Missing Leslie today and always.

I wrote this poem for my father after he died because there was so much left to say and so much to do.

I worked with Leslie when she was a reporter at the Ventura County Star.  She was sweet and a hard-working journalist.  I learned so much from her - a calm voice, soft smile and patience.

When I thought about her memory, I thought about my father also who left his footprint on my heart. The poem is about those who leave and those who stay behind. That's why I am sharing this with Leslie's loved ones and friends.

Working it like a racing helms-woman.

Another year, the third one, without you my beautiful daughter.  Happy that we spent some time together but wishing you were still with us.  We didn’t do enough together.  There was so much left to do.  There was so much you didn’t do.  

Miss your presence and knowing we could be together doing things.  May I see you again in the resurrection when you come back to a healthy body.  

Me and Leslie at a Tiki Bar on her birthday in 2019.

Back in 2017, Leslie had asked me about doubts she was having regarding an afterlife.  One passage I shared with her from a letter of the great mathematical logician, Kurt Gödel, who had proven that mathematics would always be incomplete and was perhaps Einstein's closest friend at the end of Einstein's life.   Gödel, against the intellectual fashions of his time, was a theist.  His mother, who was an atheist, asked him about his thoughts on the afterlife and Gödel replied thus:"In your last letter you pose the weighty question whether I believe we shall see each other again [in the hereafter]. About that I can only say the following: if the world is rationally organized and has a sense, then that must be so. For what sense would it make to bring for a being (man) who has such a wide range of possibilities of individual development and of relations to others and then allow him to achieve not one in a thousand of those? That would be much as if someone laid the foundation for a house with the greatest trouble and expense and then let everything go to ruin again. But do we have reason to assume that the world is rationally organized? I think so. For the world is not at all chaotic and capricious, but rather, as science shows, the greatest regularity and order prevails in all things; [and] order is but a form of rationality." (Letter to Marianne Gödel, 23 July 1961)To me Leslie really epitomizes what Gödel argues here.  She had so much potential, touched so many people, and had so much to give the world, yet she had not nearly enough time.  Thus, I think we have reason to hope that her potential will find realization in a life beyond our suffering mortal world.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

- MEF