Around the bend, in our vast apartment, in an ancient building on Ocean Avenue, mother lay in bed, connected to an oxygen tank on the night table, waiting to pass away, or to be saved one more time. In the past year, the "attacks" came more frequently. Almost every other week, she had been rushed to the hospital. She was on and off the critical list. When the telephone rang late at night, I twitched in terror, often leaping a few feet off the bed. Was this the Death Call? "I'm sorry," the imaginary voice announced. "She just passed away at 1:04 a.m."

But she was a good woman. And a young woman. And God's child. So she survived many bouts with the angel of Death.

She was 50 and had the body of a very old woman. She suffered from inoperable heart failure, arthritis, phlebitis, and at least half a dozen additional ailments. Her body was the manifestation of despair and hopelessness. (Ghostly, the tiny woman "smoked" an ersatz cigarette. Eventually, she had stopped smoking King Size Kools. But it was too late.) Yet her heart and soul and voice evoked the beatific image of Mother Theresa. She was Jewish! But an honorary saint. So we ordained her our MOTHER THERESA.

It happened in our Brooklyn apartment 39 years ago. I was 20. I hid in my little room and drifted off to Mexico, where sensuous Spanish girls waited for me, an acne-scarred scholar. But that night, I was the Scholar of Death.

Periodically, I visited Mother Theresa, who was breathing quietly with the oxygen tank. She'd had an "attack" earlier in the evening but had apparently recovered. Father had given her oxygen and called our family doctor, William the Great.

Father, my older sister Rose, and I waited. Mother Theresa gave us a faint smile.

Briefly, she got off the machine and "smoked" her make-believe cigarette. "I thought I was dying!" she told us. And then the final attack came, in a flash, with lightning and thunder and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

She collapsed in a shroud of white electricity. Father put her on the oxygen tank again. Rose called 911. And I drifted off once more. (What had we witnessed? A truth ineffable? For me, it was a mind-splitting, soul-cutting metamorphosis!)

We waited for EMS and William the Great! (But we "knew.")

The room was vast and infinite, with circular shrouds flying across Mother Theresa's universe, rushing around and around in a galaxy of glorious colors, stolen from Mother's life force.

Mother was motionless. Without one holy breath. Without one soul-filling color from The Tree Of Life.

Now, 39 years later, I realize that Mother Theresa's Room of Infinity cannot be comprehended in one day or one lifetime. Nor can one travel from one end of the room to the other.

The holy room cannot be fathomed nor traveled through in human time.

I was a boy when Mother Theresa vanished. But she's just around the bend, in the Vastness. I'll be seeing her soon.