Leslie Larson

Leslie Larson, Don’s partner in all things of 42 years, passed away in November 2024. Here is a link to her obituary, and eulogies by Don and his three children can be viewed here.

In December 2025, Don wrote this to friends upon the installation of a memorial bench for Leslie in Telluride Colorado:

During her final days, Leslie asked us to commission a memorial bench, to be situated along one of our hiking trails in Telluride. Leslie and I honeymooned in Telluride in 1984, long before we returned to create a home and lasting friendships there over the past fifteen years. In October, the family gathered in Telluride to spread Leslie's ashes per her request, and to see the gorgeous bench and engraved epitaph. We cried together and we laughed telling stories. If you zoom in on the epitaph and knew Leslie, we hope you will see why we feel assured she would have approved – and why we think that we have tried to address the variously attributed adage, “grief is just love with no place to go.”

If you find yourself in Telluride, let me know and I'll tell you how to locate the bench in Aldasoro. It comforts the family to know that we can always visit her spirit in the vastness surrounding the bench, and that even those who did not have the great gift of knowing Leslie Larson can find her too amid a singular landscape of the eternal.

The rocker (and profound thinker about what he calls the "absolute annihilation" of his own traumatic grief) Nick Cave has written, "If you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That's the covenant of life and death. And the terrible beauty of grief."