Angels and ghosts

From Poynter comes a Baltimore Sun reporter's story about gathering information for her series on dying children and the difficult decisions by parents, doctors and nurses about the measures to take to extend their lives but at the cost of prolonging their suffering:

On so many of those summer nights, I'd leave the cool hospital and head out into the humid air, and I'd look up at the sky. I don't think I'd ever noticed before how beautiful and huge and full the moon was. It felt a little like everything in life we overlook, or we can see, but never really know. I came to think of it as R.J.'s moon. The story was humbling. For many of my biggest questions, I could never get an answer. And as R.J. got closer to death, I realized the things I was witnessing were more powerful than my flimsy words could ever capture. One night long past midnight, I was plopped on the floor, scribbling. His mother was tapping at her laptop, exchanging messages with the ad-hoc sorority of mothers across the country sitting at the bedsides of their own dying children. R.J., who had been dozing, started to stir. He pointed at the end of the bed with his long finger. "They're coming," he coughed out in his hoarse, old-man voice. "They're coming." As his mother nervously asked, "Who's coming?" and R.J. kept trying to tell her, the feeling in the room shifted somehow. There was a sense, even before he uttered his next words, that we were crossing into something big. "The angels," R.J. finally managed. "The angels are coming."