And I'll read a poem, now, that has
to do with the death of my stepmother, which
the second section of this book deals with.
And I'm not going to spend too much time in the second section
because it's a little hard for me to spend time there.
But because I think poetry is the natural language for grief,
I also feel like it's something we need to sing out.
I should say that she died of a home death.
I was the primary caregiver, along with my father,
and that when I was worried about it
I actually held a meeting in my office in New York City,
and had all the women that I knew
who had gone through a home death come to my office.
And we actually asked, I asked advice, and they did it,
and they were amazing.
The Riveter
"What I didn't say when she asked
why I knew so much about dying was that for me, it was work.
When dad called to say we had a month I made a list.
I called in my team to my office in the high rise, those Rosies
of know-how, those that had lost someone loved, those that
had done the assembly line of home death,
and said, what's this about not keeping her on TPN?
One woman who was still soft with sadness
said it depends on whether she wants to die of heart failure
or to drown in her own fluids.
I nodded and wrote that down, like this
was a meeting about a client who wasn't happy.
'What about hospice,' I asked.
They said they'll help, but your dad and you guys
will do most of it.
I put a star by that.
We had a plan of action.
When this happens, we do this.
When that happens, we do that.
But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers.
Not the one doing the dying.
This was a plan for those who still had a next.
See, our job was simple.
Keep on living.
Her job was harder, the hardest.
Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival
break down, make the factory fail.
To know that this war was winless,
to know that she would single-handedly
destroy us all."
I read that poem for my little brother.
My little brother was her biological son,
and I had seen him about a month after her death
and said, "God, can you believe we went through all that,
and how hard that was, and what a hard time?"
And he just looked at me, and he said, "Well, what about her?"
And I thought, of course, of course.
Yeah, she had the hardest job.
Leave it to the son, right, to remind me.