For the first few weeks after she died, I could easily feel my mother around me all the time. I actually got a little worried about what it meant for my life that my mother would be living in my head for the duration. It was better than being sad, but it was taking some mental adjustment.

It is perfectly childish to be in deep mourning for a man who is actually staying…with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

But it’s beginning to dawn on me: I’m not still alive only to be my newly ascended mother’s priestess. And I may not be able to feel her so easily forever. What’s the point of dying if she’s just going to be the same as she was before? Most likely, even the dead can grow. Especially the dead. Depending on where they’re planted.

Sometimes in those first weeks, I could feel her elation: Finally! Let’s get outa here already! Let’s get on with it! Surely she hadn’t been herself, the self she was in her own mind, for a very long time. And maybe she wasn’t herself—her truest, best self—most of the time I knew her, because maybe having kids wasn’t part of that self-concept. All this to say: the more she comes into her own, the less familiar she’ll feel to me.

So I like to remind myself about our favorite pastime, Shopping with Dead People. Our family motto: You will never shop alone.

Only a few years after Mom started chatting with the Dead Relatives, I got engaged to Dave. The wedding would be held in my parents’ house, catered by the parents themselves, officiated by a more-or-less nondenominational minister Dave’s parents knew, and attended by some high-school minions from the Key Club. So it was a pretty modest homegrown affair. After gasping at the cost of capital-W Wedding Gowns and Wedding Cakes, we went with neither, opting for an ivory damask two-piece skirt suit and a pretty floral cake in three separated tiers.

It was a fun* way to plan a wedding, but it did mean that if we didn’t think of it ourselves, it wasn’t going to get thunk. For instance, we came this close to having no music because we hadn’t sorted out who was going to press Play, and I couldn’t very well do it from the top of the stairs, now, could I, Dave (as I hissed at him over the banister, seconds before my big entrance)?

*Sometimes.

According to Mom, the Dead Relatives often came on shopping trips while we were choosing decorations and what-have-you, and that was nice. I had only Mom’s word for it, but I was happy if she was happy, and I had no pressing metaphysical or practical reason to doubt her, and together we all bought many shiny things.

A week or so before the wedding, Mom and I were rolling through the JCPenney housewares department when she stopped suddenly in Bedding and put her hand to the side of her head.

“Either I need to eat something,” she announced, “or someone is talking to me.”

“I don’t know what’s in the food court, but—“

“No, it’s over there. We need to be over there.”

Well, sure. I had no other plans. Why not? We pulled the cart around a corner, up to a large display facing the entrance from the mall. Still frowning and looking down in concentration, my mom pointed toward the display and said firmly, “There. We need something over there.”

Beloveds, I admit it: I faltered. My faith wavered. And I thought desperately, I have been a complete fool. Dead is dead, life has no meaning, and my mother is actually, literally, certifiably insane.

The display was a seven-foot-high wall of boxed margarita glasses shaped like saguaro cactus.

I am sure of so little in this big world. I am naive, suggestible, and dangerously open-minded, and I have believed (and do believe) in notions that make sensible folk shake their heads: fairies, shamans, St. Anthony’s interest in my lost car keys. But I knew absolutely at that moment that we did not, had not, would not ever, need a margarita glass shaped like a saguaro cactus.

How, how to explain this to Mom? How to reassure her that I still loved her even if she had been playing me all this time in some sad bid for attention? And get her to leave without buying one of these monstrosities? And convince her that I would definitely visit her in the institution if she would just quietly go with the nice men and put on the pretty jacket with the shiny buckles?

I cleared my throat. “Um,” I said. “Uh, Mom? Um, I don’t…think…”

She waved her hand impatiently. “No, no,” she said. “Not those. Behind there. Get in and look.”

The wall of boxes was hiding and mostly blocking a baker’s rack scattered with clearance merchandise. I wedged into the space and held the sad little items up for inspection: an open bag of pillowcases? a chipped butter dish? a drawer pull shaped like a wrench? What was I looking for?

“I don’t know yet. Keep going,” she instructed. “What’s in the back?”

I groped blindly with one hand and came out with a gray box marked “$4.00.”

“What about that?” my mother said. “Open it. Be careful.”

“I don’t even know what it is.” But, according to the logo on the other side, it was Waterford (a symbolic favorite of my Irish-American family, though it’s largely made in Eastern Europe now). I couldn’t guess what useless castoff of Waterford Marquis could be marked down to four bucks, but I imagined it was in several jagged pieces.

But it wasn’t. I pulled it out and put the box on the shelf, cradling the smooth figure in both hands. It was a clear, bright figurine of a man and woman of equal height, standing together, side by side. The woman wore a veil and carried a bouquet; the man held a top hat behind his back.

Mom and I stared at each other. Finally, she asked, “Do we have a cake topper?”

“I thought you were getting the cake.”

“We are. But you know it’s not a wedding cake.”

“I didn’t think about a cake topper.”

She exhaled heavily and smiled. “But someone did.”

When we told this story later, Mom would cackle maniacally and say, “You should have seen the look on your face!” when she’d pointed at the margarita glasses. I can only imagine. She herself was beyond surprise.