The Summer of 1976

This picture was taken thirty nine years ago in July 1976. We were all so young and happy and vital. Leif was 18 months old, and Peter A. was seven years old. It was a hot July day and we're dressed for it.

We didn't have central AC in the old stone house. There was one large window air conditioner in the living room-dining room, and it more-or-less managed to cool the downstairs. Upstairs we had one more window air conditioner in the front master bedroom. We "hoped" the AC would sort of make it down the hall and into the other bedrooms and bathroom. It was tolerable, but not like central AC.

That was a period when I was doing fabric painting on t-shirts, long before the days when you could buy t-shirts with all kinds of stuff printed on them, or design your own and have them printed by places like CafePress. I also made bead necklaces, none of which compared in style and elegance to all the ones Peter has made in the past few years. Peter has one of those necklaces on, of brown and white beads.

He is wearing a t-shirt that says "The Happy Hun" on a world globe. This was a nickname other JAG officers had for him as a military prosecutor. Peter A. is wearing his own "Sun Boy" t-shirt, that he designed and painted himself. Leif, suitably enough, has no shirt on. At that age, he wasn't much of a fan of clothes.

It was a good summer, the one before Peter A. started first grade. Many changes took place that fall. That summer was one of the happiest times.

Leif at 20 Months Old - A Joyful, Curious Little Boy

Once upon a time he beamed with joy. Once upon a time he was a happy little boy. Once upon a time he turned that headlight smile on me.

I miss that joyful little boy. I miss the teen he became and the man he was.

This is another photo I had never seen. I found it in my sister's photo album.

I wish I could have given that uncluttered happiness back to him.

This photo was taken at our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas in September 1976. Leif was 20 months old.

Guys and Dolls at Antilles High School

Another find! I was scanning some of my mother's old slides, none of which we had ever seen, and found this shot of Leif (second from left), on stage in his first part in a Broadway musical . . . which we missed!

In April 1991, Peter was sent to a conference in the Washington DC area, and wanted me to go with him. My mother came to Puerto Rico to stay with Leif while we were gone and visit us when we returned.

Antilles High School was putting on "Guys and Dolls," and we knew that Leif was helping with scene construction and lightning, but didn't know he had a small part as well. I'm not sure he even found out he'd be on stage during the performance until we were gone. We were away when the musical was performed and missed seeing him. This photo seems to be the only one. He is wearing his Fedora and carrying his camera. I wish we had been there.

He seemed to be bitten by the theater bug by this experience, and the following spring tried out for a main part in "Grease." No one had ever heard him sing before, but he blew away the audience as Kenicke singing "Greased Lightning."

We moved to Manhattan, Kansas the summer before his senior year, and he tried out for the MHS musical, and was terribly disappointed when he was told that he was good enough to get a major part, but was new to the school and didn't "deserve" it. We never saw him on stage again.

Twenty-Two Years Ago Today - Leif's Graduation Dinner

The last time I posted, using the envelope on my head as an example of Leif's silly humor, I didn't realize what the occasion was. I found another slide my mother took that evening, and discovered it was his family graduation dinner. It was taken exactly twenty-two years ago, June 3, 1993, in our old stone house. Both Leif and the house are no longer.

And now I know what was in the big white envelope . . . and giant graduation card, which you can see in this photo. I'm not sure what Leif was looking at with his head at that angle, but it was after he plopped the envelope onto my head and then stuck my straw hat atop it.

It's hard to realize that twenty-two years have gone by, and now our second granddaughter is graduating from high school this weekend. How could the years slip by so quickly? How could Leif not be here to share the occasions with us?

We are also celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary this weekend, and Leif's absence is a heartache for me. I am delighted to be able to share it with Peter A. and our granddaughters, but how I wish we could have our whole family around us, including Leif and Marcus.

If find that it seems to be the days leading up to holidays and special events that trigger a lot of sadness, and I miss Leif most then. It's the anticipation of the coming event without him, I guess. Usually when the actual event happens, I'm over it . . . or maybe I'm just distracted by the good things happening then.

I miss his laugh. I miss his smile. I miss his bear hugs. I miss his silliness and teasing. He would have added so much to all those occasions he has missed in the seven years since he died. 

Back to Manhattan and More Memories

So many memories are tied to places and events. We just made a trip to Manhattan, Kansas, where Leif was a baby, where he graduated from high school and college. We drove by the places we used to live, toured the high school, went through the City Park where he used to participate in SCA "fights." So many memories. We saw some of his best friends and the boy who bears his name.

We made the trip to visit family and attend a class reunion, but going back to a place we spent so many years with Leif brought back memories I hadn't thought of in years.

The house where this photo was taken, our old stone house on Moro Street, no longer exists, but we have 17 years of memories of life there.

I am always glad to find photos of Leif I hadn't seen before, and this one made me smile. It was taken not long after he graduated from MHS, handsome, slim fellow with his luxurious long hair pulled back in a ponytail, his mustache and goatee, and the snappy stylish clothes he wore then; silk shirt and silk jacket.

It also shows his sense of humor and silly side. We were having a family dinner in the dining room. I don't know what came in the large white envelope, but he grabbed it and quickly fashioned a mask/hat and popped it over my head. I hadn't seen this photo since the slide film was developed in 1993, because it wasn't a photo we would have printed from the slide to go into an album, but now it seems priceless and cute.

I think of all the things I learned from Leif and wish he were here to teach me more. At the time this photo was taken, he was one of the early users of a cell phone, which he paid for with his own earnings from the telemarketing company he worked for, his first job, as a senior in high school. He taught me so much about how cell phones work (and why they don't work). I miss learning from him. I miss his political and historical discussions. I miss his laugh. I miss his hugs. I want him back.

Leif on Philosophy and Climate Change

Tonight while I was looking for some other information I happened again, after all these years, on this short essay that Leif wrote to on the MySpace blog of the love of his life, J. He sent it to me for comment on February 16, 2008, just over seven weeks before he died. He took a very cynical view of humanity. I found it interesting that he took on what he saw as a coming apocalypse caused by global warming.

The photo was actually taken in August 2003, long before he wrote this piece, but the direct stare seems to me to go with his statements. He was wearing his new SCA armor.

I hope his vision of the future of humanity does not come true, and I am not so sanguine about the survival of the industrial world, but I do think we are in for a lot of horror.

Leif on Philosophy & Climate Change

Read Kant. He has many ideas, some a bit unrealistic, but among his best thoughts is  his idea of peace through conflict, that  eventually through war and competition and  resolved conflict world peace will be achieved because the costs of war with a trading partner will be too great to bear and it will be  unacceptable.

Over the years I have studied philosophy, history, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and have learned one thing. None of these guys had the answers. Truth is a jig-saw puzzle, and at best Marx, Kant, Freud, Locke, Montesquieu, Madison, et al, contributed a piece.

Another is that truth is very subjective. What you might find appalling is just fine to others, and those others might find your ideas equally appalling. I have always enjoyed the stark contrast between your excessively compassionate quest to save the world and my ruthless Machiavellian disregard for it. 

Being a bit of an evolutionary and social darwinist, I look forward to the coming apocalypse of global warming. It will be a glorious catastrophe which will either doom mankind or propel us into the next level of enlightenment. I see this as quite possibly the greatest thing that can happen to man, a mass extinction which will disproportionately affect the parts of the world which are least able to embrace a more intelligent way of living.   

The industrialized world, which is principally in northern latitudes, is already pushing to go green and is more likely to survive the climate change. Many of the corporations which plague the industrialized world will go bankrupt as the economy collapses. 

The humans which survive will be smarter and, most importantly, FEWER. Billions will die in China, India, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Oil will quickly become unimportant and religious conflicts with oil-rich Muslims will become a thing of the past as they cease to matter. The survivors will be in a position to continue the next chapter of human development from a much more enlightened perspective.

This is, of course, very politically incorrect, but then the PC are like idiots playing chess. They can't see the pieces on the board for the game itself. People can't see past what’s right in front of them. Like my 12-year-old niece playing chess with me at Christmas was fully convinced that she had defeated me and that I was either not trying or not very smart when I allowed her to take my queen early in the game. Later, when I mated her king she could not understand where she went wrong. The difference is the long view. When considering any action you must look down the slippery slope and see how it may snowball into other changes covered by the law of unexpected consequences.

Anyway, enough dark proselytizing for one day. - Leif (February 16, 2008)

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.

A visit to the Cemetery

We went to visit the cemetery on Monday, February 2nd, five days after Leif's birthday when we originally wanted to go. I made a little bouquet out of four of the flowers from the bouquet my sister Lannay sent to us in remembrance of Leif's birthday, and we placed it in the groove between the stones on the columbarium. There's no place to leave flowers except stuck in the gravel at the bottom of the structure.

Once again, we cried, touched his stone, felt our loss, noted how much longer others inurned around him had lived, where they had served, and how many more have been placed since we were last there.

It's still hard for me to see his name carved into the granite. It still hurts to think of his remains there., and to know that our beautiful son is gone forever.

I will always wish him back

Thoughts on Leif's Fortieth Birthday

If Leif had lived, January 28, 2015 would have been his fortieth birthday. It will be over in just a minute, before I finish this post. I've thought of him all day. We didn't spent the day the way we wanted to. We wanted to go to the cemetery to honor him, but this was the day the house painter decided to show up to finish the job, so we were stuck. It was also the day to deal with other issues that came up unexpectedly, so both of us were sad, both because of Leif, and because we didn't get to go to Bay Pines.

It seems that for several years, something has always come up on his birthday to keep us from going there, and that makes me feel bad, as though I can't manage to take time on his birthday to be there. It's not that I think he's "there" wondering why. It's that I want to go there for me. I want to spend time away from other distractions. Yet it seems that nearly every year since the year after he died, something else has distracted us on his birthday. Even my computer wouldn't publish this post and I had to copy it to a different browser.

We talked this morning about Leif and my father, and how they were alike and different, and how I wished Leif had lived long enough to have a family. He lived thirteen years less than my father did.

Leif's birthday was a happy day for me. I was so glad he was born and part of our family. He brought so much into our lives. I looked at a lot of photos of him today, at all the things we did together over the years.

But the last couple of days I have found myself haunted by the same old questions that have haunted me from the day we found his body. Why? What happened? I still cannot fathom it. The detective thought it was accidental. The medical examiner that did the autopsy thought it was a suicide because it was a contact wound. But I still can't even understand how things transpired, how the gun was where it was on the counter, as though he had been standing by it and dropped it, yet there was no blood on the counter.

I still don't understand how someone who had been carrying on an animated email discussion with several people during the evening, all about designing the perfect smart watch, and who was looking up a German band online and sending requests to Amazon to get their music, who went home with his best friend and was socializing him and another man until the wee hours of the morning, would suddenly not be around to get that music.

I still don't understand why someone contemplating suicide would pay his rent, put gas in his car, get new shoes, a new video game, and a new gun.

Could it have been an accident? As I've written before, it's hard to believe that of someone as well trained in firearms as he was. Surely he wouldn't have been stupid enough to put a loaded gun to his head and play with the trigger? On the other hand, he was drunk and high. Who knows what kind of stupid game he might have played with his brand new gun. Maybe the trigger pulled a little easier than he thought.

Could it have been murder? By whom? The door was bolt locked. Someone would have had to have the key, and his keys were sitting on his desk. And why would they leave the weapon? Who would have had a motive? The detective did not find anything suspicious.

I know it's not about logic. I still think the things I know point to suicide, that the things that happened after March 22nd became too much, and maybe he made a spur of the moment decision to do it.

Would I feel any better if I knew? Probably not. It won't bring him back. But at least the eternal questioning would be over.

I find myself going from smiling at photos of him I love, to crying over his death and missing him. I am grateful for those that remembered him on his birthday, my sisters, Nikko, cousins. I don't want any of us to forget him, that he lived, that we loved him, and he loved us.

A Contrast in Memorial Services

Yesterday we went to a memorial service for a friend and neighbor who died on December 24th. It was a good celebration of his life, and we learned a lot about him we hadn't known, saw his children and grandchildren, knew he'd had a good 87 years.

I found it hard to be there in several ways. It brought back memories of Leif's memorial service, and the contrast in their lives; Leif, who died at 33 by his own hand, with no wife and no children, lonely. John, who had a heart attack but had a life of verve and action with a loving wife, children, stepchildren he took as his own, grandchildren and great-granchildren.

The two of them had some things in common, a love of sailboating and SCUBA, being on the water.

How I wish Leif could have lived a life that long, that productive, and that happy. I know no life is completely and universally happy. We all have challenges and unhappy moments. But when we look back over our lives, how much better it would be to say we have lived our lives well.

It was such a contrast in the two services. John's was full of good, and even funny, memories accomplishments. No one had to speculate on why he was dead. Leif's was full of sadness for his loneliness and depression, trying to understand who he was and why he was no longer with us.

I still miss Leif every day of my life. I still wish he were here, and happy, and healthy, and had a family. I will never stop wishing it.