Doctors say the body's at low tide then, the soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying.

[something wicked this way comes]

Step one: wake up. Always at the same time. 3:00 am, give or take, as though there is some dark clock inside you that jangles in the deepness of the night. 

Step two: lie in bed. Think of the first thing you always think of when you wake up in the middle of the night- your father slowly rotting away to nothing in a bed while you try to keep him comfortable, try to keep his skin from splitting and his eventual, inevitable wounds from festering. You think of the utter emptiness in his eyes, how tenuously our souls are connected to our bodies. 

This leads you right into step three: contemplating how this is only the beginning and every single person you know and love will die. Your mother will die, a thought that you dart away from like a stovetop on fire. Your husband will die. You wonder for about fifteen minutes, give or take, if you will be the one holding his hand while he wastes away or if it will be him holding yours. 

Nope, this isn't getting better. Let's get out of bed. Make tea, sit up in the living room, read your book for a little while! It's a good book. You lay it aside almost immediately and think about the stone in between you and your sister, how it will apparently be there until you are both old women, and die as well. You think of all the people between then and now who will warmly comment on how close the two of you must be. You feel your gall bladder start to ache.

Wait! It's not your gall bladder, which you had removed at seventeen. You must be dying. You briefly wish you had spent your limited time on this earth making more friends, until you remember that honestly, people are awful. Then you wish you'd spent more time with your dog. This is a regret that brings you to your knees. 

You Google average lifespan of Australian shepherd and see that it is 13-15 years, which you knew, from searching for this every single time you are up at 4 am. She turns thirteen in April. 

Now you're on Google, so it's the beginning of the end. You search How long does it take for a 33 year old woman to get pregnant and immediately an article comes up that scolds you for waiting until your twilight years to have a baby. Another article helpfully comments that the problem is likely your weight. Another offers a hotline for information on adoption. 

Now you desperately want to feel like you are winning at something, so you Google your old standby Average height of American woman and gleefully note, for the 154th time, that you are taller than most American women. You are Googling average height of Latvian women when you startle, see your husband is in the doorway of the living room. You didn't hear his 4:30 alarm go off. 

Is it the same thing, he asks, which is shorthand for Are you up because your father is still dying and your family is still fractured and Norah is still old and we're still not pregnant and most of all because we are all on a small speck hurtling through the universe with no guarantee that anything will ever turn out the way you thought it would? And I say, Yes. 

I'm taller than the average Latvian woman, though, I add. They're the tallest women in the world. On average.

Okay, he says. Let me tuck you in. 

We walk back to the bedroom and he folds me into the side of the bed that he just left, still warm from his body. He grabs his phone and kisses me. It will all be okay, he says. See you tonight. 

Step seventeen: Remember that the only reason you and all the people you love get to be here is because everyone else's story had an end too. That their end was your beginning, and yours will be a beginning for someone else. Almost nothing about life is fair, but at least this is.

Remember that it hurt just as much as it was worth, and it is a gift to have things that hurt to lose. 

Remember that the world doesn't owe you anything. It's enough just to get to be here for a little while.

Remember that Norah isn't afraid. 

Remember that your father isn't either. 

Close eyes.

Fall back to sleep.