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.

Children, Happiness, Parables, Poems and Life

When I was in graduate school at the University of Hawaii, one of my professors told me that I would have a hard time with the empty nest syndrome when my sons left home because I was so close to them and involved in their lives. They were then ten and sixteen. I told him I didn't think so, that I had raised them to become independent, that I wanted them to lead their own lives, that I had much to do in my life, too. All of that was true, but it was also predicated on the assumption that we would always have a close relationship with our sons throughout our lives.

For 23 years, I was basically right, though the details took on different hues. First Peter Anthony left home to go to the Air Force Academy. At first he came home for breaks and spent time with us and his high school friends, but he quickly pulled away into his own sphere, and though I realized I had lost the close intellectual exchange and camaraderie we had before, it seemed natural that he was finding new companions for both friendship and mental challenges, new horizons to pursue, and we rejoiced in his successes, as we have continued to do in all the years since he graduated from high school and left home the summer of 1987.

At the same time, we were seeing Leif blossom and come into his own as a young man with his older brother away and I continued to have a close relationship with him. It was a joy seeing them both develop into interesting, intelligent adults. My "empty nest" was delayed when Leif decided to live at home and attend KSU rather than go away to school, a decision influenced by his father's willingness to buy him a used RX-7 if he stayed there and saved the cost of a dorm or apartment, but not one I felt was best for Leif. For me, it was great. I loved having him there.

Even when he moved out with Nikko, and got married, he was still close by and in frequent contact, so my "empty nest" was delayed again. It wasn't until he enlisted in the army in January 1998 that he left and went far away for three and a half years and began to pull away from the closeness we'd always had, and I think it was partly the lack of the contact and closeness that kept me unaware of just how bad things really were for him in the army, though he did tell us what happened, and expressed anger, but didn't let us know of his despair.

At the time he left, I was just beginning my publishing venture and a year later began working on a graphic arts degree, writing more, and being creative in ways I never had time for when I was a "mom" and working, so I was happy in my own new life and didn't feel as much the lack of my sons' presence, though I loved the contact we had. I think I adjusted pretty well to their adulthood and I enjoyed my time with Peter W.

I can't say it never occurred to me that we might be without either of our sons. We worried a lot about Leif because of his penchant for fast driving, with either his car or motorcycle, and his ownership of guns. Once we found out he had been suicidal the last months he was in the army, and he was so depressed when he came back to Kansas, we worried about the possibility of suicide, too. We worried about Peter A. as an Air Force pilot flying into potentially dangerous areas, and of course, we were acutely aware that other possibilities for disaster always exist, but worrying about possibilities is not the same as dealing with them. There is no way you can feel something you haven't yet experienced. Despite our worries I don't think either of us envisioned our future without our sons there for the rest of our lives. We counted on them being there the way a child counts on his parents being there. It wasn't that we ever took them for granted. We took them for integral parts of our lives.

Today we took our granddaughters, Madeleine and Aly, to the airport to fly back home and after spending four weeks with us. We loved having them here and we had so much fun together. I found myself thinking and realizing that this was how I felt when I had my two sons all those years ago, only they were my children, and I was bound to them in an even deeper way. I realized again how happy I had been then. I knew I was happy then, but I don't think I knew HOW happy, because I didn't have a way to measure it, something to measure it against. Having the girls here gave me a measure of depth, how wonderful it was to hold them in my arms, to have a conversation with them at the dinner table, to read to them, to show them new things and teach them how to do something, to have fun together at the pool or beach, to share our lives. It made me remember and realize anew how much I loved those days, those years, with our sons.

It made me think of Khalil GIbran's poem "On Children," and how well it expressed some of my feelings. I first read that poem when I was in high school, and I have remembered it all these years. I reread it again tonight to see if I remembered it well, and it is so poignant and so prescient.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Now that Leif is gone and can no longer be the arrow shot into the future, but instead an arrow that somehow fell to earth, I mourn for him, but I rejoice that Peter Anthony is truly of the future, a futurist, who has and is projecting himself far beyond my aim.

Then I thought of the parable of the Prodigal Son. In some ways it parallels our family story, with the older son steady, stable, reliable, and the younger one wanting to take his inheritance and head for other lands, wasting it, working at menial jobs, and eventually coming home humbled . . . but received with rejoicing and open arms. Leif was received home again with joy an open arms more than once, but our story doesn't have that final happy ending. We will never be able to rejoice that he has come home again. He was never "lost" during his lifetime, not to us, and he could always come to us, but in the end, he didn't. I will always be sad that he did not. Was it pride? Was it shame? What kept him from seeking help, from us, from anyone? I suppose he would say he did, in that he tried to use his GI Bill benefits to improve his finances . . . but then spent it unwisely and eventually lost the stipend because he didn't get proper advising about what classes to take . . . and by applying for personal loans to try to cover his debts when he finally realized he couldn't pay them. Was it the loan rejections that finally discouraged him? Was he just completely unwilling to come to us again? What about all the other things he needed help with, his loneliness?

The rest of my life I will go over and over every detail about the his life, especially the last years, trying to understand, trying to find a clue to what made him come to the decision to take his life.

And through it all I will be missing him. Through it all I will be loving him.

Through it all I will continue to realize, day after day, how happy I was when my sons were young and in my care, how fortunate I was, and am, to be their mother. I will shed tears because I miss those days that will never come again, and tears because Leif is dead. I will remember those days and all the days since that we were together.

I had another realization today. I miss Peter Anthony. I miss the relationship we once had where "mom" was a "good reference book." I don't think I let myself realize how much I missed him all these years since he left home, because I wasn't "supposed to." I wasn't going to be one of those obsessive mothers who hover over their children, or one of those demanding mothers who expect attention all the time. I wasn't going to be one of those needy mothers who pile guilt on their kids. I wasn't going to be one of those mothers who mopes around an empty nest when her kid grow up and leave home. And I don't think I have been any of those things. But, I still miss him. And I found out the truth by missing Leif. I need to rejoice in Peter Anthony's life and family. They are here. They will help keep our lives full.

But there will always be two intermingling streams, the lively one of son and grandchildren, the dark, sad one of loss and grief.
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The photo is of Peter Anthony and Leif on December 25, 1981 in Sagamihara, Japan. It was Peter Anthony's thirteenth birthday.

Leif's Tenth to Eighteenth Homes - Manhattan, Kansas to Fort Drum NY and back- 1995 to 2001

When Leif left our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas to live with Nikko, his fiancee then, they first lived in the yellow and purple house on the north side of the 800 block of Bluemont Avenue. They had a basement apartment. It seems this house, like others along Bluemont that once were nice family homes and were turned into student apartments by landlords that didn't care for the property, now seems to be boarded up and probably destined for destruction. Basement apartments in Manhattan weren't cheap. Nothing in Manhattan is, but they were cheapER, the closest thing to affordable. The apartment was unfinished, with the rock walls of the basement partly painted, but not fixed up, paneled, or anything. I don't know exactly when they moved there, or how long they lived there, but for the three years they lived in Manhattan, they lived in three different apartments, so it probably wasn't more than a year. The house was almost exactly through the block and across Bluemont from us, just over a block away, and convenient to KSU so Leif could walk or bike to classes. He was a student with part time jobs at places like the electronics department at Sears, and at Aggieville Pizza, which no longer exists. Nikko worked at a futon store in Aggieville, and later at local restaurants. I think they were married while living in this house.

When they left the Bluemont Street apartment, they moved nearly right across the street from us in the 800 Block of Moro Street, into the basement apartment there. That house was another former family home that had been converted into apartments by a landlord and had erstwhile been a "party house" with groups of students that whooped it up all night on weekends and about drove us nuts. By the time Leif and Nikko moved in there, a calmer group was living in the house. This basement apartment at least had windows that were partially above ground and could be opened. They had rock walls again, but it was fixed up a little nicer. It was still a walkable distance from KSU and Leif was still a student. To get into the apartment, the stairs went down from the back of the house, right from the yard, and they were steep and unprotected from the weather. That meant that if it snowed or we had freezing rain, they were extremely slippery and dangerous. Nikko fell down them once when they were in that condition and got terrible bruises. Luckily, I don't think she broke any bones. The landlord should have been required to cover that stairwell to make is safer.

Although the lived across the street from us, we didn't see them all that often, though they were often at our house for Sunday dinner or special occasions like family birthdays and holidays.

From there, they moved to an apartment complex on Stagg Hill on the southwest side of Manhattan and shared a two bedroom apartment with a friend to help with the rent. This apartment was a lot nicer. I remember it being on the second or third floor. If my memory is correct, this is the last place they lived in Manhattan before they got into such financial difficulties and Leif was working nights full time to try to keep up, and finally quit school and enlisted in the army.

His next "home" was Fort Benning, Georgia, where he went to Army Infantry Basic training and lived in what once were called barracks but the new facilities don't look at all like the old barracks. They are huge brick buildings. After he graduated from training he and Nikko were stationed at Fort Drum, New York and lived in a military housing area constructed in Watertown. it was a complex of apartment buildings and they lived on South Hycliff. We visited them there in the summer of 1999 before Leif went to Bosnia in the fall but apparently either didn't think of taking a photo of their building or I just can't find it.

Nikko lived there while Leif was in Bosnia, where he lived in at least three different camps. I never found any photos he took of them, but he did make a video tour of one of the bases. He was in Bosnia for seven months and returned in the spring of 2000. That was the summer that Nikko left him to go back to Kansas. Leif spent the next nine months there in misery, trying to get his asthma diagnosed and treated, sick, depressed and lonely.

He finally managed to get medically retired from the army in May 2001 and moved back to Manhattan, Kansas, where he again lived in the old stone house with us, the third time in his life, for that summer. He was in a deep depression and we were terribly worried about him and glad he was with us so we could try to help. He was one of those who should have been treated by the VA for depression and possibly PTSD, but knowing Leif, he probably never told anyone how he was feeling. Show no weakness.

He lived with us from May until August 2001, when he moved out and started school again at KSU.
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The photos are:
1. Leif in the fall of 2001, cropped from a family portrait.
2. South Hycliff Drive in the military housing area in Watertown, New York. I think the building Leif lived in is on the lower left on the corner, set back from the street.
3. The house on the 800 block of Bluemont Avenue where Leif and Nikko lived in the basement.
4. The house on the 800 block of Moro Street where Leif and Nikko lived in the basement.
5. One of the apartment buildings on Allison Avenue on Stagg Hill like the one Leif and Nikko lived in.

Thoughts on Independence Day 2009

Last night we were at Disney World's Magic Kingdom with our granddaughters. There were spectacular fireworks in honor of Independence Day, accompanied by narration and music. It was moving and beautiful, and patriotic. I couldn't help thinking of Leif, how much he loved fireworks, how passionate he was about his country and Constitution, how he served his country like so many others, and how this handsome and proud soldier, who looked so stalwart and had the best military bearing in the whole Infantry Basic graduating class, a man with such leadership potential, who wanted so badly to serve his country, had all that taken away from him by the very military he loved; his future, his health, his marriage, his confidence dimmed. And yet, he never stopped being passionate about his country, his brothers in arms, his oath to defend the Constitution.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, our country wasn't yet free, wasn't yet the United States of America, didn't yet have our Constitution, but it was the beginning of the long road and we are all the beneficiaries of what they started.

Happy Independence day, my son. Thank you for being the patriotic man you were, a man who served his country. I cried for you again last night.

Leif's Ninth (and First) Home - Back to 804 Moro Street, Manhattan, Kansas - July 1992 - Summer 1995

In July 1992 Leif flew from Puerto Rico back to Kansas to stay with his grandmother, Marion Kundiger, and take drivers' education at Manhattan High School, back to the old stone house where he lived when he was born. He stayed with her there until we arrived in September and started renovating the house. I've already written about that.

He went to his senior year at Manhattan High School, but started taking classes at Kansas State University during the spring semester and graduated from high school in May 1993. It was during this time that he became active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, SCA, and began making his own chain mail.

The summer after graduation, he had two special trips, the one back to Puerto Rico to be with his friends there when they graduated, and the NCL cruise to the western Caribbean we took that August.

In the summer of 1995, he moved out with NIkko, who was then his girlfriend, soon to be his fiance and in a short time his wife, but the house continued to be an important part of all our lives until 2005.

The three years he lived there again he was 17 to 20 years old.
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The photos are:
1. The front door of 904 Moro Street with a Christmas decoration on it. Taken in November 1998.
2. Leif at the formal night of the NCL cruise in the western Caribbean in August 1993.
3. Leif in his cap and gown after graduating from Manhattan High School in May 1993.
4. Leif at the Renaissance Fest near Kansas City in October 1993. He made the chain mail necklace and cape he is wearing.
5. Leif at Renaissance Fest near Kansas City in October 1993, with the chain mail necklace and cape he made. Note the earrings.

Leif's Eighth Home - Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico - July 1990 to July 1992

In the summer of 1990, we moved from Fort Sheridan, Illinois to Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, a small post on the outskirts of San Juan but still quite inside the larger city area. The city of Guaynabo was outside the post gate, and we were in a large metropolitan area. We lived in field grade officer quarters that were single family homes on a loop road up a hill. Our quarters had a large half circle back yard ringed by 29 coconut palms. It was lush and beautiful, but the lawn was so spongy and thick it was very hard to mow. Leif had that job and it was a hot, sweaty one which he did not enjoy. The coconuts grow in large clusters like grape clusters and are very heavy with the big husks that have been removed by the time you see them in grocery stores in the US mainland, and if they fall on you they can injure or kill you, especially since they can fall all at once. People soon learn not to park their cars under a bunch of coconuts, too.

Leif also learned to use a machete to clear brush around the yard, and he was good a loping off the end of a coconut so he could drink the juice. I once looked out the window an saw him stripped to the waist after mowing the lawn, with a coconut impaled on his machete, holding it up and literally pouring the juice into his mouth from above. With his tanned skin and long hair, and muscular body, he looked like Tarzan out there. I wish had I gotten a photo of that, but he refused to pose for me once I got the camera.

There was also a big mango tree at the far edge of the back yard. Mangoes are delicious when properly ripe, but when myriads of them fall to the ground and spoil they smell like turpentine.

From time to time, a small flock of blue macaws would fly over about five a.m. making a fearful racket. They were beautiful to see, though, so we didn't mind. Less edifying were the rats that ran along the electric wires and up the palm trees, and tropical roaches are enormous. Luckily we never had either of them infest our house.

The house was made of concrete block. When we were there, the quarters did not have central air conditioning. Instead, the screen was on the inside and the windows (except for the big picture windows) had no glass and the outside of them were aluminum louvers that could be opened at any angle or closed. You could open up the house and let the breezes blow through. The trouble with this was, those of us coming from the north couldn't take the heat and humidity, and neither could our belongings. Without AC, everything soon got mildewed. So, in those days, we bent one or two of the louver frames outward, took out the screen, and installed a window AC to cool the place and lower the humidity. Then we had to cover the screen on all the other windows with clear plastic to keep the AC in. Leif helped install the air conditioners.

His school was just down the hill, but to get there you had to take a trail through want amounted to a tropical jungle. He attended Antilles High School for his sophomore and junior years of high school. I've already posted photos and accounts of what happened when he tried to be on the soccer team, how he became a certified SCUBA diver and helped do underwater cleanup, and how he was in the musical "Grease" playing the part of Kenicke. He also had a small part in "Guys and Dolls" the precious year. I've also written about the guitars he had, including the one he designed and made while in Puerto Rico, the band he played in for a short time, and his friends. I don't remember the names of all of them, but I do remember Lenny, Ricky, Jill, Rebecca, Janice and Clarissa very well, and his guitar teacher, Edwin Santiago.

When Leif first got to Fort Buchanan, he had some difficulties. Antilles High School was an American school on a U.S. Army base, but most of the students were children of people working for various civilian federal agencies like the Treasury Department or the FBI, and most of them were Puerto Rican. This meant that although the classes were all taught in English, during breaks and after school, most kids were speaking Spanish. Despite his abilities Leif never really learned Spanish and his friends were mostly children of the "norteamericanos." During his first few days of school, he got "tested" as the new "gringo" and was attacked and beaten by some of the locals on a pretext. One of them hit him in the face with a ring that made a nasty cut and bruise. I caught him one day heading to school with a pair of nunchucks stuck in the back of his waistband and told him he couldn't take them to school. He said he needed to defend himself. He knew how to use them, and I was afraid he would injure or kill someone if he tried to defend himself with them. I insisted he would have to either find a way to get along or we would talk to the school about the situation. I think that was when Leif learned the macho walk, the intimidating carriage that made people think he was not to be messed with, and when he began to formulate his belief that a man should show no weakness. He had no further trouble with those guys, but to my knowledge, there was no more fighting.

Inside the house, we had a small kitchen, a large dining room-living room combination, a kind of enclosed porch we used as an extension of the living room, and three bedrooms. Leif's was decorated in his favorite black-and-white color scheme.

We saw as much as we could of the island of Puerto Rico, from the beaches to the mountains, from the cities to the countryside, and while there, we also took trips to the U.S. Virgin Islands and a Carnival cruise to the Caribbean. We especially enjoyed Old San Juan and the fortress of El Morro and often shopped at the San Patricio Plaza shopping area.

Puerto Rico was where Leif really came into his own as a young man. It was where he first fell in love with Karen, who he carried a torch for for a long time. It was where he first acted and sang on stage, where he first gave parties and had a group of really great friends. We were very sorry to have to move him from there to Kansas after his junior year when Peter W. retired from the Army. It was hard for him to leave his friends behind and start over as a senior in a new place.

When he graduated from Manhattan High School in Manhattan, Kansas, his primary graduation present was a trip back to Puerto Rico to see his friends and be there with them when they graduated.
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The photos are:
1. Leif in the spring of 1992. This photo was actually of him and Karen in a car on a date, but I cropped it to show only him. I think he looks like he could have been Puerto Rican. This was the first time he wore a beard and mustache. Note the earring and his already-receding hairline.
2. Leif in April 1992, also originally of him and Karen.
3. Leif by the sea in 1991, with El Morro and San Juan in the background.
4. Leif by the sea in 1991 with "many faces" caused by a filter Peter W. used to take the photo.
5. Our quarters (house) in October 1990.
6. The back yard of our quarters in October 1990.
7. The back yard of our quarters looking from the far end of the yard in October 1990.