Thank you for the gift of your poetry, creativity, and empathetic support,

. The first words of your sonnet, “No thing is lost,” pierced me to the heart because it is nearly identical to the words I have chosen for the inscription on his marker: “No-one is ever lost.”

I only have 22 characters and had been agonizing over what to use those few precious spaces for. I settled on that inscription when I found the words in #27 of the Tao Te Ching, which Michael had been studying in nearly every available translation for the last several years of his life. #27 is about wu wei, which is how he lived his life naturally, and thus he resonated deeply with Taoist philosophy. That poem is also the one he had highlighted in his document tracking multiple translations. I opened up the James Trapp translation (amazon.com/gp/product/1…) we had purchased several months ago and found the following lines:

Thus the Wise Man excels in the care of his people

And no-one is ever lost to him

He excels in the care of his possessions

And nothing is ever lost to him

And so it felt like Michael was guiding me to the words “No-one is ever lost.”