“I’m going to die on April 17th.” My mother scooped a heap of sweet potato casserole onto her plate and said, “April 17th. Not this year, but the one after. I’m sure. That’s it for me.” My sister, Peg, and I just shook our heads and went back to our turkey and stuffing. My nephew Andrew probed further, despite his mother’s paralyzing stare. He asked his nana how she knew. “I dreamed it on Tuesday night. Your grandfather and I were playing croquet at my childhood home in Brookline, and he whispered it to me. He said, ‘Susan, I’ve got some bad news. You’ll only live until April 17th. Not this year, but the one after.’ And your papa has never lied to me, Andrew. Dead or alive.”

We all tried to ignore it, and she didn’t bring it up again that night. Her comment added to the morbid mood at the table. Normally, Peg’s dining room is full of shouting relatives vying for the driver’s seat of the conversation. That night, forks scraped on plates and few of us went back into the kitchen for second helpings. It was the first Thanksgiving that we’d had together after Dad died.

He had passed away in June from lymphoma. At his funeral, everyone told stories about what a kind and generous person he had been. They read from laundry lists of charities to which he’d contributed. Every eulogy ended with the declaration that it was better now that he was gone; he wouldn’t suffer anymore. I didn’t think it was for the best. Perhaps it was just selfish, but even if he were suffering, at least he’d be alive. He would still be at Thanksgiving dinner.

But he wasn’t.

That Thanksgiving, I just thought that my mother had gone on another one of her kicks. She had done things like this all the time. I wasn’t sure if it was for attention or if she actually believed it. When we were children, Mom made sure to nail dreamcatchers above our beds. “They’re to make sure you don’t have nightmares,” she would say. My sister took hers down, once, because the blue-and-yellow yarn and the grey feathers didn’t match the pink décor she was trying to create. My mother wouldn’t let Peg go to sleep that night until she had nailed the relic back again. Peg cried the whole time.

I’ve never seen anyone get the feeling of déjà vu as much as my mother did. And it always meant something. It was a bad omen or a good omen or an omen that it was time to get the car washed. Her friends from years ago would always call the day after their names passed through her lips. I can’t even remember how many times Peg and I would have said, “It’s just a coincidence,” only to have Mom correct us.

“There are no coincidences. Just life.”

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. She was, for the most part, a normal sort of mother. She stayed at home until I graduated from elementary school. Then she got a job as a copy editor for the local paper, the Minuteman. By the time I was in high school, she was the arts editor for the Minuteman. Like the other mothers, she would drive us to school most mornings in the blue Volvo station wagon. Once that car broke down -– after her palm reader had told her, “Beware of a change coming in your life” -– she drove a silver Volvo station wagon.

The few months after her pronouncement were not unusual. My mother took a lot of trips. My refrigerator was awash with pictures of the sun setting behind Mayan ruins, a painting of the unfinished church Gaudi began in Barcelona, a man reading the newspaper while floating in the Dead Sea, a woman upside down kissing the Blarney Stone, and countless miniature reproductions of paintings of some Asian good luck charm or other. These postcards came every few weeks. I had to buy extra magnets just to hold them all.

Peg confronted Mom about wasting her retirement savings on these lavish trips. “You’re living on a fixed income, Mom,” she said. “You needed to start being a little more frugal.”

Mom chuckled. “I just want to see the world before I die. Is that too much to ask?”

“Why don’t you try to write for Fodor’s or Lonely Planet so she could get some cash back for taking all of these trips?” Peg had a talent for compromising with Mom that I could never replicate.

Mom scoffed. She was dying in less than a year, so why bother?

Every time my mother would discuss her approaching death, the corners of her mouth would slowly rise as if they were attempting to meet the crow’s feet that framed her hazel eyes. That frozen smile reminded me of my mother’s face at Dad’s funeral. Peg and I had cried. Mom just became paralyzed in that uncomfortable-looking smile. “How could you just sit there smiling like that?” I had asked her at the reception that night.

My mother just turned her lightly wrinkled face toward mine. “Because, sweetie, if I can’t smile about it, then what am I going to do?”

I tried to ignore my mother’s cry for attention for the most part. I reacted as my Dad had whenever he’d find a charge on the credit card statement from a fabric store for “Emotionally Centered Curtain.” He would just shake his head and smirk to himself. He always had just let people do what made them happy. He was proud of me for sticking through law school, but if Peg hadn’t given him grandchildren before he died, I don’t think his life would have been complete.

The moments that Mom would bring that foreboding dream up were infrequent but disturbing, never the less. We would tell her to stop, that it was disgusting. She would just smile and ask, “Why would the truth be disgusting?” As long as the trips were as far as it would go, I didn’t have much of a problem with it, so we let her have her superstition.