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deep and still tugging at me. I was circling it, hovering between life and death. I touched Mrs. Kessler. Her forehead was cold. I leaned into the body that was no longer Mrs. Kessler and put my fingers to her lips, colorless and thin. They used to curl readily into an amused smile she reserved for children—a smile that I’d appropriated for my students, along with her tranquilizing voice. I wanted to kiss those lips, to breathe life back into her. Her mouth hung open stiffly, which seemed undignified, so I closed it by cupping the rubbery skin of her chin and firmly pushing it up toward her nose, as though I were manipulating a mannequin.
    I put my hand on Mrs. Kessler’s cheek, just as she had done to me so often. Her skin had yellowed. A line of age spots mirrored the curve of one of her sparse eyebrows. Thin gray strands had replaced the brown hair that had been too lustrous to cover with a sheitel. I brushed them away from her eyes. I wondered if I would ever be able to touch my mother with such tenderness, alive or dead.
    Chana tore a white sheet into small sections and filled a bucket with warm water. She put a drop against her wrist to test the temperature, as you would with a baby’s bottle. “We have to make sure that the water is warm. We treat the dead with the same respect as we do the living,” she told me.
    “For the sake of modesty and respect, the body remains covered at all times, except for the part we are washing,” the rebbetzin said, instructing me to wash from the top down, right side taking precedence over left, front over back. She washed in and behind the ears, sealing water from the lips, a courtesy offered to lungs no longer vulnerable to drowning. I cleaned under the folds of her breasts, once so full of milk that they’d strained the buttons ofher blouse. Her areolas were gray and her breasts lay flat against her skin, as crinkly as an elephant’s. I lost all track of the now and the then, and I felt as though I were washing baby Lili, plump and pink and practically nippleless. Memory kindled a fire made of grief and love, and a holy heat tore through my body.
    Aviva prepared three buckets of water. No more than three buckets were to be poured in a continuous stream over the body. Devora and I trailed Chana as she walked alongside Mrs. Kessler, and when Chana had nearly emptied her pail, I began pouring. Devora did the same for me so we could sustain a steady stream of water.
    The rebbetzin handed me a laminated piece of paper, and I read from Ezekiel in Hebrew. My voice trembled as I spoke with the fluency of someone who had learned the language as a child. “And I will pour upon you pure water and you will be purified of all your defilements, and from all your abominations I will purify you.” How many buckets of water would it take to purify my mother’s defilements?
    We all swayed back and forth as if we were praying at the Wailing Wall, our rocking creating the effect of a hypnotist waving a chain in front of my eyes and telling me that I was growing very, very sleepy. I was transported to my canopied bed where I’d sat in my Snoopy nightgown, instructing my mother with great authority when to bow and move her feet three steps forward and backward while she practiced reciting the Amidah prayer. My mother hadn’t known a word of Hebrew before she met the Schines, but she was a quick study and practiced so hard that she could almost pass as an FFB, Frum From Birth, someone who had been born into an ultra-Orthodox home, someone like me. Standing before the body of Mrs. Kessler, I longed for the version of my mother who so desperately wanted to make the Schines’ world a home for us, and my longing devoured my grief.
    I hovered between my childhood bedroom and the tahara room while we tenderly patted Mrs. Kessler with a white towel as if she might grow cold from a draft. We shrouded her body, andthen Aviva, Devora, Chana, and I lifted her, giving me a new understanding of the