She stretched over me, hovering close enough to touch me, but we did not touch. I felt her over the length of my body from my toes to the top of my head.

She extended no farther above, below or to the sides than the space occupied
by me.

It was as if this floating thing that once was she had molded itself to the exact size and shape of me. She formed a perfect shadow, only there was no light from which a shadow might have been cast.

There was only me lying on my brother's old mattress and the somethingness that once was my mother floating above me.

Sometimes it hits me when I'm taking a long bath, or when I'm having that first sip of morning coffee. It washes over me in a warm flush: This happened. This really happened.

***

It was supposed to have been a family reunion.

My brother was flying in from L.A., my sister was driving her wreck of a car from Carteret, New Jersey, my parents returning from their road trip to Florida, and I was just back from a six-month hiatus on the tip of Cape Cod in a fairytale land of artists and drag queens called Provincetown. We were all to converge on our Jersey Shore family home for the Jewish high holidays.

It seemed right. Rosh Hashanah, New Year -- what better time to heal old wounds and start again?

The house hadn't changed much since I was in grammar school. Things had a way of growing in that house but not changing. Then again, how could you change something that was buried under five feet of yesterday's news?

My mom was a hoarder. Every year for as long as I could remember she'd added another layer to the pile of junk she built as a wall against the outside world.

She never made it to the reunion.

My mother went into cardiac arrest somewhere in North Carolina and died in a hospital near the highway. My father made arrangements to ship her body to New Jersey, then got back into the car and drove north. He got as far as Virginia.

I picture him sometimes, pulling into the motel in Virginia and calling my brother. He told Matt that he was having trouble seeing the road. He must have been in shock, bleary-eyed and dazed. Did he drive all those miles turning toward the passenger seat expecting to see her smiling back at him?

My brother flew in and drove the rest of the way, leaving my dad in the passenger seat, which was still covered by Mom’s sweater, to stare out the window, nodding at nothing. Nodding at everything.

Her big brown pocket book sat at my dad's feet. None of us had ever seen it
off her arm.

I think about that bag, her magic bag filled with throat lozenges, tissues, coupons, and diabetic candies, sitting there … open, ready and completely abandoned.

They made it home before me.

I walked into the empty garage, and there stood my father, looking small and lost. He blinked at me, glassy-eyed and strange, a shadow of the brawny, olive-skinned man I’d never quite known. Looking at this little red person in the garage, it seemed as though we had never met.

"What's your dad like?" my friends had asked just before I left for New Jersey.

"He's G.I. Joe," I answered.

But to look at my dad now was to see a ghost. Had he died in North Carolina, too? Was the rest of my dad beside the highway trying to hitch a ride north?

I reached out to hug him, and he collapsed into me, sobbing. I'd only seen him cry once before; I had been so young, I might have imagined it. Now he was surrendering into deep, guttural gasps.

"What am I supposed to do now?" my dad asked. I had no answer.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, not listening for a reply.

"Sure," I said, not meaning it.

It was nearing Rosh Hashanah, a holiday I remembered fondly from my youth because it got me out of school. I remembered Mr. Rabinowitz, my bas mitzvah coach handing me a slice of apple dipped in honey and saying, "A sweet apple for a sweet new year."

I also remembered it as one of the “us and them services.” These were the times during the high holidays when spouses and other immediate family members of those who had died stayed to pray for them, while those who had not lost someone left the room.

That was our favorite part as kids. We were allowed to escape the boredom of the service and run around in the grass out front, or, when we were older, sneak cigarettes behind the shul.

What this time seemed to signify, more than anything, was a separation of the
young and carefree from the old and sad. We were the "us," care-free, chasing each other through the unkempt grass. They were the "them," bent, teary-eyed and serious, chanting in Hebrew and whispering silent messages to their lost loved ones. It occurred me that with Mom’s death, I was now one of “them.”

The holiday would mean an early end to our Shiva.

“Rosh Hashanah takes precedence,” said the rabbi.

What should have been a week of mourning would be only three days.

But given the heightened time of piousness, a minyan of 12 men from our shul would come to our house to davin from right after the funeral until sundown. They would pray like that from morning to night in shifts for two more days. The rabbi said they needed nothing from us but something to nosh and a big room in which to stand.

"They're there for you, not the other way around," he added.

It rained the day of Mom's funeral. The overcast, drizzly morning made the already impossible scene unfolding before me even more surreal.

I sat as if watching a movie and stared at the simple, pine casket. … How could it be so small?

My five-foot-tall, 270-pound mother was anything but small. I had the scars of a lifetime of watching people laugh at her when she tried to squeeze through turnstiles or fit into restaurant booths to prove it.

Mom was big.

But this tiny, if wide, casket somehow contained her. I wished and sometimes still wish that I could have broken every rule of Orthodox Judaism and pried open that box, just to see her in the white cotton shroud and know that it was true, that she was really gone.

I often dream that it's all been a big mistake, that she's out there somewhere, wondering why she hasn't heard from us. But nothing short of death could have kept this woman away from her children. As it turned out, even death didn't do such a good job.

After the funeral, we returned to the house, and I held court over the myriad edible donations dropped off by the sisterhood of our shul.

Bagels, lox, cream cheese, danishes, smoked sable, tuna fish salad, rye bread -- these are the staples of Jewish mourning. We eat, and we cry.

I found comfort in making instant coffee for the men who'd come to pray and slicing bagels for the women, embarrassed because they'd come to do exactly that for me.

The dining room table seemed naked. I'd always seen it strewn with coupons. My mother would sit, going through the coupons, clipping off expiration dates with scissors if they had expired. "Nobody ever notices," she said.

She alphabetized them. Then they were placed in a filing cabinet she used just for that purpose.

My dad had thrown them all out. The table looked vacant, even with the many deli platters and 3-liter bottles of diet soda I'd put out.

"Your mother was a good woman," my mother's friend Bertha said to me as she arranged another layer of lox on her bagel. "She'd been sick for so long … so many years."

I knew Bertha was saying what a lot of the people in that room were thinking: It was better this way.

Mom had spent the last five years of her life recuperating from a major stroke.
It was true that in her last years, she seemed to have lost the fight that was a signature part of her character. "Feisty" was the first word to describe her. "Loyal" was the next.

In my heart, I knew there was mercy in the end of such a painful struggle, but I also knew that my mother was not meant to die on that highway. She was supposed to finish the journey home to be with her children. Whatever force had conspired to keep her from her destination was not an act of God, but a mystical error.

The lightning started almost as soon as the sun went down. It was ferocious, with thunderclaps so intense it felt as though the windows would shatter. I sat alone in the enclosed front porch listening to prayers and thunder.

The men of the minyan kept praying, although it was pretty obvious the blasts were making them edgy. Most of them had at least a half-hour ride home, and the dark, two-lane roads of the Jersey Shore are no place to be in a storm.

The wives had gone home hours before. My dad was upstairs in his room, lying on his single bed with his eyes closed but not sleeping. We could always tell when he pretended to sleep, because he didn't snore. My brother was sitting in the kitchen talking to a friend from high school who had come to pay his respects. My sister, as usual, had skipped out. I think it was right after our cousin Joan started asking her too many personal questions.

"I'm outta here!" she announced, running up the stairs. Can't really blame her. Joan had been pretty judgmental about the few things she knew about Lil. Why tell her more?

I was left to sit on the porch behind storm glass that seemed too thin to hold out much longer against the raging storm.

When the lightning cracked, it felt as though the house were going to be torn apart, but that wasn't what was making me nervous.

The air felt thick with eeriness.

"It's just the storm," I said aloud, but it wasn't. I knew that, just as surely as something inside of me knew exactly what or who was giving me the jitters.

I thought back to the car ride home from a triple-coupon sale at a Pathmark in Central Jersey. Mom was holding a bottle of diet orange soda with one hand, steering with the other.

"When I'm dead …" she said, starting on one of her guilt rants that we knew would end with just exactly how miserable we'd all be after it was too late.

"Mooommmmmmmm!" we moaned.

She was undaunted, "When I'm gone, I will not appear before you as an apparition. I know that I will be able to do that, but I think it will make you so nervous, it might ruin your lives."

"How will you appear, Mom!" said my sister, brother and I in unison, while pilfering American cheese slices from one of the shopping bags. We knew nothing if not our cues.

"I will appear to you in your dreams," she said.

"How will we know?" I asked.

"You'll know," she said, then abruptly ended the conversation as if it had never occurred.

At just 46, she'd become the last surviving member of her family. We thought it was funny, her constant comparisons between herself and "the last of the Mohicans." It's only now that I realize how sad it must have been.

She'd lost her dad and mom when she was in her 20s, her brother then her sister by the time she turned 46. Then there was no one left, only she. She had been a change-of-life baby, the adored little sister of much older siblings. Now we were all she had. She'd gone from family darling to family matriarch far too quickly. And no one was left to remember the beautiful little girl in pigtails.

My mother talked about death a lot.

I always assumed it was to scare us into behaving, and it did, but death seemed to stalk her. No one in her family had lived to see a 50th birthday, so she assumed at 46 that her days were numbered.

She made it to 65.

I walked back into the house, into what should have been the dining room. Mom had transformed it years before into a stockroom crammed with knickknacks, old magazines she was saving (for what?), AA batteries, vinyl placemats she'd bought at department stores long closed, and myriad useless items she'd deemed "good for something."

There were hundreds of flashlights and candleholders she'd gotten free for opening Christmas accounts at local banks.

"You can open an account on December 1st for five dollars, get a free two-dollar gift and then withdraw your money with interest on January 2nd!!!" she announced every year for many, many years.

There seemed to be no symmetry or organization to the maze of worthless trinkets she'd amassed. They littered the floor and were piled atop three folding tables she'd purchased to help fit more into the room. They filled old shopping bags hanging from nails hammered into every spare bit of wall space.

But Mom knew where everything was.

When the birthday of a school chum rolled around, she had just the right teddy bear to give. All it needed was one quick snip to remove the Savings Bank logo. When the holiday season arrived, there were coffee mugs for the teachers we liked, key chains for the ones we didn't. There were always, always, always flashlights … in every size, shape and color.

Now the room felt like an ancient graveyard. I picked up one of about 20 bags of stale pretzels. I remembered the effort she'd gone to, traveling an hour for bags of free pretzels. She'd brought them home, beaming with such a sense of accomplishment that no one had had the heart to remind her that none of us liked pretzels.

Mom was gone, but the free pretzels were still here.

"How exactly do you think your father's schoolteacher salary purchased nine pieces of property?" she once asked, in her way of always answering a question with another question. I was on one of my many speeches about the time and energy she wasted bargain shopping when she could be out enjoying her life. I never understood that this was her enjoyment.

She was right, though. She'd somehow managed to scrape together enough money from my dad's salary as a sixth-grade English teacher to put a down payment on a two-family house. Once that had built up a little equity, she purchased another small home, rented it out and used the rental income to purchase a third.

I grew up thinking we were poverty stricken, since all my clothes had either been purchased secondhand or at closeout sales. It was my brother who discovered the truth.

By then I had grown up and moved to New York. Matt was doing his accounting homework for school and used the family finances as his subject.

"I think Mom and Dad are rich," he'd said, astonished.

"Are you saying that I spent my entire childhood thinking we were the poorest kids in town for nothing?"

“Yes,” he said simply, and we both sighed at the ridiculousness of it all.

Mom was all about security. Money was not for spending; it was for saving for a rainy day. A rainy day might be another Depression or a second Holocaust. It might be emergency surgery not covered by one of her many insurance policies. It could be college for the kids. Money was protection against the terrifying unknown.

"Shana madela," she said as she dragged me to Grant's going-out-of-business-sale for another 50 bars of generic soap. "I just need to know that what I do now means you'll be all right later."

"I know, Mom … after you're gone."

But there was no money for us after she died. Dad kept it to live the life he'd postponed for four decades. He figured after 39 years of coupons, he deserved filet mignon. I could have used the cash, but it was hard to begrudge him. He hadn't bought anything that wasn't on special since the Nixon administration.

I don't know how much time passed while I was lost in memories, but everyone was gone when I walked into the living room. The minyan and the deli meat apparently had disappeared hours before. I climbed the stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor. My dad was lying on his side facing the wall, snoring. My brother, still protective since flying to Virginia, was rolled up in a sleeping bag on the floor next to the bed, keeping guard. I guessed my sister was hiding in her old room snoozing or sifting through her collection of romance comic books.

My old room was bare, but my father had thrown a blanket over the mattress on the floor in my brother's room for me. I lay down on the musty mattress and pulled the blanket up to my chin. My body ached with fatigue. I'd hardly slept in the two days since I had gotten the late-night phone message that Mom had died. I closed my eyes and tried to find a dream to hang onto.

Something woke me up around 3 a.m. It wasn't a nudge or a loud noise; it was the unmistakable feeling that someone was staring at me.

Now, I'd always had mixed feelings about the afterlife. Sometimes I believed, sometimes doubted. But the absurdity of Mom's unexpected death on the way to a family reunion made me feel as though we hadn't heard the last of her. Some part of me knew she would make it home.

But I had expected her to look as she had when I'd last seen her, if perhaps a bit transparent. I expected her to talk and to hold me, even if her arms went through me. I expected Hollywood.

That's not what was in the room.

It wasn't a person.

It didn't have a shape.

It didn't make a sound.

I couldn't touch it.

It was more like a stretch of energy.

I felt it watching me, as I lay there. Terror began to creep into my body. It felt as though my blood were freezing.

I remembered what my girlfriend had told me the day before: "I think the dead do try to contact us, but we're too scared to let them in."

I could feel my fear begin to encase me in steel.

But I had to let her in.

I breathed.

"Let it happen," I whispered.

I imagined the sensation of opening my heart and my arms and breathed again, deep, slow.

It began to stretch over me.

It climbed up over my feet, my shins, my thighs, my stomach, my chest ... and
soon it covered me entirely, floating just millimeters above me.

It seemed to breathe with me.

It seemed to be waiting for something.

I checked my eyes to make sure they were open.

I pinched myself.

I pulled the skin on my cheeks.

This was not a dream.

This was happening.

I tried to feel this thing that had been she, but it had no substance. It was lighter than a cloud, heavier than a shadow.

The air felt thick and suffocating.

I could feel my fear return. I could feel the steel. It hit me that this fragile moment might be my last chance.

The words poured out, fast, desperate.

"I'm sorry. I love you. Forgive me. I miss you, Mommy. I'm so sorry."

The figure seemed to take in my words, as if absorbing them, then pulled back and pushed against me.

I knew I was being embraced.

I could feel my terror returning in one crashing wave, and as it did, the energy pulled away.

She streamed up above me, and in an instant was gone.

She was completely gone.

I was left there on the floor of my brother's old room, wide-eyed. I slowly became aware that I was freezing.

I ran out of the room and woke up my brother, then my sister to tell them what had happened. I didn't want to go back to sleep and maybe think I'd dreamed it; I needed witnesses.

Oddly, they seemed to believe me.

"Maybe she'll come back to see me," my brother said, a touch jealous.

"You knew she'd come, didn't you? Of course she'd come," my sister said, sounding as though she'd been waiting for me to tell her exactly what I just had.

"Yeah, I guess I knew it."

I went downstairs and curled up on the pullout couch that had become Mom's bed after her failing health prevented her from climbing the stairs. The pillows still smelled like her. She must have slept there just before they'd left for their trip. I buried my face in the pillow and breathed. I wanted to remember that smell, dandruff shampoo and baby powder.

The storm continued to shake the trees; the branches danced against the aluminum siding.

The metal pulley Mom had used to help her out of the wheelchair and onto the couch swayed in the breeze from the porch. I reached up and grabbed it. It felt cold and useless. I let it go, and it swung back and forth as if it were waiting.

"She doesn't need you anymore," I whispered to the pulley.