"Hope is Now the Long Wait"

Regarding my friend, Leslie Bustard

Apr 25, 2023

I feel like I’ve been working my way around this post for the last two weeks, thinking about it, forming it in my mind, even sometimes, for various reasons, deciding not to write it: I wasn’t sure that I wanted to immerse myself in the sadness of Leslie’s passing, and even graver doubts I could write something that would in any way communicate the kind of wonderful person she was. Also, I haven’t cried much since Leslie died. This is not a reflection of how sad I am at her passing, but only a reflection of how many tears I cried in the weeks leading up to her death, so that now that she’s gone, my dear ducts have dried up.

How do you tackle such a thing, without sounding like every other obituary in the paper, where people exclaim that the recently deceased was the most wonderful person they ever knew, the kindest, the most fun, the most loving? In our grief, we tend toward hyperbole, which is not a bad thing but can in some ways cloud the extraordinary nature of those among us who seemed to truly be saints.

Henri Nouwen writes, “The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.”

This week, the world bids farewell to such a saint.

It’s slightly embarrassing to admit, but Leslie Bustard first got my attention for this reason: she professed to love my writing. For any newly published writer, this kind of genuine proclamation holds the promise of immediate friendship. My first book, The Day the Angels Fell, had just released, and Leslie went on and on about how much she had enjoyed it.

For the next few years, she would become one of the biggest encouragers to me and my writing. I will never forget this.

Imagine my surprise, then, as our friendship deepened and I began to realize Leslie was an enthusiastic fan of everything she loved! She never shied away, for any reason, from telling someone just how much she enjoyed the work that they did. Many times in the years after we first met, she would grab my arm and pull me over, eager to introduce me to someone whose writing she loved, whose music she couldn’t get enough of, whose art had captured her imagination.

This is only one of the ways I want to be more like Leslie: she was an unabashed fan of the good work being done in the community of flesh-and-blood people she knew. And she never hesitated to tell them, and everyone else, how much she loved it. Through the years, this enthusiasm had a gravity of its own, drawing an ever-expanding community into Leslie’s orbit, and she shone brighter and brighter for it.

One of my favorite evenings with Leslie happened at our house in the city on March 1st, 2020, just as Covid was making its way into the United States, and only a short time, I believe, after Leslie had received her initial cancer diagnosis. Good friends shuffled into our house, escaping the late winter chill, bringing wine and food and flowers.

In the face of Leslie’s recent diagnosis, I didn’t know what to say to her. Maile hugged her and cried. Ned was practical and straight-forward about it. Leslie was ever hopeful—she insisted we not make the evening about her cancer. We lit candles and filled glasses and ate delicious food. The kitchen lights were bright against the dark night pressing on the panes. The children were asleep upstairs. We refilled our glasses and toasted to hope and writing and books.

There were ten of us there that night: Ned and Leslie, Byron and Beth Borger, Katie and Rick James, Christie and Jonathan Purifoy, and Maile and me. We had a wonderful meal and spent the entire evening talking about books (with two booksellers, two publishers, and all of us writers, is that any surprise?). That this evening took place only three years ago is unfathomable. It feels like decades ago, or perhaps more like something I read about in a book once.

But none of us could see the future, and in many ways that night was a turning point: the severity of both Covid and Leslie’s illness would soon become even more apparent, and the trajectories of all of our lives would change. And it would be easy to say that all of our trajectories changed for the worst in almost every way: a global pandemic, a dire cancer diagnosis, lockdowns, depressions, teen children struggling with disappointment and isolation, serious battles with Covid for some of us, a faltering economy, and a contentious election season. We had all of that to look forward to in the coming months.

Christie Purifoy and Leslie on the left (with Maile hiding behind them); Rick and Katie James at the top, hovering over Byron and Beth Borger; then Ned, Jonathan Purifoy, and half of my face. In the words of Eowyn from LOTR, “I am no [photographer].”

But with Leslie it seemed that there was always hope, even in the darkest of times, and in the months and years to come, she began writing and sharing her poetry. She wrote essays for online publications. Along with Ned, she began planning conferences that focused on the beauty of creativity.

She took one of the ugliest things in the world, cancer, danced on its head, and used it as a springboard into a wonderful life.

Nights like that one end too soon. And you tell yourself we’ll do it again sometime. We’ll get everyone together. We have all the time in the world.

Here is one of my favorite poems that Leslie wrote (and not just because she dedicated it to Maile and me, but maybe because of that), from her book, The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living:

“Hope is now the long wait.”

I try to imagine her as she might be now, perhaps in some far green country, in a place that looks like the rocky coast of Ireland, sitting on a rocking chair by a fireplace in a tidy, white cottage, the walls lined with books, reading one that she’s not read before, perhaps This is Happiness by Niall Williams.

And as she reads, I imagine her looking up every so often as the birds make a fluttering sound along the path outside the open window, and I imagine her wondering if this is Ned, finally arriving after a long wait that felt like no time at all.

“Hope is now the long wait.”

In honor of the passing of our dear friend Leslie Anne Bustard, whose memorial service is this coming weekend, we having compiled all three of the podcast episodes we recorded with her over the years.

The first was recorded in February of 2021, the second in April of 2022, and the third in November of 2022. Leslie was an author, a reader, a publisher, and an encourager. As you'll find in these episodes, she was also someone who clung to hope. As Douglas McKelvey wrote of her, she was "a poet and a poem."

It is a great honor to offer these three episodes to you as one episode today.