It's been just over a month since Nikki's husband, the noted ocean photographer Jon Mozo, sustained fatal head injuries in waters near Banzai Pipeline. And while the initial shock has slowly given way to acceptance, Nikki still finds herself referring to Jon in the present tense.

"He's a deep thinker," Nikki says. "Nothing can — could — ever be on the surface with him. Everything had to have a meaning."

Nikki flips through the journal, Jon's journal, and locates April 30, 2003, a day that found her husband in a particularly contemplative mood as he wrote metaphorically about art and the impact of an artist on other people's lives.

As photographers, he wrote, "where do we leave our signatures? Who even understands our work?"

"Jon felt that nobody understood him completely," Nikki says. "He felt that his art expressed who he was."

The signature Jon left as an artist then was the same he left as a person, meticulously inscribed on a world he was determined to make more loving, more engaged, more conscious.

"A lot of people are known for only being a success at what they do," says Jon's brother Chris Mozo. "It was never like that with him. If he wasn't a good person, people would only remember what he did, not who he was."

So where does a photographer leave his signature?

On the day of Jon's funeral some 1,500 family, friends and admirers packed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in La'ie to pay last respects; two days later hundreds followed the Mozo family to Jon's favorite surf break at Malaekahana to pray and lay flowers on the ocean that was Jon's second home.

The outpouring of love and consolation has been constant since news of Jon's death first broke across the North Shore.

Like white cells to injury, dozens of people Jon had

befriended over the years converged on the Mozo home bearing an endless supply of food and prayers and personal memories. So many came to share those long, wrenching days of grief that an industrious few even set up tents, brought extra refrigerators, and set furniture out in the back yard. All agree Jon would have loved it.

"He loved having people over," Nikki says. "He'd lie on the trampoline with the kids and talk about life and struggles."

Nikki gestures to the group of teens hanging out with Makana. Many knew Jon through his work as a youth adviser with the church.

"Those kids," she says, smiling, "they've followed us around through four houses. Jon would always call and make plans and they'd come and hang out on the weekends.

"Jon's gone but they keep coming," she says. "It's such a blessing to me."

Allen Mozo, Jon's older brother, admits there were times when he would have liked to do things strictly as a family. But that rarely happened.

"Jon would always invite other people along," Allen says. "That was him. He wanted to share every experience with as many people as he could. If he went to the store for milk, he'd probably bring some some hitchhiker or some stray surfer he picked up along the way."

Coming into focus

Jon was the second of Reynaldo and Julia Mozo's four boys. Born in Honolulu, he spent his adolescence on a series of naval bases in Spain, the Philippines and Japan, returning to Hawai'i after graduating high school in 1989.

He was working at the Polynesian Cultural Center, posing for photographs with tourists, when he met Nikki, then a dancer. They married two years later.

It was Nikki who encouraged Jon's first tentative explorations with photography. On Jon's 21st birthday, she took him to buy his first real camera, a used Canon AE-1. He learned light and texture and composition shooting roll after roll of her image.

Jon took a few photography classes at Brigham Young University-Hawai'i then honed his skills working for various photo labs and photographers during the couple's two-year stint on the Mainland.

Jon had hoped to attend art school on the East Coast — he and Nikki spent much of their two years based in Maryland — but, as Nikki says, "they looked at his portfolio and discouraged him."

With one child to care for and another on the way, Jon and Nikki returned to Hawai'i in 1996.

"When we came back, we had no job, no money, nowhere to live," Nikki says.

Nikki got a full-time job doing social work and Jon started his own photo business, toting his children along on shoots.

It wasn't until Nikki stopped working two years later — "If we were going to have more kids, I told him we had to do it soon," Nikki says — that Jon's life as a professional photographer took off.

"I was home to take care of the kids so he was free to concentrate."

Product shots and weddings paid the bills, but Jon, an accomplished surfer and waterman, was determined to make a name for himself as an ocean photographer. Together he and Nikki shopped his portfolio to an increasingly receptive roster of local art galleries.

By the time of his death, at age 33, Jon had become one of the most respected surf photographers in the islands and an emerging presence in the art world.

In his most captivating works, Mozo melds impressive technical skill with a deep understanding of the ocean and the sense of humility that goes along with it. Nothing was about the surface. Everything had to have a meaning.

In "A Higher Source," for example, Mozo finds an expression of his religious faith in the image of the sun glistening through a wave an instant before it collapses upon itself.

Often accompanied by his brother Allen, himself an accomplished photographer, Jon found art in the dynamic, violent waters of his native Hawai'i and later in Tahiti, where, as always, he found himself surrounded by friends.

Driving it all was an almost righteous sense of purpose and clarity.

"People waste a lot of time, but not him," Nikki says. "He never slept in. I never saw him watch an entire game or a whole TV show."

Nikki says Jon would wake before dawn, work through the photographers' golden hour at sunset, spend the evening at home with the family, then handle paperwork and answer e-mails until 2 a.m.

"Jon was urgent about his dreams," Nikki says. "His goals were for two months or six months, not 20 years.

"If he had a list of dreams, I think they'd all be checked off," she says. "I don't think he had any regrets. I feel like he was ready. He knew it was coming and it was OK."

More than brothers

As boys, Jon and Allen were allowed subscriptions to "Ranger Rick," the religious publication "Friend," "National Geographic" and one surf magazine of their choice.

"We took every issue of National Geographic and the surf magazines and dissected it," Allen recalls. "We had animal and surf photos all over our walls and we'd sit and stare at them every night until we fell asleep.

"We both had the same dream," Allen says. " We were going to be National Geographic photographers or surf photographers."

And for a few precious years the two brothers lived that dream together. When a prize job came along, they always bid for it as a two-man package. That's how they worked last year's Merrie Monarch Festival. That's how they covered most of the biggest surf meets in the state.

Unlike other surf photographers who shot competitions from motorboats, the brothers preferred more taxing but more maneuverable kayaks, which could move easily around the larger vessels to catch the best shots at the best possible moments.

Often they weren't even concerned with the competitions themselves.

"We figured that a photo of a surfer was only good for a period of time and all you'd get from the surf magazines was $40," Allen said. "Jon figured that empty waves were timeless. So we'd be out at a competition with the best surfers in the world and Jon would be shooting empty waves."

Allen and Jon wanted to shoot the eruptions at Kilauea together. They also dreamed about going to Vancouver to shoot orcas — "not marketable," Allen says, "but just for us."

Those dreams ended Feb. 9 when, lifeguards guess, Jon was carried over a large wave into a shallow reef area.

On any other day, Jon would likely have waited for Allen to join him before going out, but that Wednesday the light and the waves were too perfect to ignore.

"When they found me they said that a swimmer had got in trouble and we think it might be your brother," Allen recalls. "They asked me if I knew what he was wearing, what kind of fins he was using, and I got a weird feeling.

"They had his stuff on a cop car," he said. "When they showed me his fins and his watch, I knew it was him."

The fins and watch remain in the bag the police returned to the family. Jon's camera was also retrieved but Allen can't bear to look at the images any more.

Allen is just beginning to eat and sleep normally again. At some point soon he'll have to get back in the water and get to work. He wonders what half a dream will look like.

Allen's face darkens as his mobile phone rings for the second time in an hour.

"Before, if I got 10 calls a day, at least five were from (Jon)," Allen says. "And when I saw his number, I'd flip my phone open like, 'Hey, what's up? What are we doing?' because I knew I had an exciting day ahead of me.

"Every day we'd go back and forth finding new spots, new animals to shoot, new dives," he says, a tight smile briefly returning. "Now, I don't even answer my phone."

Lives touched

In the crowded home office where Nikki now preps and packs mail orders for Jon's work there are stacks of prints, stores of giclee reproductions, poster tubes and envelopes. Failing afternoon light seeps in through a half-open window, lending a cold blue cast to a room illuminated only by an image of Jon at the beach scrolling slowly across a computer monitor.

On a table beneath a set of hanging surfboards, there are binders fat with condolence messages from around the Pacific and photo albums that friends made of Jon's memorial service. And there is a manila folder labeled in bold red marker, "Jon's Gold: Important."

The folder contains personal letters from Jon's teenage friends. Stapled to each are Jon's typed and printed replies — long notes full of encouragement, expressions of fraternal love, gentle admonishments to be true to themselves and their faith.

"Jon could change your life in one day, in one conversation," says 17-year-old Rachel Runnels. "He knew how things could get you off track and he always wanted me to stay on the right road.

"I feel very fortunate to have had such a close bond with him," she says. "He loved everyone and he made everyone feel special in their own way."

Rachel met the Mozos through church when she was still a child. It was Jon who first taught her to surf in the mild waters off Waikiki.

"I had talked about getting a longboard and one day he just gave one to me," Runnels said. "It's pink on the top because that's my favorite color, and it's blue on the bottom because that's his favorite color."

Jon's younger brother Chris sits on the floor nearby floating in and out of the conversation as he pastes prints of his brother's work into a scrapbook.

"Jon didn't judge and he didn't preach," Chris says. "But he still motivated you. You wanted to be like him."

Chris, a musician, composed an original song, "Ash Wednesday," for Jon's memorial service. He plans to record and release it later this year. It's what Jon would have wanted.

"I've struggled a lot but Jon never got down on me," Chris says, eyes to the floor. "He always told me that if I'm passionate about something then go after it."

A sense of urgency

A month before he died, Jon called Nikki at home and asked her to meet him at the nearby dock so they could take out a watercraft together.

To do that, however, Nikki needed to find a baby sitter for 3-year-old Anela and the only person she could think of had a doctor's appointment that day.

"Now this is not me, but I spent an hour going to every clinic between Kahuku and Hau'ula to find her," Nikki says. "I did it because he told me to meet him on the dock and I felt for some reason that I had to.

"When I got there he was sitting on the Jet Ski and he said, 'I thought you weren't going to come,'" she says. "I had a sense of urgency at the end, and I'm so glad that we had that day together."

In fact, though the couple had talked often about the dangers of Jon's job, it seemed that sense of urgency had been building for months before the accident. The couple had just finished signing papers to build a home in Hau'ula. Negotiations were wrapping up on a book of Jon's photographs that had been years in the planning. Reservations were made for a long-delayed surfing trip to Indonesia in September.

Nikki Mozo places fresh flowers at the 'Ehukai Beach Park memorial fronting the ocean. Lifeguards believe Jon Mozo was carried by a wave onto the reef where he sustained head injuries and drowned. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I didn't know," Nikki says quietly. "He didn't tell me."

A legacy in pictures

Here is Nikki Mozo in repose, her arms wrapped loosely around Anela sleeping in her lap.

"Sunday is the hardest because this was my day with Jon," she says. "We'd go to church, spend the day as a family, eat together. Part of us knows he died, and part of us still doesn't. It's like he's on one of his trips."

Nikki is going ahead with the house in Hau'ula, just four lots away from the ocean, the place Jon dreamed of sharing with his children. Plans for the book are moving ahead as well, with a release tentatively planned for Christmas.

And every day there are new orders coming through Jon's Web site and from distributor Quiet Storm.

"I feel that Jon's passion, and what he wanted people to get out of his work, will live on as long as his art is still out there," Nikki says. "We'll do what we can to keep his work out there because by sharing it, we're sharing what he stood for."

Jon's legacy may live on in another way, through other hands. Makana has shown an interest in photography, and last year he accompanied Jon on a shoot in Tahiti. He has a camera and his own laptop to store his photos.

"I'll try to put him in the same places (where Jon shot)," Allen says.

Jon's white pickup truck sits outside the Mozo house. For a week after Jon's death, Nikki couldn't muster the strength to go inside.

"You used to wait for that truck to pull up," she says. "It was very him."

But when she finally opened the door and sat inside, she found something extraordinary — a short essay Jon had written for the release of his new collection, the signature he sought for his art and his life:

"This art reflects who I am and what I've witnessed and it is my hope that these images inspire you to seek and feel the world you desire in your life ... for a lifetime."