I tell people I don't believe in the afterlife but in reality I'm a 39-year-old woman who asks her dead mother for favors from time to time.

The same dead mother who could not be saved by either religion or science. Who chemo just killed faster. Whose only discernible reaction to the most solemn of prayers at Notre Dame was to drown in her own mucus and lose control of her bowels.

I know the idiocy of asking her now, around the anniversary of her death, to keep my son alive. But I do it anyway.

It is Christmas-time after all. And we are spending the holiday trapped inside what feels like a medieval torture device that no one can see. All smiles and "Happy Holidays" on the outside, secretly checking the price of burial plots on the inside. Politely fending off questions from annoying neighbors about "our plans for the New Year" without coming right out and saying I don't know if my kid will be alive that long. That he's got only a couple years left to live unless an urgent bone marrow transplant can save him. Though it might also kill him, so it's a toss-up in the most extreme sense of the word.

This is why we're not making any New Year's resolutions, Carol.

In between wrapping presents for my son, I fire off frantic emails to doctors in Minneapolis and Chicago asking if a donor's been found yet for his bone marrow transplant. (Spoiler alert: not yet).

And in between those emails I read private messages sent to me on Facebook by other mothers whose sons underwent a transplant for this disease and hope begins to swell in my chest -- until I get to the last line where they say 'oh yeah, and also, unfortunately my son didn't make it. And he thrashed around a lot too because there were those perforations in his guts from the chemo drugs but best of luck. Hugs to you and your family."

There's an absurdity to buying Christmas gifts for someone you know damn well might not live long enough to use them.

I still remember the bittersweet grin my mother gave me after opening my final Christmas gift to her when I was in college, an anthology CD we both knew she'd never get the chance to listen to. The chemo had done nothing to stop her lung cancer and she spent that holiday season consoling her own elderly parents about her flesh-and-bones appearance. She died less than two weeks later at the age of 54.

Here I am reliving the same Christmas paradox with my son almost exactly twenty years later. The boy I thought would live forever by sheer force of the light in his eyes. Whose future's been blotted out by a deadly brain disease.

He asks for a gaming chair and desk that he might have only two weeks to use and my "but we'll be moving into the hospital soon" evaporates in my throat. Then I purchase him the new Nike sweatpants he wanted in a size far too big, stumbling in my head over the trusty "He'll grow into them" line that us parents so often say.

This is nuts, I think, this pretending everything's okay.

But perhaps the bigger absurdity is ever thinking life was guaranteed to begin with. The absurdity in me writing this column now about a child facing terminal illness as if there were some unspoken cosmic clause whereby children would be immune. The absurdity in treating death as if it were some outrageous insult to humanity, an injustice rather than a given.

Why did I ever assume he'd graduate high school and go off to college? What made me so sure "growing up" was guaranteed?

We smile and nod knowingly when children buy into things like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, envying their ability to believe in such comforting nonsense. But we're not so different, us adults. We pay lip service to our own kind of Santa Claus all the time with things like five- and ten-year plans and college savings and subtle thoughts like, "He'll grow into them."

So maybe the gaming chair's not so absurd. I don't know if my son will still be with me next Christmas, or if he'll reach his 9th birthday next May. But he's just a few feet away from me right now and he's busy booby-trapping our home for Santa.

"Do not touch, I wipe my butt with this (but no poop)," reads one.

"Do not touch, it's snot, it fell from my nose," reads another, complete with a fresh booger.

"Are you trying to gross Santa out?" I ask.

"Oh, stop! I know you're Santa!," he says. "I thought you'd touch the booger and scream and then I could catch you in the middle of the night."

Upon closer inspection of our home, I find several more strategically placed boogers on the wall, along with a spot that appears to have been colored ever so lightly with a brown crayon by someone who also wrote "FART" in the faintest shade of #2 pencil.

"Is this for me too?!" I ask, feigning indignation to the delighted cackling of an 8-year-old who is, at this moment, very much alive.

I didn't get it back when my mother was dying, when she asked if I believed in heaven just before the cancer ate through her vocal cords. Twenty-year-old me didn't even blink before firing off a resounding, "No."

She said she begged to differ. Heaven was real, as silly as it sounds, and that much she knew.

And I know what she meant now. It's right f -- ing here, at least temporarily. That otherworldly paradise that sounds like blatant bulls -- with its promises of warmth and love beyond human comprehension is right f -- ing here and it's in my kid's boogers and butt jokes and memorialized farts.