Today’s poem is The Truth by Natasha Rao. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “A pretty common response to loss is to encourage other people to cherish what…and whom… 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 bad 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 veer into awkward moments of disagreement or the demands imposed by care or necessity.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp