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.

There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

My mother died suddenly last weekend. My father found her at about six o’clock Saturday morning. She suffered from COPD for years and wore a nasal cannula at all times, but she had been going through a less-bad patch lately, and she wasn’t even seventy years old. She seems to have died in her sleep. Dad called the paramedics and my sister; I didn’t wake up when he called me. My sister called a funeral home. The police came.

By the time I awoke, Mom was laid in the front hall with a sheet over her, on a rug Melissa now never wants to see again, my father kneeling beside the body, clutching Mom’s St. Jude’s medal and the little angel charm her mother had given her. Since she wore them all day, every day, on the same chain, a pointy bit of the angel had made a little dimple on the back of the St. Jude medal. Mom used to joke that the angel had kicked St. Jude in the butt. I slept through all the action Saturday morning, for which I’m deeply grateful. I’m sorry that poor Melissa had to manage it all, but I do not wish to have been there. I won’t lie.

I answered the phone around nine o’clock, and the numbness carried me along for hours. I brought over some cookies. I apologized to Melissa. I petted my parents’ cat. I watched a show about black holes, which apparently “feed, burp, and nap” like babies. I texted some people. No, there wouldn’t be a funeral or a viewing. No wake. The body would be cremated in the “peached cotton” Eileen West pajamas I had gotten Mom last year.

Stay with me, here. This is not a story about being sad.

I don’t know how to summarize the necessary context succinctly. I’ll tell those stories later if you’d like. For now, just know that Mom and I already suspected that dead may not be as dead as all that.

To put it bluntly: for about twenty years, my mother had been getting sporadic messages from dead people. Not telegrams, not voices or visions. But promptings. Sometimes quite specific promptings that required that she and my long-suffering father drive to Bonham, for instance, or buy beat-up old silver butter dishes or carved cookie molds. I got wedding presents from my dead relatives, which was sweet. Mom said they had an eye for quality.

As you might imagine, my mother was, how shall we say…fanciful. Prone to embellishment, perhaps, with the Irish instinct for the good story (as superior to the objectively factual one). She saw signs of her affectionate long-dead relatives everywhere —and she did genealogy, so she knew lots of dead relatives. My dad said she was nuts, even as he indulged her. I’m not going to argue for her sanity. She was who she was.

The crucial thing is, though, that I am considered (more or less) compos mentis, and I was there—when she found the old dime store she had already described from her dream, for instance, or when, feeling “someone talking” to her, she and I stuck a hand into a housewares clearance rack and came out with the Waterford cake topper that I needed for my wedding cake but had completely forgotten about.

As time went on, I occasionally experienced those promptings myself and felt my way into a few of those weird adventures on my own, though she almost always was able to clarify or illuminate events afterward. So it’s not like I’m taking only her word for the reality of this feeling. I’d been there before. Just not so alone.

Naturally, with that history behind us, I was primed right away to receive any greetings she might send. At the same time, my mother was dead, and that was devastating, and I grieved, but less than I expected. Sometimes when I wasn’t crying, I was oddly euphoric. And I felt like she was, too.

Until Friday, all her greetings were clear enough to me but easily explained away by coincidence, had anyone been so inclined. For instance, on Saturday night, she sent me a beautiful snail shell and some lightning bugs; the next day she arranged for me to see a YouTube video in which spirits manifested as lightning bugs on a screen.

That’s the way it works, you see: snails and lightning bugs aren’t unusual. It’s about the context, the surprise, the way I think, “Mommy, where are you?” and immediately the little honeybee comes from nowhere and lands on me. I don’t see or hear ghosts (though my grandmother did), because that would scare me. Just this, just little things, all week. The candle that burned from Saturday morning until the hour she was cremated. My son’s sudden discovery of “100 Years,” which she loved and which made me cry.

Until, on Friday, Mom decided to pull out all the stops.

On Friday, I dropped my devoted friend Holly off at the airport, which left me truly alone in my head for the first time since Saturday. The traffic was unusually heavy because of the holiday, and Waze seemed to make itself crazy trying to route around it. Finally, it sent me so close to Henk’s German bakery that it seemed silly not to go, having gone so far out of my way already.

German food was important in my Irish mama’s life (because reasons), so she liked this place. Yes, I explicitly hoped she had left something for me. I knew how Mom shopped with dead people: keep an open mind. Reduce expectations. Pick stuff up and put it down. Pay special attention to shelves at knee level. So I went in and wandered through the little store. The last time my mother and I were here, she was in a wheelchair, sitting with her oxygen tank, and couldn’t really get down the aisles. I did not like to think about that.

Bunratty’s Mead, in a German bakery? Odd. But no. Licorice? Yes, my grandmother loved licorice, but…no. Candy fruit slices? Well, maybe. My sister loves those, and Melissa is a strict atheist, so I’m Mom’s only vector to send her a present. What the heck is this music, mariachi? Strange choice, Henk, very strange.

I was getting discouraged. What would Mom do? She used to tell me I was too prone to literalism in this arena. For instance, when the dead relatives sent me a cookie mold, I thought I had to make them cookies. She said I was missing the point, which was that I HAD GOTTEN A PRESENT FROM DEAD PEOPLE. So maybe I was being too narrow in the search. Just because I was in a store, did that mean I was there to buy something? Maybe I was there to meet someone, for instance? I side-eyed the elderly gentleman checking out the stroopwaffeln, and then I heard the song on the music system. This was no mariachi band now. This was the Kinks.

I had never heard it before, or if I had, I didn’t remember it at all. It was not familiar. But it was obviously the gift I was there to get.

Thank you for the days
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days
I won’t forget a single day, believe me

I bless the light
I bless the light that lights on you, believe me
And though you’re gone
You’re with me every single day, believe me

Days I’ll remember all my life
Days when you can’t see wrong from right

You took my life
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me
But it’s all right
Now I’m not frightened of this world, believe me…

“Days,” Ray Davies

I was too stunned and breathless even to cry. I made sure I remembered a few lines verbatim—You’re with me every single day, believe me—oh God, Mom, I hear you, oh my God—walked out, sat on a bench, and looked up the song. When I felt a little steadier, I drove home.

Now. This is a good story. I longed for a definite message from my mother, and I think I got one. This is a beautiful and touching story. But it is not over, because my mother is in a very good mood this week, and she loves me, and she may be showing off a bit. She’s entitled to it.

When I got home, I dutifully sent my father an e-mail describing what happened, even though I knew he’d think I was dotted-swiss crazy. Be it not upon my head if Dad still believes Mom is actually gone. I wasn’t out to change anyone’s mind, and I’m not now, either.

Friday evening, I looked up the song again, wanting to savor and study every word. On the bottom of the lyrics page was the release date of the song: March 25, 1972.

March 25 is my parents’ anniversary. March 25, 1972 is the day they married. This March would have been their fiftieth anniversary.

Hey, I believe in science. Don’t ask me how any of this works. But also don’t try to tell me my mother is gone from me. How could I believe that, when this is my life? This happened. She’s with me every single day, believe me.

Ramana Maharshi…was surrounded by weeping devotees as he lay dying, pleading, “Don’t go, Master, please don’t go.” To which Ramana responded, “Don’t be silly; where could I go?”

Ram Dass (paraphase by Eliezer Sobel)