Today's episode is guest-hosted by the poet Jason Schneiderman.

Don't worry, I'll be back in your feeds on March 27th.

I'm Jason Schneiderman, and this is the slowdown.

A pretty common response to loss is to encourage other people to cherish what and who they still have.

When someone loses a parent, they remind the people around them to call their own mom and dad more often.

Or they post on social media to exhort you to hold your loved ones a little bit closer tonight.

It's not that advice, of course, but in my experience, it's not the saying I love you that's hard or the hug that's hard.

It's the showing up every day, the long conversations that fear into awkward moments of disagreement or the demands imposed by care or necessity.

Before my mother went into a very risky surgery that she did not ultimately survive, I asked her what it would mean to her if she died.

It was a hard conversation, but I'm so grateful we were able to have it.

It took me years to figure out what her death meant to me, but I think it helped that I knew what it meant to her.

Today's poem calibrates that sense of love and distance, of what it means to cherish someone while being able to speak your love to everyone except the person you cherish.

Listen to the way the poem shifts at the end, how the you in the poem starts as the reader and ends as the father.

And if you want to call someone after this poem to tell them that you love them, or if you want to hold someone a little tighter, go ahead and never hurts.

The Truth by Natasha Rao.

I am only kind to my father in poems he will never read.

I try to imagine him small the way my grandmother tells it.

Patient, dearlimbed, pondering polynomials.

Wanting only a Toblerone bar for his birthday to eat alone in his room away from the violence of exploding raindrops.

Pitalis, Madras, Summer.

I wonder if he is proud of his life like I am proud of my poems, the best we could do.

In another world, I would go down the stairs to where my father is sitting alone with his wine glass and I would tell him, I'm sorry.

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