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)