Lawrence.com

Morphine. I have no idea how people went through this shit when they couldn't dose the dying hourly with hardcore drugs.

Chef Boyardee canned ravioli. Shut up. You have some disgusting comfort food that you won't let people watch you eat, too.

Camping cots

Brandy. It's what's for breakfast!

Friends who like to cook and turn their AC up really, really high, and pretend that they like sleeping on air mattresses so that you can catch a few hours of rest in a real bed.

Hospice workers. They should get paid more than engineers.

Red Bull

Old novels you haven't read since you were a teenager, waiting all dusty and yellowed on the shelf above the DSL modem which has just decided to take a nap.

Friends you haven't seen IRL in fifteen years or so, sending cosmic love that gets to you at the exact moment you need it most.

The Internet. Not only because it makes me feel less isolated in these late hours when I'm alone with a sleeping baby, a sleeping mom, and a gasping, rattling, moaning, dying dad, but also for being an incredibly efficient reference tool. When your vision goes blurry and you look in the mirror to see one pupil fixed and dilated to an incredible degree while the other is small and normal, it's really, really nice to be able to figure out in a matter of minutes that no, you didn't have a mini-stroke, you just forgot to wash your hands after administering Atropine via fingertip and then rubbed your itchy eyes like a tired child. Color me relieved.

Warm cuddly baby who will sleep even if I'm not holding her.

Iron-clad promises, made by my awesome husband, that when this is all over I get to spend three days comatose in bed.

The opportunity to take my place in a timeless piece of deeply spiritual choreography. I sat at my first deathbed vigil at the age of 8, and they always feel more like church than any actual church I've ever been in. It's hard and it's sad and it's exhausting as hell, but I think you grieve less, afterward, when you get to tend them with your own hands while it's happening.

YouTube and Project Playlist. I know he's past hearing, but just in case he's not, he should have good music to see him out.

Information, and the wide dissemination of such. So much of this would be terrifying, and nerve-wracking, if we didn't have so much information explaining what's going on, and why, and reassuring us that he doesn't feel discomfort from any of it.

Sleep. Not the actual item, because I'm not getting any, but the prospect of it. Never has something so simple sounded so much like heaven.

You. All of you. Thank you for reading. Even something as still and as private as this . . . well, I have to cope publicly. It's just my nature. At least I do it with my clothes on, these days.