I removed my shoes and headed for the shoreline, laboring hard in the soft sand to make it to the water.  It was the same route I had taken so many times before.  But this time was different – I could hardly walk.  The symptoms that would later be diagnosed as an incurable neuromuscular disease had overtaken my thirty-something body, leaving me practically bedridden, unemployed, and living with my parents.

Whether or not I could walk, I needed to flee to a place of refuge – to a familiar place of transcendence, where I could be lifted up when the trials of life were getting me down.  For years I had made tracks in the moist, packed sand along the edge of that beach, feeling the grains settle comfortably between my toes.  It was always to marvel to me how sand, so thoroughly infused by the rising sea, had not yet been claimed by it.  Borders are like that.  They impart a unique strength and hope, somehow managing to hold a tension between here and there while retaining a distinct place between places for themselves.

One minute she was here and the next, where?  My mother's body lay whole on the bed, minus my mother.  It was as if she had planned a dinner party, furnishings freshly polished, dinner on the table, then slipped out the back door, leaving a cadre of expectant guests waiting.  A hospitable hostess such as my mother could never abide such a lack of courtesy.  Besides, the fallout from some of our less than gracious relatives would kill any nice Jewish mother – that is, if she weren't already dead.  My mother would have even come back from the dead just to make a socially acceptable exit and save face.

I had to face it.  One minute her eyes were vibrant; the next, vacant.  One moment they were valuable agents of sight; the next, obsolete orbs.  In those eyes, I saw her leave and then return as if she had never left.  Somewhere in between, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the person who was my mother.  She was not the body she was in – and out of – and in again.  She was far more.

I was not much of a believer in the afterlife, having been raised in the Jewish religion, which doesn't take an official stance on such matters.  Some Jews choose to believe in heaven; others don't.  My statement of faith was best expressed by a postcard I had taped to my wall after a particularly enjoyable trip to California many years before.  Underneath a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge was the caption, "There may not be a heaven, but at least there is a San Francisco."

Even I doubted that in the split second between life and death my mother had gone to "the City by the Bay."  But where did she go? I wondered – and how had she managed to come back?  I knew it was biologically possible to revive a dead person.  But for a dead person to travel somewhere and then return because she had heard me say "I love you"?  I thought my words had fallen on deaf ears.