I knew my aunt was brilliant. I knew she was generous and beautiful and incredible at cooking. I knew she was adventurous and opinionated and sharp as a fucking tack. And on some level too, I think I knew she was a survivor.
“I’ll begin with a death / since that is where all secrets begin,” Lesley writes in an absolute banger of a poem that I found with her things after she died suddenly of a rare and aggressive cancer in December. In this notebook, I found pages of poems and short stories my aunt had written. They were beautiful. And until now, all of them, secret.
My whole life, I’d known my aunt to be an editor. Before my mom—a brilliant and, well, fiery person herself—pressed “send” on a particularly important (read: “you are wrong and here are the receipts to prove it. fix the issue immediately: I am not joking.”) email, she’d send it to her sister, the proofreader. Lesley would read and edit with machine-like precision and send back a ready-to-go draft that the devil himself wouldn’t be able to muster a response to. Neither Mama nor Lesley were really the confrontational type (my mom only if someone threatened her sister or her babies), but after a family gathering, the emails between the sisters would fly. You can call it passive aggressive if you want, but that doesn’t make the messages between them any less hilarious or any less true. (Mama, if you’re reading this, your password-making skills in the 90’s were subpar, but I really do love you all the more for it.)
Lesley was my mom’s best friend until I was born—then she was still my mom’s best friend, but Mama would just have to lie about it in front of me from time to time. I was okay with it. Honored, really, to come in such a close second to Les. Mine was the first and only birth Lesley ever witnessed. Hers was the first and only transition to death I'd witnessed. Mama was, of course, at the center of both of these life-altering experiences, holding onto both of us. Us three were soul bonded.
Mama and me, 1994.
I was in college when my parents divorced: it was fine. They loved each other for a long time, and then they weren’t happy together for a long time, and then they divorced, and there was nothing dramatic about it. I thought—probably because I was told by therapist after therapist—that even if I didn’t register it as such, my parents’ divorce affected me because my parents’ relationship was my first model of what love looks like. I would argue that my trauma probably came from assault or abuse or my multiple abortions, but therapists LOVE them a good divorce narrative.
Aside from the fact that there are plenty of people who have children together and who don’t love each other, though, in my case this route was especially untrue. To be honest, I didn’t realize until just now—truly now, as I’m writing this—that I had the most beautiful, loyal, deep, unconditional, soul-bonding representation of love in front of me all along. Mama and Lesley, only two years apart, were best friends their whole lives. Lesley was another parent to me for my whole life, and even when she wasn’t fully involved in my personal life in my teenage years and beyond, never did her support of my mom waver. I always thought it was my mom who was the glue that kept us all together. In a lot of ways, she is. But I also never appreciated until now all the work that Lesley did to keep my mom healthy and alive and strong for us.
I should’ve known Lesley had written all kinds of beautiful work of her own. I’ll never know another person who reads as much as she read. And she kept everything. Books. Notepads and sticky notes and scrap paper full of writing. Cut out recipes for chocolate cakes. Recipes for gratin potatoes. Her mother’s childhood photographs. Her father’s name tag from a high school reunion. Coins. Tacks. Scarves. A lock of her brother’s hair. She had the imagination and the material and the language to make a life writing. But she never pursued it.
One of the things she left behind was a journal—one of those journals that asks you a question each day, and you fill out a different answer on the same day every year. April 4 asked: What do you regret? “That I’ve spent so much time at a job I hate doing things that aren’t meaningful to me,” answered Lesley in 2012. When she died, on December 9, 2022, Lesley was still at that same job, probably for a lot of reasons. She was a primary caregiver to both of her parents before they died, she was a deeply giving person who didn’t want to leave extra responsibility to her coworkers, and, I think, she was a survivor who was afraid of what quitting her job and having to reassess her life might mean for her and for those around her. Looking back, I should’ve known we would have this in common too.
I dropped out of college the same year that Lesley wrote that answer in her journal. I didn’t have the strength to go back and finish until 2020. I never thought I’d graduate, much less make it into one of the most decorated MFA programs in the country. The fact that I’m even here writing this feels surreal, even now that I’m nearly a year into the program.
I don’t know if I believe that we can heal our ancestors through our own bodies. I don’t know if my pursuit of a life as a writer can ease some of the pain or regret that Lesley felt about being stuck in aspects of her own life. But what I do know is that Lesley Glasgow Hall’s work is on display in the halls of the University of Arizona’s MFA program. What I do know is that, alongside the poems and stories in her secret writing folder, there was a single personal item: a card I wrote her in 1998 that says, “DAAR LES-/LEY I LOVE/YOU SO MU-/CH LOVE/JOSIE.” What I do know is that I wouldn’t have survived without her.
On July 1, 2012, Lesley’s journal asked her what she wanted written on her tombstone, and Lesley answered: “LETLEY WAS HERE.”
A project I’m working on now is collaborating with Lesley. I am moving her words around on the page, adding spaces, deleting words—not to take away from her work, or to even critique or try to “better” it, but to have a conversation with her. I miss her. And I do think there’s a part of me that wants to give her the opportunity (the gift, the curse, the pain in the ass, the magnificence) of her work being torn apart in a workshop, or uplifted and believed in by other writers. To say to her: yes, you are a writer. Here, for example, is her poem “Night Watch,” which you can see like this in the Tiny Cabinet, untouched by me:
Night Watch
I’ll begin with a death
since that is where all secrets begin
plants springing from dead leaves,
trees from charred earth,
my grandfather’s death.
The first hour I sit with the body, I do not look—
no more than I would violate the privacy
of a sleeper on a bus.
The second hour I do nothing but look.
Strange how the hands of the dead hold their shape
while the face seeks its level, nameless as water
In the city, the mortician needs a photograph
to shape the cooling butter
back into the man.
Much later I hate how horizontal he is.
They should stand him up.
Do they think we would confuse him with the living?
Since no one is around I learn the marble of his skin,
Friendly like the arms of a comfortable chair
The mouth will not change its plastic smile.
Buy the fourth hour we are old friends,
now that conversation comes no easier,
and I can turn his face in my hands,
an old coin that buys nothing.
Toward dawn I leave my grandfather,
his secrets intact,
and turn to something I can get inside of
like rain.
Here is the version in which I talk with her:
Night Watch
The first hour I sit with the body, a sleeper
on a bus, I do not look—
The second hour I do nothing else.
How horizontal he is. As if upright
we would confuse him with the living. His mouth
that will not change. In the city,
the mortician needs a photograph
to shape the cooling butter
back into a man. Strange
how the hands of the dead hold
while the face finds its destination,
settles there, like water. His face, an old coin
that buys nothing. I’ll begin
with death since that is where all secrets
begin: by dawn, his corpse and I are good friends.
But when I leave, it is without him: memory and I
both looking for something we can get inside of
like rain.
Daar Lesley, I love you so much.
Daar Lesley, you are a writer.
Daar Letley, you were here.
Love Josie.
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