Songfacts®:

• This bittersweet song details the bonds of a family as Randy Newman sings of a father getting his children together to see their dying mother. He explained the track's background to Pitchfork:
  
  "When you see people in your immediate family die, it's usually not just sudden. It's a longer process, and people behave in radically different ways, and some of that behavior has to be forgiven later.
  
  My dad was a doctor and he took care of the practical care for his brothers when they were dying. Not easy. Anytime one of them died, he would fall out with somebody, or somebody would complain that he should have given them more rutabaga or something. So I saw that and I thought about how if my wife was gone, it would feel like this guy feels: lost.
  
  When my mother was dying, my father was sort of taking care of her. But he was taking too much of this medicine, so he was falling around a little bit. He didn't seem like he was taking care of her right. So my brother and I went to her and said, "Jeez, we're sorry that Dad's not doing the job for you." And she said, "Don't you say anything bad about him. From the very beginning of this, he couldn't have been better." And it really shocked my brother and I, because we never saw her express her love for him ever."