The last time I saw Lesley Hazelton was around 7 pm on December 5, 2023. I remember the time and day because we and others were in Fremont celebrating the launch of Blaise Aguera y Arcas's book Who Are We Now? All I remember of her that night was her energy, which was the same energy she expressed when I first met her in 1995 at a literary event in the Ruins. The energy is not easy to describe. It was so many things at once: funny, deadly serious, raw, sophisticated, and in the moment. When speaking to her, I always felt the past and future dissolve into the intensity of the here and now. And this intensity was found in her books, the most recent of which were biographies of long-gone religious figures: Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen, Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, and The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad. In the way she breathed life into a moment, she breathed life into her historical subjects. She made Jezebel a living being. The same goes with her approach to religion (she once wanted to be a rabbi but instead became an accidental theologist—the name of a blog ran between 2010 and 2017). With her, divinity was as real as her hair, the cigarette she was lighting, a book on her mind, the city that surrounded Lake Union and her houseboat.  

Hazelton, whose first worlds were England and Jerusalem (she moved to Seattle in 1992), was certainly my theologian, in spirit but not in words—we almost never talked about religion but about writing and novels and new ideas. She was also a very early supporter of my work. In fact, I recall her heaping praises on an essay I wrote in 1999 and was, in my strong opinion, a total mess. (I never thought of myself as a writer until around 2003.)

Some of my happiest moments with her were spent in her houseboat. We would drink (grappa was her tipple of choice—she often carried it in a whisky flask) and talk and talk. That energy. There at the beginning. There in the middle. There at the end. And I mean the very end.

The night (or day?) Lesley died, she (or the ghost in the machine) sent a delayed email saying goodbye to her friends. She had "bad news, good news, and even better news." The bad news: She had terminal cancer; the good news: She wasn't in much pain; and the better news: Washington state "has a Death with Dignity Act." By the time we received the letter, at 11:50 pm on Monday, April 29, she was no longer among us. The letter was so filled with her energy that it seemed she had somehow cheated death. It got no reverence from her, no fear and trembling. "What’s wrong with dying?” she asked during a 2017 TEDxSeattle talk. Is there even an answer to that? I actually don't know. But this is certain: What mattered to Lesley wasn't the eternal darkness that I always feel must be on the other side of life, but simply leaving her friends, leaving the laughter, leaving the crackling conversations. I will miss her terribly.