To the Editor:

Now what am I going to do? No Leslie Matthews Stansfield? I did not plan to actually use her as a last-resort refuge. But I definitely liked knowing she was there.

She was like Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, who used to dance on stage with her infant baby. “Don’t you want somebody to love,/Don’t you need somebody to love….”

Or maybe Janis Joplin. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I just always knew that, if push came to shove and there was nobody else who would do it, we could go to Leslie to take someone in. Anyone. She would do it. No questions asked.

The first time I met her, I kept sinking into her eyes, hazel eyes. My eyes. My father’s eyes. My other three sisters all have brown eyes.

She brought something I could not find anywhere else. She was a bond with my father who passed away at age 42, at the peak of health, from an aneurism. To me, she was a gift. A precious link to that departed father I adored.

Here she was, reportedly mother of four children and grandmother of eight grandchildren and adopter and protector and nurturer and overflowing compassion for, just, for anyone, in need or not.

She was a love child herself. What comes out of that kind of union? We have seen the result. One of a kind. Completely irreplaceable.

I am so glad I met her, a 23-and-me sister. She was so thrilled to discover her three sisters and me, a brother.

She turned out to be a writer. “Mr. Tea and the Traveling Teacup” and “Mr. Tea and the Bobbin’ Body.”

“Whimsy,” the analysts call it. She had a gift. And charm.

When she left us so suddenly, she and I were still on a voyage of discovery as she revealed secrets of my past and of my genetic makeup and of my deep inner self.

I had a candidate or two in mind that I might send to her to take in. With other people you might wonder about how she could do it, pay for it and provide shelter and food and all that.

With Leslie, you knew that her heart would just expand and her means would expand and she would just say “Yes, of course. When is she coming?”

A goddess. Durga the great protector. Immortal and invincible and the refuge for anyone and everyone who needed her, no questions asked. There is only one Leslie Matthews Stansfield. For her, the journey to heaven is short, no journey at all. The go-to goddess is home is all.

What about the rest of us, though? What are we supposed to do now?

Jim Meade

Milanville, Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: ​​Leslie Matthews Stansfield, who grew up in Delmar, died unexpectedly during surgery for liver cancer the day before Thanksgiving. She was 64. Jim Meade, who grew up in Guilderland, was in his seventies when he learned she was his sister.