Leif and the Turtle in April 2008

There are still so many reminders of Leif all around me. Last Saturday we went for a walk and saw this big turtle making its way between ponds. The shell of this was was about 14 inches long.

On April 2, 2008, just a week before he died, Leif was sending me text messages about a turtle he rescued from the street. He said it was about the size of a large dinner plate. He didn't send me a picture of it, but I imagined it to be a lot like the one we saw.

Tonight I re-read all our text messages to each other in 2008, in the beginning because I wanted to find the ones about the turtle, but then I was hooked from the beginning. What all did we "talk" about . . . everything from the presidential political campaigns (he was for Obama) to school shootings, from computers to work, from his new-found love interest to my mother's Medicare Part D account, from his interview to work at USAA to getting lost on the USF campus. There was no hint anywhere that he would be gone, that he would shoot himself.

Leif was always self-contained and not a complainer, but still, not a hint of anything wrong.

Seeing the turtle made me think of those text messages, and when I mentioned them to his father, Peter said, "He could save a turtle, but he couldn't save himself." I've thought that, too.

This photo was a self portrait he took with his iPhone on March 7, 2008, the last photo of him I've found. It was on his phone. I'm guessing he took it to send to his new love interest.

We saw him a couple of weeks later on Easter, March 23, 2008, but I foolishly didn't take any photos. Our family sometimes overdoes it taking pictures, and I try not to be obnoxious about it. Now, I wish I had taken some.

Thanks for saving that turtle, Leif. How I wish you had saved yourself, too!

Seven Years Without Leif

As a teen and adult Leif was such a towering presence in our lives, both emotionally and physically, the tallest member of our entire extended family, it's hard to realize that even though he was bigger than his friends and classmates, he must have felt small and vulnerable in the world as children do.

I haven't written any posts on this blog in some time, because it's hard to find new things to say after all these years, and repeating the same things doesn't seem to make much sense. I also wanted "new" photos of him to post.

Today it is seven years since we found his lifeless body in his apartment in Tampa. We had spent a terrifying 24 hours wondering where he was and what had happened to him, hoping he was all right somewhere because he didn't answer his phones or email, and had not showed up for work on April 9th. Should we have gone to his apartment on the 9th? It wouldn't have made any difference in saving him, as he was already dead. We didn't want to accept that possibility as long as we could hope that he was alive somewhere and just not communicating . . . which happened from time to time.

I still wonder about how it happened and why. It doesn't matter how many reasons we can find, there's nothing we can point to that made it happen just then. Why does someone finally make such an awful decision? I still wonder whether it could have been an accident, as the detective on the scene  said, rather than the suicide the medical examiner declared. I still wonder how a man so well trained in weaponry could have been so foolish as to put a loaded gun to his head and pull the trigger unless he meant it. We will never have those answers.

But it is somehow wonderful to open a box of old slides and find a "new" photo of him we haven't seen in 34 years. Back in those days, we took slides because they were cheaper than prints, and then we would only print the very best ones for our photo albums. A lot of slides really weren't print quality, or we had several that were similar and just picked the best one to print. But now, some of those that aren't really suitable for printing are wonderful to look at.

I realize more and more that our visual memories are so determined by our photos and looking at them over the years. They help to fix the pictures in our minds, and it is hard to recall how other things actually looked. I always wondered how people could say they were forgetting how some deceased loved one looked, but I can understand it if they didn't have photos they could go back to and fix in their minds. The photos also help to recall events surrounding them.

I pulled a few out of some boxes of slides Peter W. took during our years in Japan and scanned some. This was one of my favorites. What a beautiful child Leif was! I no longer remember where in Japan this was taken, though the box says it was in July 1981. Leif would have been six and a half years old. I don't remember the Mickey Mouse baseball shirt, either, but that beautiful little face I remember! The cute boy who needed a haircut I remember.

One thing that amazed me looking at these photos of him at that age was how much he looked like his niece Aly at that age. I'd never seen that before.

I wish I had time to haul out all our slides and scan all the ones of our family. Someday. There will be a lot of memories there.

For today, my memory is with Leif, the years we shared with him, and the years that have gone by without him. He will be missed every day of our lives.

Leif Clearing Out Fallen Coconut Palm Fronds in Puerto Rico

Here are two photos I had never seen before that I found among my mother's slides. I know why I never saw them. They are not in good focus, probably because she took them through the dining room window.

However, they are a treasure to me because I can see my "Tarzan son" the way he looked in high school in Puerto Rico when he was out in our large "rainforest" back yard helping to clear out coconut palm fronds, coconuts that fell (dangerous!), and mow the spongy lawn.

He was so slender in those days, with a terrific figure and long hair.

He used a machete out in the yard to cut things, and one time I looked out and he had used the machete to whack off the end of a coconut, had the big heavy coconut stuck on the tip of the machete, and was pouring the coconut water into his mouth that way. I wish I had a video of it.

Leif didn't like yard work and would have preferred never to do any, but he helped out in our postage stamp sized yard at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, whether mowing or shoveling snow, and then in our yard in Puerto Rico, where it was incredibly hot and humid, and then again in Kansas, at our old stone house and the one we purchased for Peter's mother, and finally our yard in Florida. I can't say he ever did it willingly (at least not getting started) but once he got started, he worked and got the job done.

When I think of him doing yard work, these pictures are what comes to my mind, that tall, slender young man who was strong as an ox and worked to help us in so many places.

These photos were taken by my mother in April 1991. Leif was 16 years old.

The Mail That Keeps Coming and the Photos I Have Never Seen Before

Recently I read an article by a man whose son died, in which he wrote about how his son lived on in the world of junk mail. His son was dead, but mail continued to arrive for him, months later. He said he saved the mail, as though his son might somehow be coming back for it.

I understood exactly how he felt and what he did. Even over six years after Leif's death we still get mail addressed to him, although the amount of it is lessening. The latest piece was another ad from Mazda, offering him a great deal on a new car.

I don't save the junk mail, and personal mail was never really an issue, since Leif had little use for paper correspondence, preferring to do everything he could online. After he died, I had plenty of mail about him, taking care of his affairs, but only junk mail addressed to him, and I didn't keep any of that.

It still arrives, as though he were still here to receive it. I wonder how long these mailing lists go on and on when there is no response.

It used to hurt when I saw his name on an envelope. It was yet another reminder that my son was no longer with us. Now, it's more an annoyance that they won't quit.

There's still so much of him everywhere around us, so much of the way we live that we owe in some measure to him. I sit here at my computer desk, which he and his dad put together for me, using a computer that was once his.

A couple of days ago as I was driving home, I was thinking that I would never see a new photo of Leif, or have a new story about his life to tell, unless someone who knew him came forward with them, and then, just a day later, someone did.

My mother has been an avid photographer most of her life. Her vision is no longer good enough to use her camera, and she is confined to a wheelchair, but last week she started going through her thousands and thousands of slides. I brought home a couple of the big boxes of them to give her a start. There was a big plastic box labeled "family" and some dates that went through 1993. I decided to peek inside and found a few that she took when we lived in Puerto Rico . . . and there were some slides of Leif I had never seen before. Mom only printed the very best of the photos she took, so I'm sure there are many that none of us have ever seen. I won't know whether these are good shots of Leif until I scan them, but I will treasure any new photos of him I get.

The one with this blog was one of Leif's many selfies. It was taken March 11, 2008 in his apartment, less than a month before he died. I wonder about his photography. When he was in middle school and high school, he photographed architecture and objects. When he was in college and the army, he didn't take many photos, probably because of the expense in those days when he had to buy 35mm film and pay to have it processed, but he did take some of his wife Nikko and their friends, and of his deployment to Bosnia. During that period, he didn't take selfies. But when he returned home from the army, single, he seemed to only take photos of his vehicles and himself, the only real exception being the woman he wanted to marry. After she left him, it was only vehicles and selfies.

At the time he took this picture, he was in love again, and he had photos of her, but he hadn't taken them. He asked for a camera for his last birthday, but never used it for anything but his vehicles. It seems to me that is a sign of how disconnected he was from other people. To my knowledge, he never took a photo of us, his parents, or of his brother's family when they were here to visit, except some silly cell phone videos with his nieces.

Not everyone is an avid photographer, so not taking pictures in and of itself isn't so strange, but to take ONLY the ones he did seems telling to me, a sad comment that he felt no need to take photos of people in his life, but did take photos of himself. Why?  

Leif Wrestling With His Cousin Tim

Sometimes I think the photos on this blog leaves the impression that Leif had a sort of solitary existence, since I don't post many pictures with other people in them, but it's a false picture. Leif had friends he cared deeply about and an extended family he enjoyed. Like me, he was more of an introvert and never had a crowd of friends, but he enjoyed and was committed to the ones he had, and he had a good time at social and family gatherings. It would have been fun to show more of that on the blog.

This photo I had never seen until the end of March when my sister, Lannay, brought several photos she had taken years ago. It was taken in 1985 when Leif was ten years old. He's on the floor in the red shirt, wrestling with his cousin Tim. Tim's sister, Holly is peeking over Tim's shoulder at the top left. Leif would have loved to do some of the things that Tim, and his dad, Leif's Uncle Donovan, got to do, like race stock cars. Instead, he raced his used RX7 and later RX8 on the highways. (Not a good idea and it scared the daylights out of us.)

I still wonder how many more photos of Leif I've never seen, that someone else took. Maybe more will surface.

Every Precious Picture

Grief hurts, and many aspects of grief are common to all who experience it, but some are acutely individual. Some people put away all photos, all reminders, of their deceased loved one because they can't bear to see them, can't bear to be reminded, can't bear to think about it. I often wonder, though, whether that is successful. Perhaps they can control the exterior stimuli, but what about their minds? Surely then can't cut off all the thoughts, the questions, the memories.

Others treasure every photo, every little scrap of something that was made by or belonged to their loved one, and I think this is particularly true of parents who have lost a child, no matter what that child's age.

I know it is certainly true for me. I look at these photos and remember when each was taken. Often, I was the photographer and I remember why I grabbed my camera at that point, how I felt, how I wanted to preserve the moment.

Photos that someone else has taken that I've never seen before are a precious gift. There have been very few of those. Surely some of Leif's friends took pictures of him that I may yet someday see.

This photo of Leif was taken by my sister, Sherie, when she came to visit us in Kansas in the fall of 1975. Leif was only about nine or ten months old. He was a happy little rascal then, into everything, and loved to play with pots and pans. He had a laundry basket full of stuff to play with and usually just tipped it over to get at everything. You can see it in the background here.

This photo is endearing in several ways, even the yellow corduroy pants and green shirt, an outfit no kid would be found wearing in 2012. :) His hair was still blond and thin. It's hard to believe that he would be so dark-haired as a teen and an adult.

At Bedtime They Were Mine

I loved bedtime for my boys, and not because they'd soon be in bed and I'd have time for myself and Peter W., though I enjoyed that, too, but because it was a special time together. During the day, I had "competition" from friends, play, television, and school on their part, and household chores, cooking, work, shopping, and more on my part. Bedtime was just us, no distractions, a time apart. After they were bathed and in their pajamas, I'd cuddle up and read to them, and after that, cuddle in the dark and talk. That was always the time when they'd talk about things that really mattered, the things that were on their minds, things that happened to them, what hurt their feelings, what scared them, what they had questions about, their dreams, the future. It was magic and sweet.

After that, I'd sing to them. Sometimes each one separately, but more often, once Leif was about two years old, I'd sit on the floor in the hallway between their rooms and sing to them.

It astonishes me that with the literally thousands of photos we have of our boys and our family, there is not one single photo I can find of me singing to them, or cuddling in bed with them, or singing with my guitar. I can picture those times in my mind, but no one else will ever see them now.

This photo of Leif asleep on a train in Europe the summer of 1977 is something I took. He was so little and sweet, though very tall for his age at two-and-a-half. We took a long train trip that summer, from Germany to Norway, back south to Paris and the Riviera. The boys slept on trains and in hotels, and it was a great time for us. I posted a photo of the two boys cuddled up in a hostel bed in Norway. But no photos of me with them.

I think so many of today's children don't have a "bedtime," not in the sense of a time to go to bed, or in the sense of a comforting and loving ritual they can count on. So many are allowed to stay up way too late and are tired the next morning. Even with a regular bedtime I had a hard time getting my boys up to go to school. They slept soundly and didn't want to wake up!

I wish I had a list of all the books I read to them and all the songs I sang to them. I'm trying to make a list of the songs. I'll probably be able to remember a few of the books. I'll have to post those lists when I think I've exhausted my memory of things to add to them.

Most of the time the boys were cooperative about going to bed, and I think that the pleasant ritual and the affection and cuddling made it something enjoyable instead of something to fight against. However, it wasn't universally that way. When Peter A. was about four he would go to bed just fine, but then in a few minutes start calling that he needed a drink of water, or had to go to the bathroom, or saw a monster outside his window.

Leif went through a period where after we'd gone through the bedtime cuddling and I hugged and kissed him good night and went downstairs, he would wait about five minutes and then sneak down the stairs after me. I'd put him back in bed and down he would come again. This would go on repeatedly until I had to be very stern with him or put in in his Zip-a-Babe harness so he couldn't get out of bed. Oddly, as I've written before, he didn't seem to mind that, seemed to find it a relief that he couldn't get out of bed. The "getting out of bed" period didn't last long, just a month or so.

I missed those bedtime routines when the boys got into high school and I think they did, too.

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Four years ago tonight we were having dinner here with Leif, his last birthday dinner, a day before his birthday because he had to work on his birthday, the evening shift. Little did we know it would be the last birthday dinner we would share with him

The Power of Smiles - The Power of Longing

Last Saturday I was going through thousands of digital photos and Peter W. was looking at the slide show of Leif's life on this blog. He said, again, how happy Leif looked, how it was hard to believe what had happened to him, but that you could see the downhill slide in his photos during the last year of his life. I, too, was seeing so many smiling photos of him, and it's easy to get the impression that he really was happy. I've written before about smiles in photos. Most people smile for the camera because that's what they've been taught to do. If they don't, the photographer will tell them to smile, and wait to take the picture until they do. It's not that they are always caught at a spontaneous moment of happiness and delight, or that they are really happy people in those pictures, though sometimes it IS a happy moment. We don't see all those that weren't captured, or all the times before the camera was pointed in their direction or the photographer insisted on a smile.

I've posted some photos of Leif that weren't smiling, though except for the one when he was a kid in Japan having a crying fit, he didn't really look unhappy in the photos . . . pensive, thoughtful, absorbed, perhaps, but not sad or unhappy. I do have some photos of him looking glum or unhappy, though. They aren't my favorite shots, but I am still glad to have them. They are real. Usually, I caught him unaware, or I wanted him to smile and he wouldn't, so I took the picture anyway.

The photo with this post was taken by Peter W. in San Marino in September 1979. Leif was four-and-a-half years old. We were on a trip to Italy in our old Opel Diplomat car, which I'm amazed managed the trip. It was the same trip when we visited Rimini, I think. Leif looks so huggable, but also so kind of intense.

Looking at all the photos induced an intense longing for him, a truly heartwrenching yearning to have him back again. I was overcome by it, and then I decided to think more deeply about the emotion I was feeling and discovered that he was the catalyst, but the yearning was not only for him. It was for that time of our lives. It was for the totality of the experience when our sons were young and we didn't face all these problems, when we had no worries about their adult problems and no memories of Leif's death, when we were together and happy. Peter W. says he would like to go back and do it all again, together. I know what he means. I long for the time when I could hold both my boys in my arms and hug them for all we were worth, when I could tuck them into bed at night and sing to them, a time when I knew that if they were unhappy, it would pass, a time when Peter and I were young and hopeful and optimistic about our future and theirs.

We were so fortunate when our sons were young. They were healthy, intelligent, creative, full of life and fun. Of course, they were rascals, too, and often frustrating, but mostly they were a joy, and that time of our lives was a treasure we can be enormously grateful for. We can be grateful for the smiles, the natural and the posed ones, and we can be grateful for every other expression we preserved on film, even the silly ones. They show who we were. I like that better than what we have become.

Leif in Blue on a Sailboat in the Caribbean

I love these photos. Peter W. took them when we were out on a sailboat when we lived in Puerto Rico in 1991. Leif was such a "Tarzan specimen" then, so tall, slim, muscular and handsome. He was letting his hair grow long, was finding good friends and dating, doing well in school, making his own guitar. He loved the sea and sailing. This was the summer that he went on the teen sail adventure in the British Virgin Islands and came home really looking like Tarzan with his long hair in tiny braids -- not the Tarzan ever actually had that hairstyle, but this was the Caribbean version. :) The memories of that time are good, happy ones. I'm glad he had some good times. Though not all his time in Puerto Rico was happy, I think some of the happiest times of his life occurred there, like his first love, K., and his triumph as Kenicke in the musical "Grease," his sail adventure, guitar playing, his group of friends. How I wish the successes he felt then had continued.

Today was a beautiful day, one that would have been lovely for a sail, a day at the beach, or Leif's other joy, a motorcycle ride. As we were driving down Dale Mabry in Tampa, a silver RX8 was alongside us. It might have been Leif's car. We thought of him, talked about him, reminisced, and how we missed him. BOB (big orange ball) was smiling on Tampa today. I wish he'd been there to enjoy it.

There are always so many reminders of him. I was thinking yesterday, as I was driving home from doing some errands, about this blog, about how I've been writing for more than three years. Haven't I said it all? Told all the memories, some more than once? Asked all the questions? At least all that I can put out here for an internet audience to read. What is left for me to write? And then I'll have a new dream, or something will trigger another memory, or I find a new picture or set of photos I'd like to post, and the blog goes on. I'm glad, for as long as it lasts. It's become a part of me.

Remembering the Little Moments of Life

There are so many ordinary moments of life that we don't think to document or even remember, moments that in their own way make up the cement of family time and bind us together, moments that slip past us without a second thought.

My sister, Lannay, captured some of those moments when we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia and she came to visit often. The boys were so young then, Peter Anthony in second grade, Leif two years old.

This photo of Peter W. giving Leif a drink of milk, their eyes meeting over the glass, is such a moment, not the kind of moment someone normally photographs, but so precious, such a sweet intimacy between father and son, such innocence and trust.

This photo was taken in April 1977. It has begun to yellow and it's not in sharp focus, but the sweetness comes through for all time.

Thank you, Lannay.

The Signs One Does Not See

I really debated about posting this photo. It's shocking and dramatic and disturbing, but in the end, I decided that's why I should post it. I was thinking once again about how we all look back and try to see the signs we might have missed, the ones that might have alerted us to the danger a loved one was in, that he was thinking of suicide. We could find small clues, very small ones, but they weren't things that would have alerted us at the time. I came across this article online, "How to Help Someone Who Is Thinking About Committing Suicide," on Wikihow, and it brought things into a different focus.

The article talks about hints someone contemplating suicide might give. I only remember one email that Leif sent to me in the same month he took this photo of himself, and it did alert me and make me very worried, but when I tried to engage him about his depression and loss of purpose, he insisted he was all right. I think this is a common reaction of men, and this article, helpful as it is, doesn't give you anything to go on if the person denies depression, denies suicidal thinking, and you have no other direct evidence. You certainly don't want to take precipitative steps if someone ISN'T contemplating suicide.

Had I seen the photos Leif took of himself using the PhotoBook program on his computer at the time he took them, I would have been even more worried and confronted him about then, but he would most assuredly have insisted that he was just playing with the program and his guns and it was all just a fun experiment . . . though it doesn't look like that to me. All of the photos look like an angry, depressed, sick man either giving the "camera" the finger or pointing a gun at it, or making nasty grimaces. There are no smiles, nothing "fun," nothing he would ever want to show the world. There is a series of photos using the various effects that PhotoBooth offers, sepia, negative (like this one), and others, but the poses are all in the same vein.

The thing that makes it all the more disturbing was that they were taken in the wee hours of the morning of Thanksgiving, November 22, 2007, less than five months before he died, and he had Thanksgiving dinner with us that night, seeming a little detached and depressed but mostly himself, conversational, pretty normal.

He started out taking some pictures at about 1:38 that morning. those were serious, thoughtful and maybe slightly sad. Then there was a break of about 4 hours and he took the rest between 5:48 and 6:08 a.m., and those were the ones I'm writing about. I think he may have used some of them to help model the face of one of his Mass Effect characters to look like him (I've posted photos of that character), but most of what he was doing was what appears to me to be a sort of documentation of how he was feeling, and that feeling was terrible, angry, hurt, sad, lonely, depressed.

None of the photos had him pointing the gun at himself. He sighted it toward the camera several times, held it sideways in front of his face, but not at himself. There were two different pistols in the photos, and neither was the one he used to kill himself. That one he had purchased only the day before he shot himself.

It's hard to imagine that only 12 hours after taking these photos, during which he probably spent a good part of the day sleeping, he drove to our house and acted normal for Thanksgiving dinner, and probably felt he had very little to be thankful for.

How does one help someone who is thinking about suicide if you can't tell, or they won't admit it, or insists they are handling things all right? And even if you try, will it help? It might. It's worth trying. There are many stories of people who have been saved or stopped from suicide and gone on to live a happier life and been grateful for the chance. We tried with Leif but we weren't able to help him. We cannot get inside the mind of someone in this condition. And we can only help as much as they will allow.

Leif did not call for help, didn't call a suicide hotline, didn't reach out, didn't tell his friends or his family. I still wonder how long the decision had been coming, whether he planned it or decided on the spur of the moment. Surely he had enough depression and disappointments and problems in his life to bring him to that.

However, now I am also beginning to wonder if there was yet another influence that might have tipped the scales. I knew that I'd seen things about the asthma medication Singulair causing depression and suicide. I even remember asking him about that in the fall of 2007. He said that was interesting because he had used Singulair at one time but wasn't on it then and hadn't been in quite awhile. I didn't think to examine further, but due to some other research I was doing online, it occurred to me to find out whether other asthma medications possibly caused depression, and I found that they do. It is a well-known side effect of the steroid inhalers and other medications. Leif's asthma was getting worse and he was using them more often. We will never know, but now I wonder whether that might have been the thing that put him over the edge.

If you have someone in your family who is depressed or despondent, consider their medications as possibly contributing to that state of mind.

On April 10th, it will be three years since we found Leif's body, and we are no closer to knowing why than before, but I think I am more able to take a balanced view. I'm more able to smile at the photos of him that I treasure. I will never smile at this one, but it's part of the truth of who he was and how he felt before he died, and maybe someone seeing this might see signs in someone they love that look like this and find it possible to talk with them and help them. I did not see these photos until months after Leif died.

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.

Funny Face

Leif enjoyed clowning around for the camera and making funny faces. Here's another photo I found on one of his cell phones. It was taken May 5, 2007.

I have a Google home page for my browser and one of the personalized features I set up is a Picasa slide show. That means that often when I open my browser, I'm greeted by photos of Leif, and usually they bring a smile to my face. Sometimes I say, "Hello, my handsome son." Silly? Maybe, but it's as though he is there to greet me, almost like an avatar online. Wish he were really "behind" that avatar!

Astonishing How This Blog Has Fared

It's amazing to me that in less than three years, there have been over 13,490 visitors to this blog, from six continents and over 90 countries.

I know that many of them arrived here because of some search term, probably many because they were looking for Leif Garrett instead of my son, but it is still an amazing number of visits, and I am glad they saw at least the top of the page photos and saw that my son lived.

It's evident that some were touched, some read on, some were repeat visitors, and I am grateful for that, too.

Now that I post less frequently, I am even more surprised that people keep coming. I come back to see it myself, to check the visitor stats, to post anew. Now that I have posted the best photos of Leif, it's more of a challenge to find new ones, as I don't like to post just words with no pictures.

These photos of Leif were taken on July 26, 2006 when he was helping Peter W. put together my new office furniture. I wasn't there. I was still in Kansas, and Leif's girlfriend at the time, Donna, took the photos with her cell phone and sent them to me.

He had only moved out of this room, which had been his office/living room for a year, five months before this was taken. I wonder, now, if I hadn't needed to use that room, and his bedroom, once I moved down from Kansas, whether he would have stayed with us longer, whether it would have made a difference in his life. I doubt it, though. I think he decided to move when he did because he found the opportunity with her and grabbed it.

Peter W. told me this morning he goes to this page each day wondering whether I've posted something new, even though now I seldom do. This blog became an important focus for both of us to think about Leif and our family and deal with our grief. We have come a long, long way since his death, and we are much happier and function much better. A part of that is because we have learned to live with his death and have come to compartmentalize our sadness, to keep it at a distance most of the time. But not always. It still comes through, and, from what others tell me, always will.

We will miss so many things, but one of them is his wealth of knowledge about technology, vehicles, tools and putting things together, and the help and advice he could give on all of those. Today my sister, Lannay, said she wished that she could just call him up and ask him about her problems with her computer and cell phone. I wish so, too! There are so many times I have the same wish. I don't think Leif knew how many people respected his abilities and counted on them.

Finding Photos

There are still surprises, still people from Leif's past who look for him online and find the blog or his Facebook page, memories others have I've never known, photos of him someone took I've never seen.

Last week I got out a couple of cell phones that Leif had in his apartment to see whether they worked and whether there were any photos or videos on them. When we found them, all I did at the time was put whatever accessories and manuals I found together in the appropriate box and put them in a bigger box to deal with later. I knew that a couple of them were phones we could use if we wanted to and just sort of kept them as backups. Then I thought i'd offer one to my granddaughter, who was going to get her own phone line, and figured I'd better put them back into the out-of-the-box settings. So, I took a look, not just at the memory in the phones but at some mini and micro SD cards that were used with them. And found photos of Leif I'd never seen before.

Some were painful to see, photos that Donna took of him in the ER after his motorcycle accident. Others made me wonder where they were taken, though I could see when by the filename the cell phone had given them. Long ago on this blog I wrote about wondering how many photos of Leif are "out there" somewhere, photos I'll never know exist and will never see, so it seems a bit ironic that i'd find some of them on two phones in my own closet.

This one is of Leif in his cycle jacket and cap, taken March 5, 2006, just a couple of weeks after he moved out of our house and into an apartment in Tampa. I remember that at that time, he had hope, was looking forward to being in the city, glad to have found a companion. In this photo he still has that speculative, sardonic little smile, that piercing gaze. I'd expect him to come out with some witty remark about now. I wish he were here and he could.

Another Month, Another Veteran's Day, Another Thanksgiving

November is a month full of memories and sometimes it makes me very sad. November 9th marked 31 months since Leif died. November 10th 31 months since we found him. November 11th, Veterans Day, when I usually like to go to the cemetery, but like last year, this year we were on a trip. And then there's Thanksgiving, which is the hardest one. I won't have either of my sons with us for Thanksgiving, so it will just be three of us, Peter W., my mother and me. I'm thankful beyond measure for both of them, and for Peter A. and my grandchildren, and all the other good things in my life, but that doesn't stop me from being sad that Leif will not be with us, that I won't anticipate his car coming up the drive with the stereo booming.

We took a marvelous two week tour of Egypt. It was a terrific trip and I very much enjoyed it, but both Peter and I couldn't help but wonder what Leif would have thought of all the wonders we saw, whether he would have enjoyed the trip, what it would have been like to discuss the history of Egypt with him.

Traveling is good for me. It mostly distracts me from the sadness of his loss, but coming home is always bittersweet. It's good to be home again, a place I love, but I'm always faced with the fact that he's not there and not going to be there, yet all around me in this house are things he did, things he gave me, and things that he left behind when he died. I want to remember him. I want those things around me, yet it still hurts to know we had all that together and now there's nothing there but memories and these things.

My browser home page has a slide show of albums I have on Picasa and two of those are of the thousand-some photos I've posted on this blog, so when I open my browser, I am treated to photos that flash by in some random order chosen by Picasa, and sometimes it makes me smile to see his baby face or a cute photo from his childhood. Sometimes it catches me unaware and a sadness hits me, but I'm always grateful for the photos, glad we took so many.

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This photo of me and Leif was taken in Munich, Germany in May 1978. He was three years old. It was apparently not processed well because over time it developed yellow streaks in it. I did the best I could to rescue it with PhotoShop. It was a good trip, that one to Munich. I'd love to be able to go there again with Leif as an adult. He'd love it . . . especially the beer.

How Many Photos Are There of Leif I've Never Seen?

When we were in Germany earlier this month, our friends the Streckers showed us some photos of us and our boys that were taken around 1980 when we were living in Germany. Several of them we had never seen before, and this photo of Leif riding on my back was one of them. How well I remember carting him around like this, usually when he got tired on Volksmarches and the terrain was too rough for the umbrella stroller, but also just for fun. He looks like he's enjoying himself, just a hint of a smile there. He looks so sweet. I'm glad I could scan it.

This made me wonder how many other people have pictures of Leif that I've never seen . . . and would love to see. I treasure every one.

Leif Throwing a Fit at Minka-En, Japan - September 6, 1981 - Age 6

Peter W. remarked at one time that Leif looks so happy in his pictures, especially as a child, and I said that it deceptive because most of the time when people take photos, they insist that the people in the picture smile and will do everything they can to get them to smile. I also liked to take photos of my boys when they were thoughtful, pensive, or acting silly, and I've posted some of those of Leif. However, we rarely take photos of our children when they are mad or crying. This photo is one of those few.

I no longer remember why Leif was so upset and "threw a fit," but I certainly do remember him doing it. We had taken Peter W.'s new boss and his wife to the Minka-En, which is an open air folk museum of old style Japanese houses. It's a very interesting place. For some reason, Leif got upset and started arguing and crying. It was very embarrassing, and I had to hold him and try to calm him down. Peter W. took this photo while I was trying to do that. Look how big he is at 6 years. It was not easy to hold him!

Leif did not throw that kind of a fit very often, but when he did, it was a big challenge to know how to handle it as a parent. It usually stemmed from some kind of frustration he was feeling. As he grew older, he learned to keep his emotions more under control and stopped this kind of behavior.

I doubt that he would remember either Minka-En or the incident if he were still alive, but he might. He had a terrific memory and amazed me at times with what he could recall, even being able to practically recite movie scripts or describe a car trip turn by turn when he was only six.

If you'd like to see what Minka-En is, click the name and visit the website.

565 Posts

Does a mother ever run out of things to say about her child? Does she ever forget? Does she ever run out of photos to show?

I suspect that at some point, the photos do run out, and I am finding it harder and harder to find ones of Leif as an adult that are enough different than what I've posted before and good enough quality, and that I still have baby and little boy photos. I'm finding that I have told so many of the stories . . . are there still new ones to tell, new things to say?

With this post I have written 565 posts on this blog out of 628 days since he died. Some of them have been short little memories. Some have been long stories. Some have been delineations of grief and sadness.

With this post I have posted 934 photos, mostly of Leif, some of family members, some of places he lived or things that belonged to him, but all with significance for his life or my feelings about it.

It would fill a long book.

And yet I still long to see photos of him, to remember him, still long to see him. He will always live in my heart.

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This photo was taken April 19, 1991 at our house in Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico. Leif was 16 years old.

Not Always a Happy Child

Peter W. remarked to me yesterday that when he looks at this blog, he sees that Leif had such a good life as a child, was such a happy child. I answered that one reason it looks that way is that we are usually likely to photograph people when they are smiling and happy, so that's not always an accurate picture of the rest of their lives.

Leif did have a good childhood, but he wasn't always smiling and happy. Like any child he had his ups and downs, disappointments and frustrations. I photographed some of those moments, too, and I have pictures of him looking serious, contemplative, bewildered, pouting, and a variety of other expressions, especially when he wasn't really aware of the camera with someone telling him to smile. When you think about it, why do people have to tell us to smile in photographs? Because we want photos of people smiling. They are more pleasing, generally. However, if it was natural to smile for the camera, or we felt like doing it, no one would have to tell us to.

Leif had the usual assortment of childhood tantrums, upsets, and hurt feelings, though as he grew, he was more and more self-contained and unlikely to reveal much about them. When he became a man, he had almost completely erased showing much emotion or allowing his hurt or misery, or even anger, to show, though he felt them deeply.

As an adult, he took many self portrait shots and usually was not smiling in them. I've posted some of them here. Although I like posting the childhood photos of Leif that show him happy, even joyous, perhaps in the interests of a more well-rounded view of him, I should post some others, like the one above.

This shot was taken of Leif in the backyard of our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas, in July 1976, shortly before we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. He was one-and-a-half years old. He's climbing onto the glider on our swingset. Little mister adventurous, barefoot and all. He looks so serious!