If my children remember me as fondly as I remember my mum, that would be a treat.

All our lives are little books - but they're not someone else's complete book. You're a chapter or a page or a footnote in someone else's life and they are going to keep writing beautiful chapters when you are gone. And those green shoots can grow around grief and put it in perspective. I hope people will think, "I'm glad I read that - Simon's story". And just because it's over, doesn't mean it's gone.

As being useful.

Oh, yes, absolutely. I have two children, and often I think about them and how when I’m gone, they will be here listening to an old CD of mine, thinking, “At least I can I can hear her voice.” I think this is very charming. It’s very nice. And then, of course, I also think about the other generations of opera singers coming behind me… It’s so important that they can have a real testimony of how it was in our ears. I think that what stands the test of time is really the memory of people hearing us singing somewhere.

I also think that most of us get wisdom from a wide range of sources, from the people we know and love, from strangers on the street, from therapists and counselors, from teachers, from books, from podcasts, so I turn in all of those directions.

Some books I return to again and again: Alice Munro's books, but especially "Lives of Girls and Women," Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Mary Oliver's poetry collections, Raymond Carver's short stories, Joan Didion's essays. There are so many more! It's hard to name them all. Books are my cure.

And so it’s true; I think what I said on that post is that every day since my mom died, there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about my own death. That’s true. And I don’t think about it in a morbid way, but I think of it in a way that I’m aware of not taking my life for granted and not taking your life for granted, or any of our lives for granted.

I’m a binge writer.…I'm not an everyday writer.

The love and the light in that book astounds me.

The way I often find what I’m going to write next is by writing.