DEBORAH BRODSKY: Considering the last time I’d seen her was back in ’67, it would have been a shock no matter what, but Lilly in that hospital bed wasn’t anything I could have prepared myself for. I’d been to a few funerals by that point, so I knew death as a destination, but before Lilly, I didn’t know the journey. Lilly hadn’t asked me to come. She’d called to tell me she was in the hospital, but she hadn’t said, “Deb, I’m dying,” and I hadn’t come because I thought she was. When she got sick in ’70, Yuma was three and the school hadn’t been around long enough to feel like family. By the time the second sickness came, Yuma was ten and so used to everyone in the poetics department that I was sure he’d be fine without me for a little while.

As soon as I saw Lilly, I knew. So did she; it was in her eyes, though knowing something isn’t the same as being at peace with it. Lilly was forty, and she wasn’t ready to die; but if she had to, she was going to die working.

I’d never seen pain like hers up close. It would sweep down like an angry Old Testament god, then stay or leave on a whim. Mornings were her best times, so that’s when we would talk. Mostly we told our favorite stories about each other, a lot of deep remembering. After about an hour of this, I’d be as tired as she was. This gnawed at me until I realized we weren’t just talking: my brain was building shelves to store all those words in some more archival way, because I was about to be their only custodian.