The Playlist

It was somewhere around day eight or nine in the ICU and Lonna had lost her mind.

That's not a figure of speech. ICU delirium is a real thing — bright lights, beeping monitors, drugs, sleep deprivation, no day, no night, no idea where you are or how long you've been there. The patient in the next bay had been screaming for three days straight. Lonna had spent ten days intubated and was now extubated but still rough. She couldn't speak. She was tugging at her bracelet, the blood pressure cuff, her mid-line. She tried to bite a nurse. She was begging me to take her home. I'd say I couldn't. She'd nod, understand, and ask again thirty seconds later.

The staff was kind. The drugs weren't working. Nothing I said was landing.

I tried family photos on the iPad. Nothing.
I tried Ted Lasso. Nothing.
I tried talking. Nothing.
I tried being quiet. Nothing.

Eventually I queued up Miranda Lambert and put the iPad next to her pillow on a loop.

Why Miranda Lambert? Because for years we had driven Austin to Houston and back, over and over, for appointments and clinics and tests, and Miranda Lambert was the soundtrack. It wasn't a thoughtful choice. It was the default. It was what we listened to when there was nothing to talk about and a long road ahead.

The agitation went down. She wasn't fixed. She was still in the ICU and still tied to half a dozen machines. But she settled. Something in her — under all the drugs and the delirium and the panic — recognized the music and recognized that she was somewhere familiar.

Here's the part I didn't understand until later: it calmed me down too.

Lonna has no conscious memory of any of those days. She doesn't remember Miranda Lambert or the iPad or the looping. So in one sense the music was for her — the agitation was real, and it eased — and in another sense it was entirely for me. I was the one watching the monitors. I was the one who needed something to do that wasn't useless. Hitting play on a familiar song was the one thing in that room that worked. Both things are true. The music reached her. The music reached me. That is most of what I learned about caregiving in the ICU, compressed into one observation.

Two years later, when we threw Lonna's Lungs Party on April 19, the playlist was the first thing I built. Before the catering, before the magician, before the slides. Three hours.

The first songs were about breathing. I had searched for them deliberately. Catch My Breath, Breathless, Still Breathing, Every Breath You Take, Breathe. Five songs to open the playlist, to tell anyone listening closely what the playlist was actually about. The sixth breathing song — Florence + the Machine's Dog Days Are Over — I tucked in later, because the album it came from was called Lungs. Most people wouldn't catch that. I would.

The rest of the songs came from a personal archive I'd been building for years. Songs I'd Shazam in a store or a car or a hotel lobby, songs from TV shows that didn't sound like anything else, songs from old albums I kept coming back to. When it was time to build the playlist, I went through the archive and pulled the ones that still moved me. Some were Lonna's. Some were ours. Several were mine.

A few I will tell you about. Most I won't, because every song on this list has a story like the ones below, and most of those stories are mine and Lonna's and not for the internet.

Viva La Vida — the Sofia Karlberg cover. Softer than Coldplay, a woman's voice carrying it. The song is about fame and power, but I always heard it as something else: that to fully embrace being alive, you have to accept both the glorious successes and the painful downfalls. Track six on the playlist, right after the five breathing songs. The pivot from stay alive into this is what being alive actually cost us.

Beautiful Things — Benson Boone, the acoustic version. He spends the whole song begging not to have this person taken from him. I found a girl my parents loved. Thank God every day for the girl he sent my way. I want to hold you every night. I'm terrified, oh, I'm terrified. I put it on the playlist for the party. Lonna was alive and in the room when it played. It was a love song.

Now it's a different song.

Beautiful Crazy — Luke Combs. That one is Lonna. Starts with a coffee. Takes forever to get ready. Never on time. Drives you wild. Lonna in a song.

Rebel Yell — Billy Idol, 1983. We were already married. Lonna loved this song from our young years, when there was nothing to do about it but turn it up. I will think of her every time I hear it for the rest of my life.

Angel from Montgomery — John Prine. The song I would play for her on the guitar. Lonna bought me the guitar.

Leader of the Band— the Zac Brown cover of Dan Fogelberg. That one is mine. I'd like it played when I go.

Knockin' on Heaven's Door— the Eric Clapton reggae version, not Dylan or Guns N' Roses. In January 2025 Lonna was knocking on heaven's door for real and somehow came back to me. That song earned its place on the list the hard way.

How Far I'll Go — the Alessia Cara version, from Moana. Lonna saw herself in this song and she was right to. Loved the water. Loved adventure. Independent. Connected to community. Sat at the edge of the water forever. Wanted to be the perfect daughter. And she loved Disney. It is one of the most accurate songs about my wife that exists.

Stay — Rihanna and Mikky Ekko. The only song on the entire three-hour playlist that Lonna explicitly asked me to add. It was her song, not mine. I love it now anyway. I did not put it on the list to send her a message. She put it on the list and the message arrived later.

Cover Me — Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A. The deliberate closer. Three hours of music and this is what I wanted in the room when the last song played. I will leave it at that.

There are thirty-five more.

A hundred and ten people came to that party. Most of them, as I wrote elsewhere, never noticed the music. That was fine. The music was not for them. Lonna heard it. She moved to it. She was there. I watched her face.

She passed on July 29.

In mid-August I packed up the van and drove. Dallas first, then twelve hours to Raton, New Mexico. Somewhere on that drive I queued up Lonna's Lungs for the first time since the party.

I made it six songs.

The breathing songs. The five I had picked on purpose. Five songs about breathing, played in a van driven by a man whose wife could no longer breathe at all. I turned it off. The journal entry from that night just says tragic and tears.For a minute I felt like I had failed her. I knew that wasn't true — scleroderma did this, not me — but the playlist did not care what was true. The playlist just played her back to me, and six songs in I could not do it anymore.

A week or so later I made it to Durango to see friends — Peter and Anne. We sat down for dinner. At some point one of them put the playlist on. I don't remember which one. I didn't object. We just let it run.

It was wonderful.

The same songs. The same order. The same five about breathing right at the front. Eight days apart. One time gutted me. The next time held me. The difference wasn't the playlist. The difference was that I wasn't alone with it.

I don't listen to the playlist often now. Maybe every couple of months. It's not in my regular rotation and it shouldn't be — that would wear it out, which would be its own kind of loss. But when I put it on, I love it. The songs that meant one thing while she was alive mean something else now. Stay especially. Beautiful Crazy. Rebel Yell. Cover Me.I built the playlist for a party. I didn't realize I was also building a record. Not a memorial — a record. Something I'd reach for in five years, or ten, that would land me somewhere specific in my own life.

One last thing, because this is the part I'm still figuring out.

I have started sharing playlists with friends. Not Lonna's Lungs — mostly other playlists, mine and theirs. When someone you care about is going through something hard and they send you fifteen songs they've been listening to, you can feel where they are. It is more honest than most conversations. You can hear what they're avoiding and what they're sitting with. You can hear the song they keep coming back to even though they don't know why yet. Music is one of the few channels we have left for telling another person what we feel without having to find the words.

That is also a kind of caregiving. It does not look like caregiving. It looks like swapping song titles in a text thread. But it is the same act: noticing someone, paying attention, sending back something that says I hear you.

So that is the lesson, if there is one. Music reached Lonna in the ICU when nothing else did. Music reached me when nothing else did, in a van between Dallas and Raton, and again a week later in Durango when I wasn't alone with it. And music is reaching me now, in both directions, with the people who are still here.

It's the same songs the whole time. It's the rest of us who keep changing.

🎧 Lonna's Lungs — three hours, the songs that held us

Casey King spent over two decades as a caregiver for his wife Lonna, who lived with scleroderma and underwent a double lung transplant in 2023. He is writing The Caregiver's Trap: A Roadmap for When the Caregiver Needs Care.

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