Frankly, it never occurred to me to drink in the morning. There have been times when I wished I could feel some kind of release in alcohol, but I don’t. There was a period when I was dealing a lot with death, the slow dying of people I loved, and there were twenty-four hours days I spent bedside in the ICU catching five minute naps and feeding on cups of pudding the nurses would hand me at two in the morning. I would hear the soft steps of the staff, the hum of the air purifiers, and sometimes my mother calling for her mother in the voice of a seven year-old. When I would get home from that, the sky would darken, the time would come when I should be sleeping then I would go to the freezer and pull out a bottle of vodka and pour myself a clear syrupy shot and down it in one and still I would lie in bed and listen, waiting. Maybe it was my metabolism, or maybe when death demands your attention there’s nothing on earth that will silence it.
