The Bond With One's Child

I've written in posts shortly after Leif died that it felt like having a part of me cut off, and though it still does, like an amputee, I am learning how to live with it, though that doesn't mean I will ever stop missing him. I have speculated that there is something very physical about the bond between a mother and child, something in the DNA, perhaps, that knows when it is missing, but now I've read a study in Scientific American that has a different and compelling explanation. It says that the brains of new mothers change and areas grow as they bond with their infants. There literally are neural connections that are deep and strong, physical ones, not just psychic bonds, or are they one and the same? The article, "A New Mom's Changing Brain," by Nathan Collins, explains how these changes occur and what the effects are. The entire article is not available with this link, but if you have access to a good public library that has databases or a college or university library that does, you can access it there.

I found myself wondering just how profoundly my bond with Leif had changed my brain, and how acutely my brain, and thus my feelings, suffers from the lack of him and the bond being supported by his presence in my life. Is this at least partly why mothers (and perhaps fathers, too, for someone needs to research that) grieve so terribly over the death of a child, no matter what age they are when they die?

I also wondered whether love of any kind, romantic love, friendship, also creates changes in the brain, demonstrable proof of the response to another. I'll bet research would show that, too, but that it would be in some ways different than the response to one's baby.

I have felt sad that I haven't had time to post on this blog for the past 12 days due to other family needs. The living have to take precedence over the dead, and although I know that and believe it, still I felt as though I were neglecting Leif during this time, not giving him the time I want to devote to his memory, not keeping up the blog as well as I would like to do during the last part of the third year since his death. I can hardly believe that in only 18 days, it will be three years since he died. I still don't want to believe it, still want him back. It doesn't seem like three years could already have passed.

I was talking to my neighbor and friend whose son died six years ago this month and she said she heard a man whose son died man more years ago answer the question about whether it hurts and less over time this way, "No, but it hurts less often." She agreed with that, and so do I.

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These photos of Leif were taken in our quarters at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico around February 1991 when Leif had just turned 16 and was starting to let his hair grow longer. They are unusual because I think this was the only tan outfit or shirt he ever had. Tan was not his color or a favorite of his, so I don't even really know how or why he got it. Note the acid rock t-shirt under it.

A Sense of Style

Leif loved this pink "Hypercolor" shirt. He had a sort of mustard yellow Hypercolor sweatshirt, too. For awhile during our years in Puerto Rico, Hypercolor was a big fad. I still have two of my shirts, though they no longer change color. The tie-dye feature reminded me of the 70s. The flared "weight-lifter" pants with the narrow ankles were "in," too, in wild prints. I don't know whether the same things were all the rage on the US mainland at the time or not, and it seemed to me that the styles in Puerto Rico were a little more colorful and flamboyant, at least for the young.

Leif was right in step, wearing the ragged blue jeans and the wild print weight-lifter pants, an earring, "cool" shirts, Oakley sunglasses, and necklaces. This photo of him was taken somewhere on the island of Puerto Rico on an outing but I can't place it exactly. It was in November 1991 when Leif was 16 going on 17.

Leif was a stylish dresser until he was got out of the army. When he gained weight, he couldn't get into a lot of the clothing he had worn when he was younger, and he was always financially strapped. I don't know whether he didn't continue to dress with flare because his taste had changed, whether he was depressed and didn't care, or whether he just didn't have the money to dress the way he wanted to. He did spend a lot of money on his motorcycle jackets and boots, and just the day before he died he bought an expensive pair of shoes, but I think most of his money was going to support his debts and living expenses. We often gave him shirts as gifts, so he had some nice ones, but he gained so much weight that he didn't have the figure to show off the kind of style he once had. I wish I had seen him dressed to the nines one more time.

Leif in Hawaii - October 1985 - Age 10

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

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

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

Leif's Sense of Beauty and Aesthetics

Leif would sometimes maintain that he didn't "understand" jewelry, or things that people acquired simply as decor. He insisted that he loved the beauty of well-designed functional things, whether a gorgeous car, a snazzy motorcycle, a beautifully designed computer, a "cool" cell phone, or anything else of that kind. Furniture he could find both comfy and beautiful, and he had a great sense of style in clothing when he was younger and slimmer, and cared. He also could have made a fine art student if he'd had the interest to develop his talent, but it wasn't his burning interest.

However, I used to like to argue with him about his assertions concerning decor, jewelry and the like, because when he found something that truly "spoke" to him, he went for it. For instance, he picked out one of the most beautiful diamond ring sets I've ever seen when he wanted to propose to J. He wore jewelry on occasion; earrings and necklaces when he was young, and still wore the Greek double battle axe necklace I brought him from Greece up until he died. He loved stylish, fancy watches, too. And he decorated his walls with swords and a print he bought that he very much liked.

So, in a way, his assertions were contradicted by his behavior and his taste, but in another, they weren't. He liked to purchase things he could USE, and those he wanted to be the best and not just functional but aesthetically pleasing. His fine taste was one of the things that helped to put him in debt, as he apparently couldn't resist expensive things he could not afford if they fit into his scheme of desire-functionality-design.

These photos were taken when we were living at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, I think, when he was in ninth grade in the spring of 1990, age 15. He was just beginning to let his hair grow longer. His ears weren't pierced yet, but it's surprising to me that he is wearing a cross. He was never religious, never a believer. I wish I knew the story of why he wore it.

How to Help a Bereaved Parent - WikiHow

How to Help a Bereaved Parent (click on the title)

This is an excellent article and video from WikiHow on how to be a friend or relative to a grieving parent whose child has died, the best I've seen. Especially good are the short video and tips at the end. Three years ago, before Leif died, this would have been just "information" for me. Now I can relate to everything said and it is all so true. Save this or bookmark it in case you ever need it. I hope none of this blog's readers every experience the death of their child.
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The photo of Leif was taken at Lovers Point in Monterey, California in July 1980 when Leif was five years old.

Will They Remember Him?

Leif's nieces and nephew found him irresistible. They would climb all over him, touch his beard, play with him, act silly, make cell phone videos together, play chess together, and generally horse around. He was good with the kids, gentle and tolerant, and amused, my gentle giant. I wondered how he felt about being with them, whether he wished he had children of his own to go home to, though he never really voiced that sentiment.

I wonder, now, whether they will really remember him. I know they will remember that he lived, that they had an uncle that died, but they were so young when he left them that I imagine they will only remember him from photos or stories we tell.

I have a lot of photos of him with them, but I don't post photos of them online. This one is an exception because it was taken six and a half years ago and their faces aren't shown. That night in July 2004, all three of them were climbing all over him and having a great time. He was pretending to roar and flex his muscles like some kind of giant and they loved it. I loved watching it. That was a happy evening with all of us together, and Leif seemed relaxed and happy. It's a good memory.

The photo was taken in our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas. Now neither Leif nor the house is still on this earth.

A New Realization: I Lost a Friend

I was thinking again the past two days about how families stay close and how we become friends and I thought of two very different kinds of time together. There are the family gatherings where we all enjoy being in a group and sharing time with each other, the kind that cements family closeness but in which there's never really time for any kind of personal closeness or intimacy, time to talk in depth with another person. Those times are what cements a personal closeness as opposed to a group identity and closeness. So often, once children leave home, find their adult friends, become immersed in careers, move away and have their own families, we only have the first kind of visit. The one-on-one or just parents and adult child kind of visit happens infrequently if at all. It happens with siblings, too, for many of us.

When I was considering this, I realized why we felt so close to Leif. He WAS with us as an individual all of his life except for his years in the army. We had him to ourselves, with time to visit, time to talk about so many things, time to be close. And that revelation suddenly brought another one. I hadn't just lost a son when he died. I lost a friend. A dear and close friend whose company I enjoyed. It was a loss in so many ways, the loss of our son, the loss of his future, the loss of the grandchildren we'd hoped to have, but it was also the loss of a friend, and I realize I've been mourning that as much as the others, without even knowing it until now. I miss my friend.

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These photos were taken in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1991 when Leif was sixteen years old. I'm with him in the second one. When I was in San Juan a couple of weeks ago I pictured him on those streets and down by the harbor.

Leif at the beach in Puerto Rico

Leif loved the beach all his life, though without a companion here in Florida he rarely went. When he was with us, we had a beach vacation every year but for three years we lived in Hawaii and went to the beach often, and for two years we lived in Puerto Rico and went to the beach now and then, especially when Leif and Peter W. were SCUBA diving.

This photo was taken on the beach in Puerto Rico, probably Luquillo Beach, in February 1991. We had been in Puerto Rico for six months and Leif was 16 years old.

I look at these photos and I'm so grateful I have them, so glad to have a record of his life. The last couple of days I've been in a kind of funk of sadness on and off. The questions I had put out of my mind for a time came back to haunt me, and I am acutely aware that we are coming to the third anniversary of his death in April. For some reason having another year pass is very hard. The knowledge reinforces the finality of his death.

Peter W. is again talking about how Leif had so many things that should have given him a good life . . . good looks, height, a strong and happy family background, brilliant intelligence . . . and he asks how this could have happened. I reply that with all Leif's gifts, he was somehow cursed with the same misery that took my father's life, and my father's aunt's life. I find that some days it hits me and I can't get past it. He was and is so much a part of our lives that I don't think we will ever really be over it.

Leif and El Morro - San Juan, Puerto Rico - Ages 16 and 17

One of the places in San Juan, Puerto Rico that we would all remember is the fortress of San Felipe del Morro, which people just call El Morro (the rock). It is a huge Spanish Fortress dating back to the sixteenth century. Approaching it via the expansive park grounds is beautiful but doesn't give one the full scope of it's enormous size. Near it are a famous cemetery and the School of Fine Arts (Escuela des Artes Plasticas). You can see El Morro in the background of one of the photos of Leif and the art school in another one, and I've included a photo of El Morro I took from the ship and one of the art school taken on the cruise I went on last week. The other photos of Leif show him on the walls of El Morro, a place he found very impressive. I wonder if visiting it, and some of the other places we visited in his childhood and youth, helped to further his interest in belonging to SCA and his fascination with swords.

Leif was sixteen in the photos of him at El Morro in 1991, and he's wearing his trademark Oakley sunglasses and the current fad in clothing at the time. The guys pushed their pants up to just below the knee and their socks down to the ankles and showed off their hairy calves. They were also fond of "muscle" shirts. The other photo, with El Morro behind Leif across the bay, was taken in 1992 at the time the tall ships sailed into San Juan harbor to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus. He's wearing another fad, a tie-dyed shirt that changed colors with heat and sunlight. he was seventeen.

Scars

We all have our scars, those injuries life has dealt out to us that heal over but leave their image and imprint on us forever. Sometimes they are things we would fervently wish that we had never experienced. Sometimes the experiences were worth the pain. Sometimes we learn from them. Sometimes we grow. But sometimes, they are just wounds that heal over but leave us irreparably harmed. The scars of our lives, whether visible or invisible all have stories, and all those stories are worth telling. How different they are than tatoos, which also may have stories, sometimes even ones from invisible scars, but which usually are meant as decorations on the body, not evidence of wounds. So, although I think Leif would have heartily approved of this t-shirt saying, I think that scars and tatoos are quite different.

Leif was fond of saying he had no regrets though in the end I don't know whether that was completely true. He also believed that it's the things we don't do we regret, not those we do. Both are popular viewpoints, but I am not so blithe in either assertion.

There are so many things that remind me of Leif, of his life, of the things he said, the things he loved, the places he lived and visited. I just returned from a Caribbean cruise that visited San Juan and St. Thomas. We lived at Fort Buchanan in San Juan for two years, during Leif's sophomore and junior years of high school, where he attended Antilles High School. I've written about him during those years on this blog. They were good years for Leif, years when he blossomed in many ways. I hadn't been back to Puerto Rico since we left in 1992, and each place I walked in Old San Juan was a place I'd walked with Leif many times. I remembered him there, remembered the times we took him with us out to dinner, the visits to El Morro fortress, the trip to the Bacardi Rum Factory, the trip to El Yunque Rain Forest, swimming at Luquillo Beach, sailing to Vieques, and so much more. How I wish I'd been able to take him back there again.

We visited St. Thomas, too, and I remember climbing the hill to have lunch at Blackbeard's Castle, the place I saw this t-shirt. The restaurant is now gone, replaced by a gift shop and a bar, but the view is still spectacular, now "graced" with statues of famous pirates. Leif would have gotten a kick out of the story of Blackbeard, a man Leif's size who was a giant in his time, when the average man was 5' 2". He wore 6 pistols across his chest and would put cannon fuses in his hair and light them, then jump on to a ship with his hair on fire, yelling at the top of his lungs, and scare the daylights out of the crew of his victim vessel. They say he had little need of his guns to intimidate them. Leif would have loved hearing that.

I think that Puerto Rico and the Caribbean was the closest place to a home where Leif really felt AT home, where, after an initial series of difficulties, he made good friends, had an active social life, fell in love the first time, and loved the climate and culture. I am grateful he had those years.