen. I'm sure they do and I wish they would share them.

Leif in 1993 - Age 18

These photos were taken at the surprise family reunion we had in honor our of my mother's 75th birthday the weekend of July 4, 1993. Leif had just graduated from Manhattan High School at the end of May. He really enjoyed seeing his cousins, aunts and uncles.

You can see that already at the age of 18, his hairline was receding badly, a presage of things to come as it receded farther and farther, but here he still had that luxurious long hair, back in a ponytail and he's wearing his trademark (at the time) earrings and a chain he made himself using a heavy gauge wire he wound and cut into rings. It was part of his making chain mail, and he made quite a few items, culminating years later in the 50 pound chain mail shirt he made.

Leif in Puerto Rico - 1991 - Age 16

Leif turned into a teenage heartthrob in Puerto Rico, quite a change from the shy and gangly kid he was in Illinois before we moved. With the long hair, I used to tease him, between his sixteenth and nineteenth years, that he looked like he should be on the cover of a "bodice-ripper" romance novel, or pose for the covers. These photos were taken in the back yard of our quarters at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico. I don't remember it ever really being cool enough to wear a sweater, but Leif's sense of fashion didn't seem to be geared to the weather. It must have been a bit cooler, though, because a friend of his who was also in these photos was wearing a long-sleeved turtleneck.

In those days, Leif liked to wear a chain around his neck and an earring, too, and dress fashionably, including the dress fads of the time. His favorite color was purple. I've already posted a photo of him in his purple suit. I don't know what happened to that sense of color and fashion as he got older, whether he got more conservative, or felt it didn't fit in as well in the USA, or whether it had something to do with his weight gain, but he stopped wearing anything but black and blah tan stuff most of the time in the years before his death, with the exception of some conservatively colored button-and-collar shirts that had nice patterns on them, mostly gifts from his dad.

Leif had good friends in Puerto Rico and I know he missed them greatly when we moved away back to Kansas.

It's getting harder to find new photos to post on this blog, especially ones with a story to tell. By now I have posted over 800 photos of him. The photos of him from birth in 1975 until we moved to Hawaii in 1983 are in albums and relatively easy to find, but I got overwhelmed in grad school and working, and the printed photos from 1983 until we started digital photography a few years ago are all sitting in two large file boxes, waiting for me to write on them what they are and where they were taken, and the dates, and who knows if that will ever happen. In some cases, I no longer remember where they were taken! At least I put a date on the envelopes. At least a year.

And aside from photos that don't have clear memories attached are all the memories with no photos, like the time in Puerto Rico when the termites were swarming. We had never seen anything like that, although I had heard about it. If you've never experienced this, I hope you won't. We were sitting at dinner one evening, in our dining room in Puerto Rico and it was dusk. We looked outside and saw a cloud, a HUGE cloud, of insects in the back yard. Bear in mind that our house in Puerto Rico did not have real windows, just screens and metal louvers surrounding some large picture windows. The screens were covered with clear plastic so that we could have a window air conditioner, but the place was far from airtight and the termites knew it.

While we were looking curiously out the picture window, termites started finding their way into the dining room in droves, through any small opening in the areas around the louvers. We couldn't dispose of them fast enough and we couldn't keep them out. It didn't take us long to realize the light was attracting them, so the only thing we could do was turn off all the lights. Not even a candle or flashlight. No television, either. We just had to wait it out. Leif thought the whole thing was rather amusing, just as he thought catching giant rats in the laundry area under the house (a task for which I paid him) was kind of amusing -- or to be honest, it was my unwillingness to do it myself that he found amusing.

Leif's Essay on Freud and His Own Personality Development - February 11, 1994

Leif started taking classes at Kansas State University when he was in the spring semester of his senior year at Manhattan High School and continued at KSU after graduating from MHS in May 1993. This is an essay he wrote for his Human Development class in the spring semester of 1994 when he was 19 years old. I think it is revealing of some of his feelings about a couple of the moves he made as a military "brat" and how he molded his personality to fit the environment in which he found himself. It would be interesting to see what he would think today, or at the end of his life. He always remained vitally interested in psychology and personality theory, and he might have majored in psychology instead of general social sciences if he hadn't had to take math, which he hated, like statistics.

Leif Garretson
HDFS 110
February 11,'94

For this assignment I would like to discuss the various aspects of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical/psychosocial theories of development. I find that Freud had a unique and brilliant, but simultaneously narrow and simplistic, insight. His description of the human psyche in terms of the id, ego, and superego, rings true and explains a large percentage of one's personality.

However, Freud's intense concentration on the libido as the sole motivator is unrealistically unilateral. According to Berk (1994) Freud states that the ego develops as a mechanism for satisfying the demands of the id within the confines of reality. Later the superego develops as the conscience that further inhibits the desires of the id. I agree with Freud about the structure of the psyche, however, I do not believe that the child's personality has completely formed by age five.

I have had opportunities to change my personality dramatically much later in life. This, I believe, is due to the fact that growing up as an army "brat" I had my environment changed dramatically every few years. In my opinion, the most profound of these changes occurred immediately following my freshman year of high school, at approximately age fifteen. I had been living in an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago, known as Highland Park. Highland Park was a predominantly Jewish city with a very exclusive social structure. The people that had grown up there and already had long-standing relationships formed their own groups that were virtually impenetrable. I found that an outsider like myself could not break into one of these cliques and became as inconspicuous and introverted as possible.

In contrast, after moving to Puerto Rico I found that I could leave my old self behind and become whoever I wanted to be. I responded much differently. In Puerto Rico I was regarded as something exotic and changed my entire behavior dramatically. I began to wear nicer, less ordinary clothes; I became much more confident and assertive. I began to make lasting friendships that I had not made in the past. I began to do all the things that I never would have dared in Highland Park, including developing a "rep" for being a flirt. The person that I became in Puerto Rico, and for the most part remain today, is the antithesis of the invisible army "brat" that I was prior to the move.

In my opinion the Freudian theory of development can be very helpful as a model for therapeutic reference and is a good base for psychoanalysis. However, it gives explanations for only a few aspects of human development. It suffers from an extreme overemphasis on sexual impulses. Freud seeks to explain all of human behavior through sexual impulse, an approach that is inadequate and rather narrow-minded.

The psychosexual stages are an excellent map through the human psyche which tells us how the mind itself learns to deal with the world. They give a working explanation for certain adult behaviors and are extremely useful for psychotherapy. On the other hand, they are ineffective for defining all but a small number of personality traits. The concept that a person's personality is established by the age of five is absurd (Berk, 1994).

Freud's work was and is essential to the development of both the disciplines of psychology and human development. "His psychsexual theory was the first approach to stress the importance of early experience for later development." (Berk, 1994). His theories are important and must be understood to grasp a large potion of developmental thought. However, they should not be taken as the "Gospel."

[Berk, Laura E. (1994) Child Development, (pp. 14-15) Boston: Allyn and Bacon]

-----------------------

At the time he wrote this, he probably still had his long hair, but he was required to cut it to keep his job. He was working at Aladdin's Castle in the Manhattan Town Center Mall. When he got the job, he had long hair and the management had no problem with that, but then it was purchased by a new owner (Japanese I think) that required employees to have short haircuts and he cut his, I don't know just when that change occurred but this picture was taken on the day of his marriage to Nikko, October 20, 1995.

Leif & Lannay - May 1977 - Age 2 Years 4 Months

Leif had a special affection for his Aunt Lannay, my sister. He was not a very affectionate child, to me and his dad. When he was small, his favorite form of showing affection to me was to wait until I was sitting, or down on the floor and take a runnig leap at my back. But Lannay was different.

Leif got to know Lannay when we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia when he was a year-and-a-half old, and during the year we lived there, she came to see us often. Leif took to her in an instant. He loved her long blond hair and he would snuggle up with her and cuddle in ways he never did with us.

This photo was taken in Charlottesville in May 1977 when he was a two years and four months old.

Leif - The Purple Suit & The Sculptor - 1992

In high school, Leif became a snappy dresser with his own sense of distinctive style. When he wasn't wearing the the in-style ragged jeans and combat boots, he liked unusual styles, particularly two suites, one a sort of silver/gray the other purple, and he looked terrific in them.

This photo was taken in our back yard in Puerto Rico. Note the Oakley sunglasses, one of several pairs he owned over the years. I found one in his belongings after he died.

That yard was surrounded by a ring of 29 coconut palms and was very hard to mow. Leif got that job, and he didn't like it. However, I wish I had a photo of him out there, bare to the waist, long hair streaming, with his machete stuck into a coconut he had just lopped the end off of, holding it in the air with the machete and drinking the juice by pouring it down his throat. He looked like a very well-built Tarzan.

I chose this photo because of an analogy Peter made today. He said it's as though we had what we thought was a perfect piece of marble and spent 33 years sculpting it, and then found it had a fatal flaw that would cause it to disintegrate.

I thought a lot about that today, but the analogy isn't quite right. It's more as though we had about 20 years to sculpt the beautiful statue, and then had to put it out into the public garden, where vandals worked for years to destroy it and finally managed to do so.

I say that because Leif suffered greatly. He was betrayed by people he loved. He was treated with terrible unfairness and cruelty in the army because of his asthma. He suffered heartbreaking loneliness and depression.

Although the rest of Shakepeare's speech doesn't fit, the line "he loved not wisely but too well" certainly fits Leif. He had great love to give, but he chose unwisely and those he loved broke his heart.

Leif had flaws. They contributed to his loneliness and depression, but as I learn about depression, I see that many of those flaws were symptoms of it.

Yet in so many ways, he WAS the beautiful statue, the beautiful mind. He was brilliant, though he never found a focus and sense of purpose for that mind. He was handsome. He was kind. He was funny. He had a social conscience. He cared deeply about his country.

When this photo was taken, he could have been a model, posed for the cover of romance novels, but although he dressed the part, he never had the artifice to be the ladies' man . . . and indeed, what he really wanted most of all in life was a loyal, loving soulmate, the protector of his heart.

How I wish he had found her!