The Riveter by Ada Limón

What I didn't say when she asked me 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 a high rise, those Rosies of know-how, those that had lost someone loved, those that had done the assembly line of a 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 singlehandedly destroy us all.

— Bright dead things by Ada Limón (Page 36)