Was it a dream? A waking dream for me. My companion dozed and roused. He seemed reassured by my presence. I demanded nothing, asked for nothing. Safety, quiet, and death hovered over us. It was a relief to have someone to speak to about death, honestly, without jokes or deferrals. Facts with feelings attached, because without the protective fur of feelings, facts are merely arrows that pierce and achieve nothing but hurt.

I’ve waited my whole life to give someone a good death. Presence grows out of absence. As I lay dying as a teenager, my family reacted like marionettes with their strings cut. I was dying but I was much more alive than the stiffs who surrounded me, people who loved me but who could not act on their love. So it is with a fierce energy, a tremendous passion, that I approach the sickness and death of others. What I was not given, I give in spades. I have the words, the actions,