So I'll start with my book Obit, and it came out in 2020.
And there's really nothing you need
to know except that my mother passed away
in 2015 after a long illness called
pulmonary fibrosis, which is this brutal illness,
if anyone knows anyone that has experienced it
personally or indirectly.
It's when your lungs harden and you suffocate to death.
It is awful to watch someone experience that,
and I wouldn't will that upon anyone on either side.
And then my father had a stroke maybe 15 or 16 years ago.
And he passed away in January this year,
but he lost all of his language.
And so they just populate these poems.
And yeah, they're just written in the shape of obituaries
and everything dies.
Did I?
Just down.
Music-died on August 7, 2015.
I made a video with old pictures and music for the funeral.
I picked Hallelujah in a cappella
because they weren't really singing, but actually crying.
When my children came into the room,
I pretended I was writing.
Instead, I looked at my mother's old photos.
The fabric patterns on all her shirts.
The way she held her hands together
at the front of her body.
In each picture, the small brown purse that now
sits under my desk.
At the funeral, my brother-in-law
kept turning the music down.
When he wasn't looking, I turned the music up
because I wanted these people to feel what I felt.
When I wasn't looking, he turned it down again.
At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers
away.
But the music was still there.
This was my first understanding of grief.