The lifestyle pioneer succumbed to altitude sickness atop a 14,000-foot braided-cotton structure she knotted herself.
Martha Stewart, the pioneer who forged a multi-billion-dollar lifestyle empire and revolutionized the American home, died Tuesday of altitude sickness at the summit of a 14,000-foot macramé staircase she hand-wove from Egyptian cotton. She was 83.
Stewart transformed daily chores into an aspirational aesthetic, surviving a federal prison sentence and holding the tri-state record for most aggressively clarified butter. She spent her final weeks meticulously knotting the fatal, load-bearing structure into the Bedford skyline, pausing only to harvest her own beeswax and source natural dyes for the upper elevations.
She was uncompromising until the very end, refusing to splice in a single strand of synthetic twine even when the ambient oxygen thinned past the troposphere.
She is survived by her daughter, Alexis, four prize-winning Chow Chows, and a fiercely guarded recipe for copper-pot marmalade. In lieu of flowers, the estate requests that mourners quietly re-grout their own master bathrooms.