Every morning, I wake up and listen for Martha’s breath. Usually, I can hear her snoring softly, like a little cartoon mouse — more of an inhale and “mimimimi” exhale than a buzzsaw “zzzzz.”

When I don’t hear her snoring, I look into her room — her door is 3 feet from mine — and usually see her lying on her stomach with her cat, Muffy, snuggled tight into her waist.

One recent Sunday morning, there was no “mimimimi,” and Muffy was curled into a ball a foot away from Martha. I knelt on the floor next to her bed, stroked her face, held her cold hand and wept.

“I don’t know how we can just go to another client now, I can’t stop crying,” Diana Chavez said, pressing her hands under her eyes.

We sat in Biscochito’s living room, the same space where just two weeks ago we had gathered to plan for supporting a beloved client through end of life. On this day, we met to mourn her passing — caregivers, support liaisons and me.

The caregivers would meet privately with our grief therapist later in the afternoon. We were all processing not just the loss of someone beloved but also the strange economics of professional grief.

When I first met artist Cara Romero, her list of awards on Wikipedia was long, but nothing like it is now. I love and live with art, but I don’t understand it the way artists and gallerists do. So we became friends talking about family, business and our professional ambitions.

In the award-winning PBS documentary Cara Romero: Following the Light, Romero says: “We make art out of a need to connect, to communicate, to maybe not be lonely and introspective. You’re really trying to bare your soul and what’s in your deepest places. Those pieces that are the scariest for me are the ones that people connect with, feminine and vulnerable. … I made a promise to myself in self-care and in healing that I would always pursue my art, it was the one thing that made me whole.”

When I was 5, we went camping in Michigan across the lake from Mackinac Island. Every morning we rode a ferry to the island, where we ate fudge and bicycled around in car-free Victorian charm.

My father bought me a sailor hat with my name embroidered across the front, which fell off my head and into Lake Michigan as I admired it, Narcissus style, on the ferry ride back to our campground. I remember my tears. Dad told me I would have to buy my own replacement.

I didn’t work in a family business and was still too young for a paper route, but commerce made sense to me. I drew several pictures of the lake and persuaded our camping neighbors to purchase them. I got another hat.

At Biscochito, our non-hierarchical approach might seem wildly innovative, and I wouldn’t deny it over cocktails. But the truth is, we’re not alone in exploring flatter management structures.

Even big businesses are trying this — though often as a means to eliminate middle management roles and increase efficiency. For us, it’s about something far more profound: making the actual work of caregiving better.

This belief in our approach was put to the test last summer when we were asked to support someone who chose to end their life by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, or VSED. This experience not only validated our methods but also deepened our understanding of what true support means in caregiving.

When I sold my caregiving agency in 2022, we had around 300 caregivers working with us and I got a bigger multiple than I’d expected.

I stared at the number on my account screen — a lot. I saw two options: invest, serve on some nonprofit boards, exercise in the middle of the day instead of at 6 a.m. and retire; or double down, build something bigger and better, maybe write a cool book and retire to a villa in Italy. I chose the second option, and then I didn’t.

I’ve written before about Biscochito’s journey to create a nonhierarchical business structure. A key piece of that journey was the top of the pyramid — me. I felt the tension between building an organization that fully honored the work and workers of caregiving and pursuing the profit margin that would award me an even larger multiple.

How did Sage Bakehouse create the best vibe in Santa Fe?

In the past year, I’ve enjoyed approximately 150 scrambled egg tartines and vanilla bean cream cheese Danishes from Sage Bakehouse.

Beloved by all of us, Sage became my sanctuary after a concussion last June. After months in a quiet house or dimly lit office, I needed to reacquaint myself with the bustle of everyday life. I walked into Sage with a battered nervous system and general post-injury fragility. The staff’s competent friendliness and consistently excellent food took me by the hand and sat me in the corner with a pastry while they managed everyday life.

Sometime between my 50th and 100th tartine, crowds got easier and I thought I could ease off of my Sage mornings. I was finishing my coffee while a quickly forming line reached out the door.

There are two big challenges in the business of caregiving: getting great caregivers and keeping great caregivers.

Two years in, we’d figured out how to get great caregivers — be kind, pay people as employees with full benefits and all available protections, and support their work (dementia and grief specialists, support groups, engaging team interactions, etc.). In fact, we had a waiting list of caregivers who wanted to join the company. But many caregivers were guarded and responded to misunderstandings or mistakes — their own or others’ — with defensiveness and relationship abandonment. (They quit.)

Then Sarah, our regional practice facilitator, heard an Adam Grant podcast about interviewing. During the podcast, Grant briefly speaks with Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations. Sheridan says, “I spent years interviewing everyone the way most of us do; we spent two hours sitting at a table lying to each other.”

I paid my way through school working nights in a factory and started my post-collegiate career as an elementary school teacher full of Dead Poets Society-level idealism.

I taught fifth and sixth grade at Hawthorne Elementary School in my hometown of Elkhart, Ind. That state was trying “looping,” in which teachers remain with the same students for two years. I met my students at the start of their fifth grade year, and we remained together until they left elementary school at the end of sixth grade.

Those kids met my idealism and spent two years teaching me how to lead their learning community. They banished the “timeout” corner (my only discipline tool) and never walked in a straight line, but they taught me how to create an environment where they could learn. My students academically held their state and national rankings, with many improving compared to their larger peer group.