Part 3: I Am All That Is Left. Amen.

title: Part 3: I Am All That Is Left. Amen.
author: We Were Three
contenttype: podcast
publication: We Were Three
published: 2022-10-13T02:10:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com/6qj4J/nyt.simplecastaudio.com/49c4ce4f-e6a6-40ec-924b-1ef8bdeeedfa/episodes/489f39fc-7f08-4ea9-9f60-7924e37d06c6/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=49c4ce4f-e6a6-40ec-924b-1ef8bdeeedfa&awEpisodeId=489f39fc-7f08-4ea9-9f60-7924e37d06c6&feed=Gr51r1oq

word_count: 6598

I'm opening up crossplay. I've been playing against Dan. My colleague gets a New York Times. Cats played another move. Ugh, she played stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I'm guessing Tenga is not a word, let's see. Tenga is a word. A foe. Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win. New York Times game subscribers get full access to crossplay. Our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. Here's a question that occurred to me while I was sitting next to Rachel and her brother's car, driving around Santa Ana, California. Are you kinda hiding out here? Yeah, absolutely. I've been hiding out here for a while. She'd been in California for a few weeks when I got here. Her plan had been to start clearing out the house where her father and brother had lived. But when she got to the house, she couldn't stand being in it. So she fled up to Northern California. She wanted to be alone. Did that for a few days. That was awful. Then she met up with friends. That was better. Rachel's been talking by phone and text and face time with her teenage kids every day while she's here. But by the time we were driving around together, she hadn't been home to her family and Rochester, New York, for a while. Grief somehow maintains a public image of mainly sadness, fragility. But grief can also be selfish, unfair. Kind of an asshole. Rachel's aware. I don't know. I'm having a hard time right now. I'm just having a really hard time connecting with anyone. It's like fucking up my relationship with my partner. I just don't feel like anyone has my griefs back if that makes sense. I cry in my car by myself. I go for drives and just scream. And then I come home and I'm mom who's got a chore or snowboard lessons to drive you to or whatever. And it's like I'm just, I don't know. I just feel like a piece of shit for saying it. I just can't connect and get myself to do mundane, ordinary things that are required of me. Rachel's described her father and brother as anchors for her, heavy but stabilizing. Without them, she's floating, driving around the place where they lived, looking for ways to feel nearer to them, to understand them. From cereal and the New York Times, this is the last part of We Were Three. I'm Nancy Updeck. I'm Jetson Jones. I'm a reporter and meteorologist at The New York Times. For about two decades, I've been covering extreme weather, which is getting worse because of climate change. And it's becoming more important to get timely and accurate weather information. That's why we send these customized newsletters, letting you know up to three days in advance about extreme weather that could impact you or place you care about. At the times, you can be confident that everything we publish is based off the most accurate, scientific, and vetted information available to us. Because we want you to be able to make real-time decisions about how to go about your life. This is the kind of work that makes subscribing to The New York Times so valuable. And that's how you can support fact-based independent journalism. So if you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com slash subscribe. Part three. I'm all that is left. Amen. Rachel and I have separate but overlapping missions here. We're both trying to see these people she's lost as fully as we can. I asked to come to California while she's here, partly because I wanted to see the places she talked about. But also, I'm still trying to understand what life did COVID land in with her brother and her father. What was happening in their lives before the text messages? Rachel has some answers and her perspective. And other answers are here in California. I'll be there shortly, my dear. We're off to see Sandy. Rachel's father's longtime girlfriend. Long time as in, she met him in 1978. We're going to meet Sandy now because I want to talk to her and she's agreed. Sandy saw Rachel's brother and father during COVID when Rachel didn't. And she's also known all three of them for decades. She met Rachel when Rachel was three years old. This is the girlfriend Rachel called in the middle of the wine and roses fight with her father and his then wife, Alex. Sandy remembers the call, though she doesn't remember finding out about the marriage until later. Oh, I will. I will, I'll stall. That's okay. We never have eyebrows when we wake up. Sandy's telling Rachel. She doesn't want us to get there until she has time to do her eye makeup. All right. I'll see you soon. I got a draw in. All right. I'll see you soon. Thank you. That's great. Yeah. Okay. Bye. Sandy in photos from Rachel's childhood is a young white woman with blue eyeliner around her big blue eyes. A California girl with her hair parted in the middle and hanging down. She's holding a grumpy looking gray cat in one photo, cigarette in another. There are also many photos over the years of Sandy with Rachel's dad. Sandy and Rachel's father never got married but they never 100% quit each other. Sometimes Rachel calls Sandy her kind of like stepmom. Sandy lived with the Camacho family more or less constantly with an occasional monstrosis hiatus. Until Rachel was around 14. Even after Sandy moved out, she lived right around the corner for years. On the drive over, Rachel tells me she and Sandy have never talked about her father's abuse. He hit all of them. The violence experiencing it and seeing it twisted Rachel's view of women, including herself and Sandy. I grew up resenting her. I grew up a misogynist. I grew up thinking women were weak and I pinned it all on the fact that she would not leave my dad. To me, and this is just a dumb child, mapping it out for herself, I just believed that women were incapable of having the kind of strength that would allow you to exit. There are a lot of things they've never talked about. The last time we had even been with each other, I had we were in a physical altercation. Sandy? This was after wine and roses. After Rachel had graduated from high school and she didn't have anywhere to live. She had her baby boy and he sometimes stayed with her during the day and he'd be with her ex-boyfriends family at night. And she was pregnant with her second child. Sandy let her stay on her couch for many months. Rachel remembers an argument escalating from something tiny. Did Rachel eat the last packet of Sandy's ranch dressing? I was on the phone and she was screaming at me. I'd been home at that point for nine months and I was just exhausted. I'm like, get the fuck out of my face. She wouldn't. Like leaned over me now, sitting and I just got up and I just started swinging and she fell back. And it was pretty brutal. Yeah. And you guys have never talked about that? No. I moved out the next day. We've never spoken of it. The first time we spoke again was like via text when I reached out from getting her info from my brother's phone. Wait a minute. You guys had not spoken since then? Yeah, it was like the 90s. So in 25 years, you guys had not talked from when you hit her until your brother and father died. Yeah. And she has since been nothing but a generous, thoughtful, informative person to me. So that's incredible. You know, it actually, I have a lot of shame that I responded in the way that I did. And it's just, it's just not who I am. It's who I can be. It's not who I am. Well, here we go. Here goes nothing. See what happens. Hi. We park in the driveway alongside a single story house, big succulents out front and by the driveway. Some drainiums, eucalyptus. Hi, dear. Sit in the shade. This is the house where Sandy grew up and now lives with one of her sisters. We walked around to the backyard. Go ahead and go to the table on the lawn. Oh, is there a table? Yeah, in there. Sandy's still got long brown hair parted in the middle, hanging down. A little gray at the roots. She's tan, wearing a blue sundress and flip flops. While we're scrutinizing people here, my hair is also a little gray at the roots. I'm dressed in black and navy, like a slightly rebellious cat burglar. When Sandy met Rachel and Peter's father, the father's name is Pete, which can get confusing. That's why I mostly call him Rachel and Peter's father. When Sandy met Pete, senior, the father, it was the late 70s and they were living the same apartment complex. It had a pool in the middle. Pete was putting some very smooth moves on Sandy and she was smoothly evading them. She kept saying, come in my apartment. We have the manager's former apartment. The air condition is gray. Oh, wow. It was so funny because even then, after running into them different times, I wouldn't go in. I just put my arm in the air. I'm going, yeah, that's nice. Oh my gosh, Sandy. Isn't that funny? I was so cautious. I love it. Oh, help things in there. There was always flirting. And then, I think it really, we really became friends. And then, I think it really, we really became good friends with the pool because Gilbert was there too. And then they talked about how they were going to play guitar. And so I think I ended up, since I played guitar too, you know, come on over. And then they have barbecues. He invited me to the movies. It was actually 78, but it didn't really become like a big romance. I know he wanted it to be, you know, a relationship until like 79. Sandy got to know Pete and his younger brother, Gilbert, and the rest of the family. She hadn't lived with Pete in over 30 years when he died. But their relationship, in one form or another, outlasted everything except COVID. Rachel says her father and Peter when she talked to them on the phone, often rolled their eyes about Sandy. Talked about their relationship with her as if it were a burden. But Rachel is also sure that they rolled their eyes about her and complained about her behind her back. So what Sandy describes is three people supporting each other. She, Pete, senior, and Peter celebrated birthdays and holidays. He picked on the phone and checked on each other. Sandy doesn't have a car. Peter drove her to get groceries and go to doctor's appointments. Peter didn't like dealing with bureaucracies. Sandy would make those phone calls for him. She found a dentist and made appointments for him and his father at their request. Peter would bring her fresh juice from his juicer. Sandy says Pete, the father, was calling her every weeknight for a while as he drove back from work because he was afraid he'd fall asleep. She talked to him all the way home even if she was tired of talking. Pete had told his son that Sandy was the one he should call if he, the father, ever got sick or anything went wrong. Your dad was thinking seriously considering the vaccine. And I said, let me make you an appointment. And he said, well, let's let all the, because it just come out. He goes, let's let all the immune compromised people get it first. And he goes, because I'm perfectly healthy. And he goes, maybe next month. That was January of 2021. Peter, in the meantime, he didn't like the mask. He started believing it was going to cause pulmonary, oh god, edema, all these things. I would, I would embarrass him in stores on purpose. Even your dad and I talked about this, your dad would go humor me. Put your mask over your nose. I don't want to die from COVID. And because Peter, I don't want to get sick. Sandy got COVID vaccines and boosters as soon as she could. And when she said she felt fine after each shot, Peter, the son would say, yeah, well, let's see how you feel in three years. Long before COVID, Peter had a habit of dismissing things other people believed. That he didn't by saying, oh, you fell for that. COVID seemed to slot right into the, oh, you fell for that groove. Every time Peter drove Sandy to an appointment, he would hand her videos. He said she had to see. I've seen some of the videos Peter was looking at. There were hundreds of videos and memes on his computer. A pharmaceutical analyst who said COVID vaccines were intended to poison healthy children. Someone quoting an undertaker who predicted mass deaths from vaccines. Not people who held press conferences and sounded slick. Sandy said the videos she remembers were regular person sounding off. And I swear to God, literally on a corner of New York with the, you know, the accent. And it was somebody interviewing her, but she was a nobody. It was just a person on the street, literally. And here's going, listen to this. I'm going, the F is she. You're making me listen to all this stupid crap. You're giving me a headache. He would just throw up his hands. I can't believe you, Sandy. I'm like, I can't believe you. I mean, we would argue all the way to my new four beach pain doctor appointment. I get there anymore pain. I'm exhausted. I'm mentally exhausted. A headache and, you know, from stress and necktietans, I'd be like, give me double the injections. Please from right into the car with Peter. So we would get in to all these arguments, but we'd end up laughing about it. And, you know, he'd end up laughing, but it goes, say I need really, you need to start listening to these things. Her dad, just that Peter was being ridiculous. And he told me numerous times. Well, he just can't, he said, I didn't, he goes, you know what I do? He goes, I try to convince him otherwise on all these things. And he doesn't listen. He gets really stubborn and upset. He goes, you can't change his mind. He goes, so he goes, I don't like hearing all of that. You know, he gets on the computer. He starts telling me and trying to get me to believe it. And he goes, I argue with him till I'm blue in the face. And so he goes, now I just go, oh, uh-huh, and walk away and go to my room. Peter started believing that the vaccines made people shed the virus. And therefore those people were dangerous to be around. His father told Sandy he didn't believe that, and it's not true. But in the name of keeping the peace, Peter's 67 year old father now couldn't imagine getting vaccinated. He said, you know, well, I've been thinking about it. He said, Peter would flip out. That would have probably been by that time in the February or March, because that's when Peter did not want me in the car anymore. And that's when he really got weird thinking that we shed the virus. So he said, I could never get it. He said, with Peter believing that, you know, we would talk about all the time. And he said, he'll think I'm gonna shed the virus all over the house. And then what, you know, and I said, just do it and don't tell him. What did you say to that? He goes, secrets always find a way of getting out. And he goes, let's see how this plays out. This is how it played out. Slowly, he started thinking just like Peter, and I was horrified. Because he kept saying he wanted to get the vaccine. Then all of a sudden, well, I went away on that. Then he started saying he was worried about what was in it. And that he was reading things that it could kill you in three years. I mean, he was selling like Peter. Sandy, for years, had been noticing Pete Sr's quick, sharp brain becoming less quick. Now the decline seemed to be accelerating. Pete, the father, was forgetting words. He even forgot to combine Sandy's birthday, which utterly out of character. Several months before he died, he started lecturing Sandy and her niece Sarah via text. He puts me and Sarah in a group texting, like bashing Fauci, some little JPEG. And this is what you look like after vaccines, a monster. I'm like, oh my god. And it got to the point where, I mean, her dad was always a fun, smart guy. It got to the point where, and he still was, we'd talk on the phone and laugh. But every, you couldn't say anything without it going back to the vaccine. Sandy, like Rachel, distanced herself from Pete. She'd known him for 43 years. And in the months before he died, she was barely talking to him. Because the COVID conversations were unbearable. And he wouldn't talk for long about anything else. Like Rachel, she figured she and Pete, the father, would go back to talking more and seeing each other. Once the COVID-Furver had run its course. When Sandy got the text from Peter that his father was dead, she had the same reaction Rachel did. Oh my god, car accident. Because just like Rachel, she'd had no idea he'd been sick. Sandy says her knees buckled when she grasped that Pete, the father was gone. Peter told her he had asked his dad if he wanted to go to the hospital. His dad said no, he didn't have insurance because he was in between jobs. Sandy wanted to scream, but he did have medical coverage. His father was 67 and covered by Medicare. And she remembered when Pete signed up for it. Peter told Sandy he was sorry he didn't call her when his dad was sick. Sandy was so angry at Peter. But now he was sick. She put off her anger and worried about him. Peter texted her from the hospital. The one Rachel had talked him into going to. Two days later, he told Sandy what he didn't tell Rachel that he was leaving the hospital against medical advice. Peter's phone is full of texts from Sandy in the last weeks of his life checking on him, suggesting different clinics and urgent care places he could go to since he knew he wouldn't go back to the hospital. She could not budge him. Neither could her niece who'd known Peter since they were kids. And Peter was lying to Rachel this whole time. The fact that they were all women and that we here were all women sitting around talking about men who were no longer alive. Men Rachel and Sandy had tried to keep alive in this pandemic. It stuck out. Rachel said that when she thought about it, her brothers, COVID views and her fathers had always skewed in the same gender direction in her conversations with them. The women in their lives were pleading with them to get vaccinated. They were all a bit hysterical about it. Her father and Peter both used the word hysterical. A bit simple. Brainwashed. One of Peter's last texts to Sandy was, you really need to stop talking or mentioning the word COVID or anything remotely related to COVID. Listen, Machismo and Massageini helped assist my brothers, death, as much as many other things. They thought that we were dumb women. I mean, they did. They were patronizing and could be paternalistic at times. I was a little snarky. Oh, it was long. Peter was worse. Oh, yeah, he was very bad, but like, you learn that. That's a learned behavior. There was a time in my life I didn't imagine it would be me and you left at the table. Can you imagine? Who knew? Holy shit. It's shocking. It's just shocking. I'm still in shock. Like we've outlived a lot alongside each other and, you know, in spite of the men in our lives who just couldn't get it right. Right. You know when he was the worst was Anaheim. I know. He was drinking more than what? Why I wonder. That's third grade. I know. That could have been because of having to go to Lacey, maybe. Lacey is the Theoleacy Corrections Facility in Orange, California. Rachel remembers hearing that her dad had to go there on weekends for a while. I asked why. Why did you go to Theoleacy? Because he assaulted me. Is that what? We kept it quiet from the kids and he would tell them he had that I was for me. No, I thought it was, so Theoleacy was because of you. Yeah. They began to have this conversation they'd never had gingerly. They didn't get into the incident between them where Rachel hit Sandy, but they talked about Pete, the father, and his violence. One of them would mention an incident and the other would remember part of it also. Rachel murmured, I'm so sorry that happened to you. Sandy told me later that it had been many years since Pete, the father, had hit her. The memories are vivid and painful and mixed in with good memories. She said Pete never stopped asking her to marry him. She never wanted to. Lots of reasons. She took Sandy a few tries to move out of Pete's place for good and settle into an apartment that was separate but close by. I don't know how I ever forgived him, but you had to forgive a lot, Boo Boo. I'm shocked at myself. You had to forgive a lot. I'm old and mean now. I wouldn't have forgiven any of it. This stage of my life, but you're not mean and old. I loved Rachel and Pete are so much leaving for good, killed me, being away from the kids. They really felt like my children. I guess that's probably why I was stupid and coming back sometimes. It was a lot better when he wasn't drinking. But even then, yeah, I had a temper. You just didn't know. When he said his dad used to beat the shit out all the five boys. I'm just glad that we're alive, lady. I felt like sometimes he would just maybe be frustrated over tired and I had a feeling he took more of it when I was there. More of his anger out on me and I used to think hopefully that saving you guys. That's true. It is true. I hated that. I'll be honest. That tears me up that we would be relieved that at least there was a third body now that would take hits. Well, yeah, because that's that's so sad. It's scary to my god to be looked. My dad did the same to me. I remember being terrified as a kid and being alone with my dad when he even it was the same thing. It was the alcohol when he would drink. When you're little and you got this mad man chasing that, the fear. The conversation moved on. Sandy waited until the very end of a cigarette at the table. Menthol. God, I miss smoking. I loved everything about it. The ritual, the repetition. The enforced pause of just taking one out and lighting it. I could go on. Sandy told us about a couple of quiet evenings with Pete, the father from the early days of COVID. I could picture it a different kind of pause. Two people who've known each other forever in a country at the beginning of a terrible time, full of uncertainty. And they sit outside near each other but apart, talking, listening, afraid of the same thing. He came a couple times like by himself, you know, after work. And we just sat out in the yard here and he, you know, he had me and then before he left he kissed me. And he was like, oh my God, I'm sorry. Because he goes, I know we shouldn't, you know, because it was, I know I shouldn't be doing that at this time. I hope I didn't freak you out because I, I even said, you know, not necessarily six feet apart but maybe we shouldn't know. We're kissing. Rachel and Sandy are the two who are left to their continued surprise. But they're also the two who get to talk or at least start to talk about what happened. Rachel spent her whole life saying in different ways, can we just talk about what happened? She couldn't do it with her dad. She thought after her dad died, oh Peter and I are going to have some conversations now, real conversations. It never happened and maybe it wouldn't have happened even if he lived. When we were driving to see Sandy, Rachel had no idea what she would be willing to talk about. And here Sandy is grieving the same two people with her own heavy load of memories. And she was up for excavating some of the past with Rachel. Coming up and finally we start excavating the house where Peter and his dad died. That's after the break. This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. International Women's Day is this March. Time to celebrate all women, the leaders, the caregivers, the hype friends, the how do you do it all types. Therapy can be a space to reflect, reset and reconnect. And BetterHelp makes it simple by matching you with a qualified therapist based on your needs and preferences. No pressure, no guesswork. This month visit BetterHelp.com slash New York Times for 10% off. That's better HLP.com slash New York Times. Rachel's last conversation with her father was a few months before he died. It was an email exchange about her decision to vaccinate her kids against COVID. It started out okay, then got very bad. It ended with Rachel writing, each shit you corny misogynist. And he responds minutes later, I would tell you to eat shit too, but you're already putting something worse inside you. And that's the last straw. That's when I say, you're making a face like am I really going to read out that what I said but all caps like you are. Yeah because so I am. Hello, hello, hello, hello, die lonely dude. Die without the family you massacred and beat into a pulp every chance you got. Wretched little creature. Guess what was the worst thing for my health Pedro? You all caps. And then I blocked him. In my family, I sometimes fancy myself the blunt one, except for maybe my beloved and Frankie. And this email is so far out of my league. Maybe because to me it seems final, like relationship over. But Rachel has no doubt she and her father would have come back from this. In the months before her father died, she was preparing herself for how her dad and her brother would make fun of her down the road for how over cautious she'd been about this COVID thing, how credulous. Now instead of arguing with them, she's going to the house they died in. She needs to start clearing it out. We pull up into the driveway. A small ranch house with an attached garage closed. Rachel hasn't been here for a few weeks since that day she ran up to Northern California. What are all these stickers? These are nail. They're stickers in the front windows. The agent's contracted inspectors. Please know this property has been winterized. Yeah, they turned my water off and they kept it off as fucks. And that's the bank who did that. Please leave breakers in their current position, except for items of winterize. Rachel's wrangling with the bank over this house. Yeah. Don't worry about what it's going to smell like in here. Wow. Madness. Rachel's told me a lot about this place. How much she hates it. In fact, it's so prominent in some of her memories of growing up. I pictured the inside as bigger. I guess to contain all the unhappiness. Rachel and Peter spent a lot of time here as kids and she did not see it as a refuge. It was a grandparents place. And Rachel remembers both her grandparents, her father's parents, as cruel. She says they'd tease Peter about his list. Pitt family members against one another, swat the kids with fly swatters, throw a step at them. She remembers an uncle overdosing in the living room. Another uncle punching her in the face and on and on. She calls it Hill House, from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, a very creepy book. She was horrified when Peter moved in here at 17 years old after the wine and roses fight. Rachel says he had to put a padlock on his bedroom door to make sure no one in the family stole from him. Being here now, Rachel is overwhelmed. Every room is crammed with stuff on shelves and all over. They started acquiring shit and then never made room for new things. And then they started stacking and like, oh, one day this will be worth something. Or if I hold on to this for 40 years, it will be worth quadruple its value. Like, that's how they operate it. She walks down the hall and goes into her dad's bedroom. Starts opening drawers in the bureau. What are you looking for? I don't know. I just want to see stuff. Socks. She's looking for clues to tales about the life her dad and brother were living in these years. She didn't see them. Interesting. What were they doing? So my brother thought my dad was sober and this is evidence. He was not. That's a beer can hidden in his, in his, work out clothes drawer. We each wander separately for a while. I was also trying to imagine the life Peter and his dad had built in here. What was this house for them? The most startling aspect of the house is how dark it is inside. It's bright Southern California sunshine outside and then you step into this bunker. The windows are completely covered with fabric or curtains that aren't just closed. They're clipped together so no eye can peek through. The curtains were to keep Rachel and Peter's mother from seeing inside if she came by. Their mom and dad divorced in 1977. But Rachel's mother has been a factor Rachel's entire life. Rachel remembers being on the phone with Peter years ago. Their mother was outside knocking on the door and Peter was army crawling on his stomach using his elbows to get from the kitchen to his bedroom to stay below any possible sight line. Neighbors were unnoticed to let Peter and his dad know if they saw her. After texting with Rachel and Peter's mother, talking to people who've known her and encountered her over the years and reading court documents that include statements she's made. I believe she's someone who's been failed by multiple systems in this country and is also someone whose behavior has had a sustained, devastating effect on Rachel and her family. The darkness made the house to me feel somewhere between a trap and a cocoon. Rachel found stacks of papers in the house and let me look through them. From these I finally get a sense of her dad in his own words. I found an application her father had filled out for relief under the Dodd-Frank making home affordable program. There's a handwritten statement in neat blue all caps writing called a hardship affidavit. It's from October 2016. Her dad wrote quote, since 1975 I have been employed as a professional in the petroleum engineering industry that has fallen on hard times due to collapsing oil prices, causing me loss of employment and income. I'm currently receiving $1,800 per month in unemployment benefits and that is my only current income. I have depleted all of my cash reserves in order to help keep a roof over the heads of my daughter and five grandchildren. I have no stocks, IRA, 401k or pension plan to fall back on. The second mortgage on my primary residence increased from $751 per month to $2,768 per month recently and I'm in danger of losing my home of 52 years as this statement is written. End quote. Rachel says her father was always mysterious about money and she says she didn't know about any of this. Didn't know he was unemployed back then. Didn't know about the ballooning second mortgage. Didn't know how worried he'd been about money long before COVID. Pete Camacho was an intelligent man with a college degree who made decent money when he was working and worked most of his life. He also fully supported his adult son and had helped his daughter get and keep her family's home in Rochester. Peter told Rachel after their dad died that the last job their dad had gotten, he'd been let go the first day because he couldn't provide proof of vaccination. Peter said their dad had cashed out his life insurance policy a few weeks before dying because he was behind on mortgage payments for the Santa Ana house. A cocoon and a trap like many people's homes are. Rachel doesn't blame Peter for talking her father into his COVID beliefs. No, I'm at my dad for creating a person who could talk him into that. I mean it's Frankenstein's monster. It's as Mary Shelley as you're going to get. You did this. You cobbled together the pieces of a person you broke and you did your best to keep them animated but in the end you just didn't, there just wasn't enough effort on your part to undo the damage that you caused. For years she's been carrying in her head visions of alternate futures for her dad and her brother. In every one, they are out of this house and away from each other. You'd imagine Peter possibly married a father transformed by parenthood in wonderful ways if he was lucky. He was only 44 when he died. Plenty of time for even big changes if he'd wanted that. Here in the house I saw Rachel mourn these lost futures one by one and begin laying each to rest alongside the people her father and brother had actually been. She sat down on a chair in Peter's room. I was thinking the other day how close he was to a world. My dad wasn't in it where our dad wasn't there. I mean, if your dad had died and then Peter had survived. Peter had survived. Like the night I said, Peter we have to sell that house knowing he was going to deny it and when he said, I know that changed everything for me. I understood that he understood the weight of this house, the true weight of it, how physically demanding to crawl through all of this, mountains of cascading fucking nonsense. He understood in that moment even when he was dying, this house had to go. And I think of who he could have been without this house and who he could have been without my dad. Like he could have, and maybe this is just my own rewriting but I really believe that he could have been free. I felt like with our dad dying, I was getting a new brother. I was getting a peatless Peter. And what was that going to be like? I had hope. I had hope. What's left in the waning days, what we hope are the waning days of a pandemic, just us, the country we were before we lost over a million people to COVID, the country we still are. A place with a non-system of healthcare and mental healthcare, with 67 year olds who were running out of money, and 44 year olds driven to paranoia by lies and isolation. And poets slogging their way through death paperwork, while raising children and trying to make sense of their losses. After spending months talking to Rachel, I thought about how often grief has questions at its core. What have I lost here? How much? Is what's left enough? A lot of Rachel's poems are answers to those questions, different answers at different times. She has a love poem that has no title. I asked her to read the end of it out loud. It's about loving someone after you've loved a bunch of other people. It's about the overwhelming feeling of finding home, after having wandered for a very long time. Uh, last love, I once vowed my heart to another. Forgive me. Last love I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty. Forgive me. Last love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me. Last love I envy your mother's body where you resided first. Forgive me. Last love I am all that is left. Forgive me. I did not see you coming. Forgive me. Last love. Every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen. Last love you are my last love. Amen. Last love. I am all that is left. Amen. I am all that is left. Amen. We were three was produced by Janelle Piper and me and edited by Executive Editor Julie Snyder. Editing help from Neil Drumming, Ira Glass, Jen Guera, Hanna Jaffee Walt and Sarah Canig. Editorial consulting by Kiesa Lehman, Ivan Aranski and Sarah Kovato. Which in fact checking by Ben Falen, original score by Sophie Allison of soccer mommy with additional original music by Matt McGinley. Sound design and music supervision by Michael Cometay, the supervising producer is in day Chubu. Julie Whitaker is digital manager. Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of The New York Times. At The New York Times, thanks to Jordan Cohen, Kelly Doe, Lindsey Fischler, Jason Fujicuni, Dana Green, Desiree Ibokwe, Lauren Jackson, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Anishimuni, Megan Shepard, Julia Simon, Alamine Sumar, Kimi Sai, and Susan Wessling. Special thanks to Anthony Almajera, Rana Audish, Tyson Bell, Trevor Bedford, Rachel Bender Ignacio, Danielle Elliott, Jeremy Faust, Derek Lowe, Kristen Puntagani, Jason Salami, Clark Shapiro, and Tim Trumbull. I'm grateful to everyone who talked to me about Rachel, Peter, and Pete. And thank you to Rachel and to her family. They let me into their home at Inking Me and Times and answered every question. We were three, is from serial productions and The New York Times.