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me!” we plead when they lift their arms in the air and curl their hands over invisible shapes. Science says the grasping gestures are related to changes in brain chemicals as the body shuts down, but my death books said it’s because dying people reach up to greet those who died before them. A cat visited my mother regularly in her final weeks, at one point jumping on her bed and lying at the foot of it like every cat we had when I was growing up. In the beginning, I’d laughed and told her there was no cat, but with the dying you soon learn the folly of raining on a parade, especially one that might produce that holy grail of darnedest things: insight into the afterlife.
    â€œWhat kind of cat is it?” I asked, finally. “Is it orange?”
    â€œBlack,” she rasped.
    We’d had two orange cats, both named Magnificat and called Niffy for short. Niffy One and Niffy Two, both of which were friendly and affectionate. In between we’d also had a black tomcat that was an asshole.
    My mother softened in senility. She developed a childlike quality she probably hadn’t had even as an actual child. Her head seemed perennially cocked to one side, her eyes wide, and with her hair now growing back in soft white tufts she looked like a perfect white frosted truffle. For the first time in years, she was without affectation. There was no trace of the drama queen. As feathery and ephemeral as she was, she seemed like a real person rather than someone impersonating her idea of a person. Though I never would have said it, she looked almost exactly like her mother, who, despite her fleshiness and thick glasses and suspected intellectual disability, everyone, even my mother herself, had recognized as being very pretty. For the first time in years, I didn’t merely love her. I actually liked her.
    â€œDo you know why you’re here?” the hospice nurse asked her gently one day (unlike me, she knew not to shout). This was turning out to be a day of particularly acute agitation. There was a lot of picking at the sheets and furious murmuring. I’d long given up my philosophical lectures. My new best friend was Haldol, which was supposed to keep her calm and which I administered under her tongue through a syringe. There was a perverse and momentary pleasure in this act; it made me feel like I was a stern, efficient nurse, like someone who knew what she was doing.
    Her words, barely intelligible, were like soft formations carved from her teeth and lips. Her breath could scarcely carry them an inch.
    â€œBecause,” she said, “my mother was here.”
    *   *   *
    Ten months after my mother died, twenty months after my grandmother died, I nearly died myself. Oddly enough, this was a scenario that had crossed my mind a time or two over the preceding year. Talk about a morbid trifecta: three generations of women in one family, each of them almost physically repelled by the one before, wiped out in less than two years’ time. This wasn’t a recurring thought, more like the kind of thing that crosses your mind two or three times and then convinces you that the sheer act of thinking about it at all converts it from a mere implausibility to an almost total impossibility. This is what doomsday scenarios are for. They protect us from disaster by playing out the disaster ahead of time. They’re the reason the plane doesn’t crash and the bomb doesn’t drop. They’re the reason we will almost certainly not die in childbirth. The fact that I almost died despite having entertained the thought of dying, the fact that my organs began to fail despite my having walked down the snowy sidewalks in the days after my mother’s death, thinking, Maybe you’re next, maybe there are no coincidences, maybe you were right about it being presumptuous not to believe in an afterlife and maybe the afterlife of this matriarchal line is a group-entry kind of deal , still