Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died.

I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now.

Though it’s been nearly 30 years now, two things about Pat stand out across the decades.

First, she understood fear like no one I’ve ever met. Every organizer knows about fear—the fear of the boss, the fear of retaliation, the fear of vulnerability. Pat understood something else, something deeper, about fear: the fear we have of our own power, particularly when we’re using it against people who have authority over us or people we respect.

Underneath every one of our fears of someone with power, Pat thought, is our fear of defeating or overcoming that power. Pat understood that because all of us grow up with fear, we learn to live with our fear. We adapt to it, our limbs and organs grow around it, we internalize it, it becomes a part of us. When it comes time to letting go of it, we can be suddenly and surprisingly reluctant to do so. We’ve gotten too attached.

Psychoanalysts and political theorists—Plato and Rousseau come to mind—know all about this kind of thing. Pat did, too. And gave me a classroom experience in overcoming it, the likes of which I never learned from anyone else.

Second, I’ve never met anyone with a stronger sense of working-class consciousness.

A lot of people, particularly in academia and journalism, have a lot of opinions and ideas about working-class people in America. And, of course, like any group of people, there’s a dizzying amount of diversity in the working class. I know it’s hard to believe this, and it’s certainly hard to say it, but Pat seemed to transcend all that. I’ve never seen anyone reach across the differences between people—people sitting right next to her at a table—by a combination of love and confrontation. From that combination, she created class consciousness.

Pat was a white, Italian, Catholic woman, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a daughter. Above all, she was a member of the working class. She understood and felt its grievances, she hated the humiliation and indignity workers suffered, she knew how smart workers could be, she knew the difference between resentment, on the one hand, and rights and respect, on the other. She felt those things keenly, whether up close or on far. She knew how to talk about them. She knew how to fight for them.

Pat is part of a generation of workers and organizers whose knowledge you’ll never find in a book. In fact, she always used to laugh, in a fun way, at graduate students taking notes in organizing meetings. Everything important, she said, was up here, pointing to her head, and in here, pointing to her heart. You can’t write it down.

Well, Pat, here I am, writing it down.