For more than forty years, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver lived on Cape Cod with the love of her life, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook.

When Cook died in 2005 at the age of eighty, Oliver looked for a light, however faint, to shine through the thickness of bereavement. She spent a year making her way through thousands of her spouse’s photographs and unprinted negatives, which Oliver then enveloped in her own reflections to bring to life Our World - part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soulmate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.

Oliver ends Our World with The Whistler, a poem on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war- bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an- kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?

My current partner has lived on his own for 8 years and the absolute most I have to help him with is maybe sending him $20 so he can make a bill payment on time

After I left, in the first six months I got texts or calls asking me to please tell him:

The online banking password (dude, I left you, you should really change that)

Where I ordered his special-wecial organic underwear

Where the good cutting board was (my dad gave it to us at our wedding, genius, I took it with me along with the rest of the stuff from my family)

What brand butter we bought

What brand of local kielbasa we bought

Who his doctor was

What RMV office had the shortest lines

Where the old tax returns were (in the fucking box labeled tax returns)

The phone number for his best friend

I shit you not.

Then he had a heart attack (mild) and none of his family or friends were around to take him to the hospital. But instead of calling 911, he called me, who by then lived 45 minutes away. He lived 5 minutes from an EMS dispatch location. He called me, despite the fact that he didn’t believe me 8 months prior when I was feeling suicidal and I had to call a cab to go alone to check myself into the hospital for a 72-hour hold. I told him to call 911, hung up on him when he whined about “making a fuss”, called 911, called his siblings and then texted them “your brother is having a heart attack, I called 911 for him, come home,” and washed my hands of it.

The whole family is currently waiting for my grandpa to die so my grandma can finally go free, because she’s so stuck into her role as a caretaker that’s the only way to force her to let this shitbag go.

Gender reveal party

Gun-based gender reveal party

Dad is a border patrol agent

It caused 8 million dollars in environmental damage

Despite being named Time’s Person of Year, Tarana Burke was not included in the iconic TIME cover. She is the forgotten founder of #MeToo, and though others have gained positive attention through the use of her creation, Tarana Burke remains unacknowledged, unthanked and unrecognized. Take a moment to celebrate #TaranaBurke and her immense contributions to sexual violence prevention and awareness. Tarana, thank you for your incredible activism. You have uplifted and healed countless survivors and deserve recognition and applause far greater than what you’ve received. Let’s give Tarana the thanks and magazine cover she deserves.