Last love letter

This was the last love letter I sent to Leslie - just under three months before she passed away, more than 50 years into our relationship.

When we first started work with refugees

Dear Leslie

Written in the car parked in front Of Lucky Dog Books (Paperbacks+): I’m driving along through Hollywood Heights. Stopped at an intersection and flashed on someone running the stop sign and running into me. Listening to U2 – songs of mercy (who sings about mercy?), sorrow, joy, transcendence – Mothers of The Disappeared, Miss Sarajevo, One Love.

Leslie at memorial for Feather, hand in hand with
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Duboce Park

Oh Leslie. I’m thinking how you and I have lived The Dream. Our whole lives working for a better world, for justice (you’re a warrior, no doubt), for suffering people, for beauty – living a world of love, navigating our way through what I truly believe were the most incredible times in history – civil rights, women’s rights, sexual revolution, psychedelic revolution, gay rights/marriage equality and the list goes on and we were there/we are here, together, each in our own way, making it happen.

January 2015, San Francisco

And now, whatever it is that’s happening is as mind-opening as anything that went before. I feel kind of like you’re taking us on a ride and I’m in awe. Not always an easy ride LOL. I feel zero need to label it or do anything other than experience it and I love thinking about it.

Leslie in a jeep in Burma, on the road to Maymyo

About the fact that he and I were warriors and then psychedelic, and now dancing beneath the stars, Jeff says in that hard voice, “There ain’t many in this class.” And I say about your and my individual paths and our paths combined where we did IT ALL, “There aren’t many in this class.“ Few have done it as fully as we have.

So I thought about a car slamming into me and I thought, if I die today, I AM fulfilled. And I thought, if we never have sex again, I AM fulfilled. I hope none of this happens for a long time, and I know, backslider that I am, I’ll be grumbling again before long. But the bottom line is – and I’ve said this before – Thank you for this astonishing life. It’s been everything I couldn’t have even imagined.

Beep-Beep! Here she comes!