What Would Leslie Do?
We lost a good friend, an amazing web presence, an inspiration and a serious force to be reckoned with. Leslie Harpold is no longer with us.
The details are sketchy (complications from bronchitis) and that which is known, is overwhelmingly sad. Seven days into her Advent Calendar, her updates stop abruptly.
Why is it that something as fragile and precious as life is taken so for granted? Suddenly someone's gone and you spend your time rummaging around old emails and websites trying to find something tangible that you can grab onto. When I lost a very close friend in fall of 2001, Leslie sent me a wonderfully warm and supportive email and in it, she enclosed the following quote which I included in the eulogy read at his funeral.
On a day of burial there is no perspective-for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was-to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), French aviator, author. Flight to Arras, ch. 2 (1942).
Thank you Leslie... that about sums it up and it's about time for that cry.
Update: Others remember. here, here & here.
Posted by kerry at December 12, 2006 02:38 AMKerry - I'm so sorry about your friend. I only knew Leslie through her writings on the web, but that was enough to know she was bright and funny and talented, and will be sorely missed. Janie and I always read the advent calendar together, and I noticed Friday that she hadn't updated. Christmas just won't be quite the same.
Peace & love,
Susannah