What's up? It's Major.

Today's episode is hosted by poet and slowdown producer Micah Kielbond.

Don't worry. I'll be back on November 25th.

I'm Micah Keelban, and this is the slowdown.

My mother was, for 35 years, a flight nurse.

She conducted hospital-to-hospital transport of patients who needed a higher level of care.

In western Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest, an ambulance ride would often take too long.

It was hard work physically and emotionally.

There was danger to it, too.

Twice, helicopters crashed into the water,

killing both nurses and the pilot, my mom's colleagues. There were days where my mother and her crew lost a patient, and after a 24-hour shift, having witnessed death, she would come home to

mother three children.

In the last year, my mother opened up to me about her journeys in grief, with her colleagues and with the loss of her parents.

Most of the pilots that she worked with were ex-military, many of the Vietnam generation.

They learned in their youth that hardest lesson.

How to keep on when you lose the person beside you, who you knew, who could have been you.

She told me that the pilots taught her and the other survivors how to work through that grief.

My parents were in their late 30s after the first crash, raising two little kids, their community

full of young families like them. My grandfather would die that year as well. I learned that I was

born into that time of grief. Maybe it's why I'm the poet of the family.

Humans are permeable to loss in that way. Grief feels sometimes like a burden, a heavy one.

But it is also a practice. People we love leave this earth, but they don't leave us.

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