Leslie Hartman | 1973 - 2020

I want to begin today by thanking Rima, for contributing to these words, and for reading them ahead of time, to help me make sure that I was making sense. I also want you to know that as much as I speak today from personal experience, I know that no matter how special my friendship with Leslie was, so was yours. And that those parts of herself she was kind enough to give to me, she gave to each of us. So I hope you’ll allow me to speak not just for myself but maybe in some small way, for all of us. I know I may not always get it right, she was too many things to too many people for a few hundred words to encompass, so before I really begin, I want you to know

that as I wrote this you were in my heart, too.

As a philosophy of life, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” strikes me as particularly resonant with the way in which Leslie

lived hers. The poem goes,

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

I know I risk conflating genres and turning an elegaic exercise into an academic argument, but doesn’t even the opening line strike you as exactly what Leslie would have said to us, what she probably did say to us, at some point? “It’s okay, Sugar, you don’t have to be good”? Leslie had this wisdom about her, so far beyond anything I have ever experienced with another human. More than anyone I’ve ever known, she seemed to know, like really know in her

mind and heart and body, that life isn’t about goods and bads, that life is about being , being yourself, and being authentic. And who, more than Leslie, told us, like Oliver's poem, to love what we love? Who taught us more than she

to be our most authentic selves if nowhere else than in her presence, with her, because her authenticity beckoned our own, welcomed it, and cherished it. How rare to have someone with whom we could be our truest selves, a word

I caution my students against using, but how else to describe that sense of relief I felt in her presence, a place where I could let my guard down, fully, where I could be just me , whichever me I needed to be at that moment. Such an exquisite gift, to give us that space of selfhood.

And I think of this, too, when I read in Oliver’s poem, “tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” How

many of us have done this--at a picnic table at Dan’s, or at Mable’s through dusty rays of dying sun, or my favorite

space of all, at the kitchen table--how many of us have bared our souls to hers? There’s a reason, that Leslie was the only person I was going to allow in the room if I was fucked up on hospital drugs. Leslie was a vault, and I know she wasn’t this only for me. She made room for all of us in the vast space of her heart. She shouldered secrets with us, sat under their weight with us, helped us live with them and in them, good or bad.

Maybe it was because Leslie was so strong that she could do this. I don’t know how many of you know this, but for

about a year, she and Rima and I worked out together with a physical trainer, and he was FLOORED when he discovered that she could press more than him and most of the men he trained. How many of us has she hugged with those strong arms, folding us into herself. Nic

Bagherpour offers the best description when he says,

They were the most genuine, real,

hanging-on-for-every-bit-of-love-and-real-connection hugs you could ever hope for. . . . If Leslie hugged you,

you felt it. You knew you were hugged. You knew you were loved.

And she loved us so hard. To borrow Schmuffin’s words, she graced us with “a million small, quiet acts of love.” From hair ruffles, to these magnificent hugs, to letters and postcards. Or the smile she’d give you when she noticed you were there. The way she would look at you, as if she really saw you. She was a world unto herself, and she offered herself to us without question, made space for us

and supported us.

For many of us--I know for me--she was a stabilizing force in our lives, someone we could always depend on. When I

woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep, I knew she’d be there. I know I’m not the only one

either. If you wanted to talk, she would listen and talk with you, and if you just needed someone to take up space with

you, she would do that too. It makes me think of a text that Chris Welch shared in the Facebook group. She had texted

him after his stroke, while he was in rehab. She was thinking of him, she said, and if he needed anything or just wanted to hang out or listen to music, she’d be around. And in her infinite Leslie wisdom she concluded, “It almost always gets better.”

I don’t know how it gets better after something like this. But “meanwhile the world goes on,” and so must we. Leslie was, as Scott Danbom said, a light, an extraordinary light in a world that too often surrounds us with darkness, a light so bright, we feel its warmth, even now, on this cold October day. As we adjust our bodies and our selves to this new life without her, we have an opportunity to carry that light with us: to keep learning from her, to keep aspiring to be as welcoming, as curious, as joyful, and as

caring as she always was. We should always look for the weirdos, fall into research holes about word origins and

biology and weird bugs and art, stay up til 6 am just to text a friend traveling on the other side of the planet because

you know she needs it, pull out the wigs at the perfect time, feel one another’s sadness and pain even, or especially, if we’re too “spongey,” as she always was, and we feel it a bit too much. And always, always, be ready for a cranberry vodka shot.

Happy birthday, Leslie. We love you forever.