For many people, roommates and romances are the most important relationships of their late teens and early 20s. For me it was Cora Brooks, a poet and activist 51 years my senior. She taught me how to make bread without measuring the flour or water or yeast, to not fear improvising. Through Cora I learned slowness and grace.

Cora taught me that there are worse things than dying — that getting older is a process of losing your children to distance and coping with incontinence and memory loss, yes, but also of becoming more unapologetically yourself. She got angry at the government, at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, at her body’s failings, at her family. Her secret to recovering from multiple strokes? Turn on the radio and teach herself to dance, step by wobbly step. “The trick is to keep moving,” she told me.

I met Cora through the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, Mass. The Schlesinger houses over 100,000 volumes of books and periodicals, photos and films, and the collected papers of various prominent American women. Julia Child’s papers are there, alongside Helen Keller’s and June Jordan’s. In 2011, when I was a sophomore in college, I received a research grant to study the work of 13 female poets who had their work archived in the Schlesinger. I started alphabetically: Brooks, Cora. I never made it to the others.

Twice a week I signed in at the front desk, deposited my backpack in a locker (only pencils could be brought upstairs) and entered a quiet and cold reading room. A few minutes later, a librarian would emerge from an elevator pushing a cart of gray boxes with folders inside: the contents of Cora’s life in 43 ordered boxes. I read through diaries and to-do lists and newspaper clippings from the 1960s along with paragraphs about her two children.