In my dreams my mother keeps walking out of the kitchen singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. She never sings past the first verse. Last night I dreamed I was back at the house — every light on when I arrived. My mother, forgetting she was dead, smiled, said she was fine, everything was fine. At family gatherings — weddings, baptisms — my mother would look around, sort of stunned, and say: There’re so many of you! As if we’d arrived from someplace other than her own body, a country foreign to her. My mother is no longer flesh or breath. She’s not a thing anymore. Is she with God? Some days I believe, some days I don’t. Centuries ago, in a church in Europe, someone carved God Help Us into a pew. Plague years. Sometimes my God is so big, I wonder what’s the use. Divinity diluted into nothingness. My mother tried to stop drinking. I stopped, she told me once. Like you’d stop a dryer or a washing machine. We were standing in Blackwater Falls Gift Shop, looking at coffee mugs printed with maps. West Virginia on one side, waterfalls on the other. One mug had a gold star to mark the visitor center. You Are Here, it said on a travel mug. Here and not here. How do you name what isn’t here? She tried to stop. And didn’t.