→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 36: SPRING/SUMMER 2026
In the month after her death, I dreamed of my mother several times, the kind of dreams you have about the dead, dreams that ignore death, that hard fact. The dead seem just to be visiting in those dreams, just come back from a trip. They have a surprise for you; they have knitted you a sweater. Their faces wear familiar emotions—happiness, disappointment, anger—and you speak with them, go places with them (they like to drive, the dream dead), but all the while there is this dull knowledge waiting for you when you wake to a world in which they are gone.
In one of these dreams she brought me a casserole, and we ate dinner together on the patio of my parents’ house while live music played, the musicians just out of sight. In another, she drove me to the airport so that I could travel to Iceland.
“ I wished as maybe everybody does that she would say one last thing, but she didn’t. ”
The last time I saw her alive she was in a hospital bed doing the hard work of dying. The room was white, also the sheets and the sky outside the window. It was snowing, and I told her that, as if it was important to know the weather just then. I wished as maybe everybody does that she would say one last thing, but she didn’t. Her eyes were half-open, and I believed (wanted to) that she could see me.
When some months later she came to stand by my bed, she wasn’t dressed in a hospital gown, or in her good black laying-out suit. She didn’t have a casserole dish to offer. She was a dark figure standing over me with a shock of light hair. I thought it was my boyfriend, come upstairs to tell me something. Why is he standing on the wrong side of the bed? I wondered.
Time in dreams is slippery. Sometimes the dream seems to cover years, and in others times slows, the seconds dripping and sliding. I was half awake, stuck in dream time. I didn’t recognize her. That one long thought, that it was my boyfriend, turned and turned on itself until I knew that it wasn’t. He was downstairs. I could hear him moving something around, something heavy.
“ I was half awake, stuck in dream time. I didn’t recognize her.”
My mother was someone who made the best of things—an optimist. She was more likely to smile than frown, even more likely to laugh. She loved being in company with her sisters, her daughters, her granddaughters. She always complimented the cooking if someone else had done it. If it was her own, she’d say it might have been better if there was a little more salt, or if it had come out of the oven two minutes earlier. She liked to tell stories about her childhood, when her family had lived in the country. She told jokes against herself. She made fun of her hair, which in those later years was silver white. “I have to tame my hair,” she’d say when she was getting ready to go out, the implication being that the taming was never quite successful.
(I’m haunted by her hair, now that I’ve stopped dying mine: silver white, with a mind of its own. It mocks me when I look in the mirror.)
The shadow stood there without moving. I screamed, a choked, almost silent scream. It wasn’t just dark, but blackened, as if it had been burned. It didn’t speak or move or try to touch me. I lay on the bed, unmoving. We waited, the figure and I, for something to happen.
In the last year or so of her life, she smiled less, under the burdens of age and pain and vulnerability. She liked to do things herself and didn’t like being done for. Sometimes she seemed to blame my sister and me for our having to do things for her that she had once done for herself.
Once, we were at her house on a Sunday for dinner, which we had cooked. When we came on Sundays in those last months, we also did the housework, vacuumed, did laundry. After dinner, I was folding sheets as she had taught me: take a corner in each hand, spread your arms wide, bring the corners together, shake the sheet to make it fall correctly, then catch it at half its length to fold over so it can be made into a flat square, ready for the linen closet. When I was about to fold it over itself, she caught at the sheet. She was sitting on the couch, her walker beside her. She held the ends together, waiting for me to match my two corners to hers. She looked as happy as I’d seen her in weeks. She brought the folded sheet to her face, to inhale its clean smell.
“he looked as happy as I’d seen her in weeks. She brought the folded sheet to her face, to inhale its clean smell. ”
I’m haunted by those smells, hers and the smells of her house. Laundry that has been dried outside in the sun. The smell of her lipstick, a coral-orangey color, always worn down halfway and smudged a little on the edges of the tube, an earthy smell, like clay mixed with perfume. The damp dustiness of their basement, scented with detergent and the dry heat of the furnace. The smell of dinner on Sundays, when she still cooked, the roast or the casserole, the scalloped potatoes—not one smell but the marriage of all that went into the meal. The smell of the house after she died and then our father died, when no one had lived in it for a while.
When I was lying on the bed and she was standing beside me, I said nothing. My mind was empty except for the thought, You are here. You cannot be here. You are in the box behind the door in the room across the hall. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t reach out. I didn’t try to comfort her. I didn’t say good-bye.
Where is the end of a story of a haunting? Is it when the ghost goes away, is exorcised? Is it when the ghost is accepted? Maybe it has to do with the will and volition of the ghost.
Why did she come only once? Did she get what she wanted? Why did she come alone? (For their ashes, hers and my father’s, were together in that box between the door and the bookcase.) My waking sent her away, disappeared her after that one long moment, the atoms or airs that had come together to staple her to that place gone, traveling away, vanishing into an alternate space and time.
It was unlike her to be a ghost—something she wouldn’t have approved of in life. She liked to be grounded, liked to know what was what. But maybe her death had made her adventurous, freed her from her own expectations, as well as from pain and immobility. Just once more, she might have said to herself. She liked to have a plan and a direction. I will come once more, and then go.
