My mother has been dead for over three weeks now, and I am getting used to the idea that I can’t just go to the phone and call her up whenever I want to tell her something.

But early this morning I had the strangest dream about her.

She just showed up at my house, smiling, looking her best. And she was just so amazed about this dying thing that had happened to her!

“I can’t quite believe it really happened,” she said. “It’s not bad, actually. I’m fine and all that. But there were some things I wanted to tell you before I went that I didn’t get to say.”

And then we just discussed the whole experience. I wanted to know if, during those last few days when she couldn’t talk, if she could still hear us talking–and she said, oh yes, she’d heard everything. “I squeezed your hand,” she said. “That meant I could hear you. I thought you’d get that.”

Oh, right. I thought so.

Then I told her I had blogged about her death, and she said she wanted to see what I’d written.

Well, that felt weird, I don’t mind telling you. I stalled a little bit, but she said she absolutely insisted on reading what I wrote about her, so I finally went and got the laptop and showed her the website.

In real life, she didn’t know a thing about computers and was only dimly aware that I had a blog or a website, so in the dream, of course, I had to explain everything to her. She sat there and read everything I’d written, and then she shivered.

“This is kind of strange, to read about my own death,” she said, but she was smiling. “Especially when here I am, back in the world just temporarily.”

“How long do you have?” I asked.

She said she wasn’t really sure. I told her her ashes had arrived in the mail and that I’d put them in a safe place until I could sprinkle them, and she said, “You know, I don’t really want to talk about the ashes part of things,” and I felt like maybe I’d been rude to bring it up. Of course! Who would want to be reminded that they’d been cremated?

But she didn’t dwell on that problem. Mostly she just wanted to sit there, smiling. She looked out the window and said things looked so beautiful, much more beautiful than she remembered. “Everything is so different,” she told me.

I told her I missed her a lot, and that it was hard knowing she wasn’t always there, and she nodded.

Before I woke up, she leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about me, or feel bad. Everything happened just the way it was supposed to.”

And then I woke up. It was so strange how it felt the same as when I had just finished a conversation with her. I closed my eyes again, trying to fall back to sleep, but she didn’t come back. The dog, though, came over to the side of my bed and licked my hand.