When I opened my eyes, the last mysterious light of the waning day was filtering in. It was only then that I noticed I was not alone. Manika was at the other end of the bathroom, bent over, pushing a broom, its bundle of straw wrapped in wet rags. The walls and ceiling and floor of the bathroom I now saw were covered with undulating gray insects, strange feathery otherworldly bugs, like waves of silver gossamer, like a gauzy veil, like ash. Soundlessly, with her muted broom, Manika was pushing these ghostly creatures down the drain in the center of the cement floor. Our eyes met. I rose at once, flushed the toilet, and left.

Dying is a very private human act, like going to the toilet, like sex. One of the more embarrassing aspects of the punishment of those who are condemned to be executed is to die in public. They wet and soil their trousers, their sexual members are aroused. Even animals that are mortally wounded are given the grace to be allowed to slouch off into a secluded corner to die with dignity. Ma was no longer there when I reentered her room, she had been eliminated and effaced. A stranger had taken her place in the bed, waxen, bloated, rigid, swollen blue hands and feet, a figure that in no way resembled my mother. I would not have been able to identify this suspect in a police lineup. I do not believe in the soul or the anima or the ch’i or the vital spirit, not even in the neshama, literally, the breath of life, the Jewish soul train, or any of that mystical junk, but that creature in that bed was not my mother. It was a husk, a hollow shell, a carapace, such as a locust casts off. My real mother had taken advantage of the privacy I had granted her to escape through the window.

What followed then was like the worst kind of dream—the dream that paralyzes you with horror and won’t let you go so that you can never wake yourself out of it into the relief that it was only a dream. From the moment I returned to that room until we disposed of the remains, I did not leave the side of Ma’s impersonator for a minute. I had already paid a terrible price for my brief absence, which my mother had exploited so cruelly by snatching her death when no one was looking and running with it, stealing away forever. Now I resolved to remain fixed in my place, partly, yes, in homage to the Jewish exhortation to guard the dead until properly settled, which I count among the more humane and enlightened mandates of my lost faith, but above all in my determination to show my mother that I was capable of honoring the promise I had made to her.