By the time you read this
Remembering my friend Lesley Hazleton, who chose when to leave, and left a great many things behind.
I was sitting at the breakfast table when it arrived, an email from a friend who said she would be dead by the time I read it.
“I’ve been a pro-choice feminist for over six decades, so it should come as no surprise that I’ll be exercising choice in this too,” Lesley Hazleton wrote to friends in a farewell message that reveled in life, self-determination, and the rights guaranteed to her and others with terminal diagnoses under Washington’s Death With Dignity Act. “In fact by the time you read this, I’ll already have exercised it. I’ll have chugged down the prescribed meds, standing tall, then laid me down to sleep. It’s that simple.”
All of Lesley’s brilliance and wit and peculiarity and grandeur rushed into me as I read, like a sudden haunting return, and how sharply I missed her, this marvelous friend I had not called for too long. Now, she was gone.
That night, I woke from a shallow and sweaty sleep and pulled up on my phone the web site for a used-book clearinghouse. I typed in her name to try to find all of her books, both in- and out-of-print, hoping for more, more, more. The ones I already knew popped up, some of my favorite books of all, like her imaginative, intimate biographies of Mary (Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother), Jezebel (Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen), and Muhammad (The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad).
I have to pause here. There are more august ways to say it, but to me, there is nothing cooler than my friend Lesley deciding to write an intimate biography of the mother of Christ, except the fact of her absolutely pulling it off. The book is magical, beyond bold, all the way to Mary’s own late-life resurrection of sorts in a women’s commune. The book begins, “She is thirteen. Short and wiry, with dark olive skin. The trace of a mustache on her upper lip, soft black down on her arms and legs. The muscles are hard knots in her arms, solid lines in her calves.” In those four sentences, Lesley did what centuries of paintings failed to: make Mary matter as a female body, and make her of matter. Virgin as stuff, as mustache, as muscle. If I had known about this Virgin, I might not have had to leave Christianity in such a hurry as a 17-year-old wondering why God would ever give me a body and not want me to use it for all the things it’s used for.
The very first gift I gave the love of my life was an audio recording Lesley made just for him — her reading my favorite sentences from Mary. That remains the best gift I ever expect to give. It was Lesley’s lovely written words, yes, but also Lesley’s epic voice: husky and throaty, with the British accent shaping that smoker’s prize of a rasp, her affect amused and questioning, questing, jousting. For someone so impressive, she was so much fun. This was someone who would like you to jump in the lake with her, yes, right now, she had towels back at her houseboat.
That night after she died, scanning the book list in the moonlight through my window, I scanned more titles of her creative and gutsy books, evidence of the creative and gutsy life I had been so lucky to experience firsthand. After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam is her telling of a multigenerational family drama that helped me grasp more deeply entire regions of the world. Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Where Mountains Roar are memoirs of her time as a war correspondent in Israel (as a secular British Jew educated in Catholic schools in England), and Driving to Detroit: Memoirs of a Fast Woman describes her time driving race cars and the travels that landed her on the Seattle houseboat where she lived the last decades of her life. (That book singlehandedly convinced writer Paul Constant to move from Maine to Seattle.) I knew all of those but hadn’t heard before of England, Bloody England: An Expatriate’s Return or Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths, based on hundreds of interviews. I ordered several books that night, some I still haven’t read and others to own as signed first editions. I want there to be even more Lesley Hazleton books than there are, like maybe a book about her love of flying, and the season of her life when she piloted small planes into the skies over the Cascade Mountains.
Lesley had terminal kidney cancer. Ultimately, I can’t imagine her dying any other way than by her own hand, willfully, and in style. Her goodbye letter was witty, elegant, and generous, a fine entry in the category of final piece of writing for any author. What was it like to be on the receiving end of that letter? When I struggle to reconcile her death with her vibrancy, her goneness with her ongoing influence in my life, I can hear her saying, from one of her TED talks, “What’s wrong with dying?”
What’s wrong with you dying is that I didn’t get to say goodbye or ask you every last thing I wish I had — and I just simply miss you, some part of me insists. I then imagine a Lesley-like response. I’m dead, she says. I love you, you love me, and I’m dead. What’s the problem? Fair enough, my dead friend. I love you, you love me, and you’re dead. I will repeat it like a mantra as I keep reading you, as I let you in more, as I let you go.
On that night when she was not yet dead 24 hours, I discovered books Lesley had never mentioned in our 15 years of friendship. She’d told me about being a psychologist in Israel and New York; she had loved treating teenagers. After I became a therapist, Lesley spoke to me of teens as inspirations, people who have yet to forget to ask every day why things aren’t different, better. People who have not yet lost their way and become compliant, responsible, task-driven adults. She loved them, wanted us all to grow up to be like them. I had to agree with this impossible idea. Lesley didn’t stay a psychologist, and in our conversations she didn’t say a word about a psychology book she wrote, which I found, to my astonishment, that first night: The Right to Feel Bad: Coming to Terms with Normal Depression.
Another daring choice, my dead friend. I ordered it, and it arrived several weeks later, its mesmerizing paperback cover an iridescent artifact of the 1980s.
I became a psychotherapist because I believe that when being a person is devastating, what makes it worse is to be misunderstood, dismissed, left alone, blamed, or judged, by oneself or other people who ask you to pretend that everything is fine so as not to pop the balloon of their illusions until such time as – inevitably – they find themselves where you are. By extension, what makes it better is to be received by people who get it, who get the darkness and the rage and the complexity. This does not mean that I live entirely in dark places or want anyone else to, only that I believe that lingering in dark places long enough to turn on a flashlight and get a good look around is what makes the light places, the wonder and the humor of life, worth having.
I had no idea that my beloved friend wrote a book about this. God, I love my friend even more in death than I did in life. Another gift of darkness, of death.
Maybe it was always thus, but growing up white, middle class, and American in the Jazzercising 1980s, I can relate to what Lesley writes in The Right to Feel Bad, my copy of which has so many hot-pink post-it notes sticking out of it that it looks like I’m chasing an A+ on a book report. I offer one highlight:
“…[L]isten, for example, to Dr. David Burns in his book Feeling Good, one of the more popular books now on the market, as he tells us how we should feel when someone we love has died:
‘You validly think, “I lost him (or her), and I will miss the companionship and love we shared.” The feelings such a thought creates are tender, realistic and desirable. Your emotions will enhance your humanity and add depth to the meaning of life. In this way you gain from your loss.’
My first thought on reading this was ‘Thank God I am not loved by David Burns!’ What about mourning? What about tears and reproach of the world or God for injustice? What about emptiness and hopelessness and the terrible awareness of the fragility of life in the face of death? In other words, what about the undesirable?”
The pressure to “distort emotion into a ‘desirable’ channel before it can be felt” haunts and oppresses many of the patients I see as a psychotherapist today. They not only feel depressed, they feel guilty or bad for being so. Lesley describes that “what began as a right in the sense of entitlement – the right to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence – has segued slowly into the sense of being right…Many people describe depression as ‘when I don’t feel right’ or ‘when I don’t feel myself,’ as though the only self that is valid is the happy self. By now, happiness is feeling literally all right, and depression all wrong.”
“But normal people don’t feel this way,” my own patients tell me, one after another, as though they were programmed with this line or one just like it. Half my work is undoing the belief that any feeling that is challenging and does not have an immediate solution is wrong, unhealthy, and dysfunctional.
Today, for instance, Abraham Lincoln would not be in public life, Lesley reminds us. Because he had acute bouts of depression during which he self-isolated and considered suicide, in today’s psychology, he would be hospitalized, pathologized, and medicated as well as separated from any sense of purposeful identity. Lesley posthumously reminds me, as someone who has had my own lifelong struggles with depression, that the world may recoil from my own periods of self-isolation and thoughts of suicide, but that doesn’t mean that there is anything inhuman about my having them. In other words, if you are invited to my funeral, please dance and laugh but I wouldn’t mind some wailing and keening. One without the other and I become suspicious.
During a time of my own personal wreckage more than a decade ago, after a nightmarish breakup that involved canceling a wedding and pressing the reset button on my future, Lesley invited me to stay with her on the houseboat for a time. She wanted to take care of me. I wish now that I had gone to stay with her, but I didn’t.
Unfazed, Lesley instead picked me up one morning at the crack of dawn and drove all the way to the westernmost stretch of the contiguous United States, to a place she found restorative herself. She led as we semi-bushwhacked our way through a slender path, our shoes growing thick with mud and the slime of banana slugs. At the end of the hike, we emerged onto a vast bright stretch of Pacific Ocean on Shi Shi Beach.
On Shi Shi, she showed me anemones and starfishes and crabs so fat and bright as to be obscene. They pulsed and bulged and piled on each other in their glistening pools, forming a microcosm of life itself, messy, ugly-gorgeous, unignorable. They woke me that day into what I love about being a person.
Puttering along the beach, we identified objects of mystery, things once carried away by currents and now deposited back on land. Maybe, given the flotsam of my own life at the time, Lesley had meant to show me a place where things find land again. We made up stories about the lives of the objects we saw. We decided that a stick dipped in layers of different-colored paints had been a prop in an elaborate art project in Japan. Lesley handed me the stick to take home, so I did.
I noticed recently that the stick stands in a corner of my home resembling nothing so much as the cane that proves that Santa Claus, having vanished, was once present, in the movie Miracle on 34th Street. So maybe it is silly but also fair to note that Lesley had white hair, she was magical, and I await her books in the mail the way I anticipate a holiday. I clasp my hands in anticipation and thanks, as my friend continues to arrive.
The guts of love are painfully beautiful. Thank you.
Deep bows. Many thanks, Jen-