I now lower the clear glass straw into the clear water and watch him struggle, choke, to bring it to himself.

“Good,” says a dadlike voice. “You were thirsty, weren’t you?” The voice sounds like a pederast kiddie-show host, like God the Father Almighty, like healthy healthy Hartley cheering Robert who is so sick that he says things he doesn’t really mean.

Shortly after my ideal one scolded me for immaturity and professional ineptitude, this (water, drugs, treats, Ensure food supplement, turning the patient in bed, the doughnut foam pillows needed to shield inevitable bedsores) started being what I did with days.

Hard to explain: First I was doing it because it had to be done. My friends could not afford paid attendants. Then I did it because I was one fragment of our Circle still left upright. Next, I told myself I did it because I could do it, do it as well as most and better than some. Then, old hand at rigging Hickman Catheters that pump nutrition into beloved boys’ chests’ centers, I got almost too good at it. Compassion can become a form of legal ego.

Next phase, I lived these rites and cheerings merely as a journalist: I planned to someday “use” it, as a feeder source for fiction. Of course I’d first have to antique it, improve it into something far more shapely, and shortly. To use it someday, in the disguise of a novel, I’d probably need to roll back the period, make myself better looking, make them less gallingly articulate. Placing the struggle in a prettier age that might retroactively give meaning to my chores as all these gifted lives were ending everywhere around us.

Nothing helps cheer a brilliant thirty-four-year-old dying so unjustly. Not your wit, not your will, not the best that medicine could offer us then.

You just keep him warm and comfy and supported, and wait. You give up any plan or hope that gets in the way of anticipating what fluid or solid or joke your dear needs next. I’d somehow stopped writing. I kept tutoring. But I gave up sperm-doning for fear I’d shoot my present sadness into some new life form. Jinxing junior. Finally, tired past gray and on toward clarity (once everyone but me and The Bama had finally come down with it), I tired till I hit an ersatz wisdom, the cult of Only Now.

I gave up the eventuality of ever having a writing life again, even AFTER. AFTER, too, was a prop I quit leaning on. By then, this was a job, looking after was simply what I did, and then it stopped being a duty or a job and it was just a Tuesday and the things that needed fetching, washing. On the back of my apartment door, I’d thumbtacked a list marked “Do Today.” It had just three categories:

Must. Should. Might.

Must was a column I never quite got out of. I admired the waiting rectitude of Should. But, oh daydreaming ran mostly toward ethereal and sky-blue Might!