David Gordon, born a Jew in the last year of the 19th century, converted to Catholicism, an event so distressing to his original family that they declared him dead or, in his daughter's words, sat shiva for him.

When he died at Bellevue Hospital in New York in 1957, a few weeks after having a heart attack in the Forty-Second Street Library, life changed radically for his only child. She and her mother moved out of their apartment, back to her maternal grandmother's house. Her life, she felt, had split in two; into the part when he was alive and when he was not. And as he died when she was so young, her life seemed consequently unbalanced. With him disappeared her childhood - literally. She never saw her windup Cinderella again, or her Alice in Wonderland rug.

Though her father was, a Jew, he had placed her in a Catholic world where she felt an outsider. She had Jewish blood and when his family consigned her father to a state of non-existence after his conversion, Gordon felt she had also been consigned to a kind of non-being. Most of the references to Jews she heard were a product of the anti-semitism of her mother's family. They also used the sentence that was the most horrible to her, one which gave her the only clue she ever needed to the timbre of real hate. "That's the Jew in you" they used say whenever she did something they didn't like.

Another remark that dogged her at times related to his early passing. "She lost her father: she lost her father when she was very young" as if his death had somehow been the result of her carelessness, her inattention, her failure to keep him in sight.

Her exhaustive research resulting in "The Shadow Man" ultimately made her decide to actually move his remains from where he lay with the Catholic in-laws who hadn't liked him to a new grave, a new cemetery where he could be patriarch, head of a family - his daughter's family, whom he had not lived to see.

"WHEN I tell my mother that I want to move my father's body to a new grave, she fixes me with a look I know very well.

"That's the thing about you," she says; "you always had wacky ideas."

My father lies in a grave under a stone that bears not his name but that of my mother's family: Gagliano. He lies among people who at best tolerated or patronised him, at worst despised him. He lies with his father-in-law, my mother's father, who refused to appear at my parents' wedding. As my mother walked out the door to go to the church, her father handed her a card upon which he had written, "You will work till the day you die".

In the cemetery plot with my father, along with my grandfather and grandmother, are my grandfather's mother, Anna Gagliano, and one of my uncles, Santo Giuseppe Gagliano, known as Joe. Perhaps to seem more American, he changed his name legally to Samuel Joseph. Also his wife, Edna, who converted from Presbyterianism in her last illness (she was nursed by my grandmother). There are also stillborn twins, children of my uncle Anthony's. Reading the names on the stone, you would think it was the grave of any Italian family. No one could guess there is a Jew there. No one, passing, would know he had passed the remains of my father.

The remains. "Those are pearls that were his eyes; /Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.

But into what? He is not under the sea. What is left of my father's body?

During a panel on art and ethics in which I participate, a slide of a photograph of Andrew Serrano's is shown. It is a picture, called "Jane Doe killed by police," taken in a morgue. The face is blackening with rot.

There are holes instead of eyes.

Holes, not pearls, that were his eyes. I have to consider the fact that what I want to move was once an object in the state of the image in the photograph. Its frightens me to look at Serrano's picture, and frightens me to make the connection with my father. I think it is my father I am horrified for, not myself. But how can I be sure? I have to reckon with thoughts of worms and grinning skulls. But I don't have to dwell on them for long. I can concentrate on a headstone. With his name. Which I do. Which I allow myself to do. I don't allow myself to think that under the ground my father will be still alive, and that, wiping the earth from his eyes, he will say, "Thank you, thank you, you have rescued me from all these years of burial". Of course I have imagined it.

But I don't allow myself to think it might be true.

The last time I saw my father, he was in his coffin, still and stiff, surrounded by flowers gladiolus and chrysanthemums. I think and to the (had I feared the sight of him?) he was surprisingly beautiful, considering what he'd been through.

He was still recognisably himself.

"BEFORE it can happen, there are transactions that need to be made among the living. There is, the law which, in relation to the moving of the dead, is complicated and must be obeyed.

Moving a body to a new grave is a practical issue, and one day I took practical steps. One of my closest friends, Gary, is a Jesuit, now connected to a parish on the Upper East Side. He puts me in touch with an undertaker he's worked with, Harry Finnan, of Charles Peter Nagel, Inc. Harry is co-operative, intelligent, efficient. I can see this from the moment we walk into the funeral parlour and he comes to the door, apologising for being engaged with "a family", people in mourning, in shock. Gary and I head for a bench at the back of a corridor, passing workmen, ladders, sawdust, plastic sheets. Restoration Harry explains, is going on.

He shows me into the office. He looks at all my papers. He asks me some questions.

"How many are with him?"

"How many what?"

"Bodies."

"Oh, I don't know."

"Well, the important thing is, who's on his level."

"Oh, none of them is on his level," I want to say. "He's above all of them. That's why I want to move him out of there."

But I remember who I'm talking to. And that it's important to stay quite literal.

Harry makes a call - one call, - and finds out that it's possible for me to move the body. I need affidavits from every living member of my mother's generation. And a new plot for my father and my family. Do I want the same cemetery? Not necessarily, I say. As a matter of fact, I'd prefer somewhere else. He suggests Calvary, in Queens. It's a cemetery I've always liked, because a lot of immigrant Irish women paid for their own graves there. I'm glad of this choice. Also, my father will officially be buried in the City of New York. Our Town.

But I will have to ask permission of my two uncles and the aunt who has been my nemesis. Who has always frightened me. Who has always disliked me. Who badly hurt my mother. Who could always make my mother and me feel in the wrong with her coldness, her fanatic law-abidingness. When a priest in her parish quoted approvingly from Final Payments [a novel by Mary Gordon] she wrote to the bishop demanding the priest's dismissal. When my uncle, her brother, showed her a write-up of an interview with me, she threw the newspaper across the room with the words "I don't read trash."

I have always known myself as the person who has had to defend myself against her.

As her enemy.

If she goes along with my request, will she no longer be my enemy?

Then who will I be?

My beloved cousin agrees to speak to her for me. My cousin Joseph, whose name in our childhood was Peppy, whom I continue to call Peppy, although he has dropped the name. I've given up my childhood name: Mary Kate. Peppy never calls me that. I never call him anything but Peppy. Peppy, whom I have no memory of life without, who has always, for all my life, provided me with joy, solace, and tremendous laughter. We used to have to be separated at family dinners because we laughed so much we couldn't eat. The adults would always say, "This laughter will end in tears." It never did. This year, at my birthday, Peppy said, "What kind of people would separate children because they were laughing? Wouldn't you want children to laugh?" Oh, my darling Peppy, from you I have learned to be a sister, to be a female, easily, among males. I can never give you what you have given me. You were the easy child; I was the difficult one; you the smoother-over; I the pointer-out. How did I ever have the good luck to be loved by you? It would have been impossible for me not to love you, but your love for me is a miracle, a gift. I like, to feel that I understand you: understand your great imagination and the depth of your knowing heart. At least I can give you that.

I am worried that Peppy's goodness won't be strong enough to overcome my aunt's malignity. The day after I talk to him, I am sitting in the living room with the children. I begin crying because of my father. Anna takes my hand. I tell her how much I want to move his grave, how afraid I am that my aunt will stop me. She says, "Don't worry, Mom, you'll eventually have your wish. You'll probably outlive her, and even if you don't, I will And I promise that I'll move your father's grave so you'll be buried together."

Suddenly, I am filled with pity for my aunt. She is old, and I am young. She is childless and I've borne children. She was crippled and I've been healthy. I want to stop thinking of her as my enemy.

She says she won't stand in my way.

Other relatives' permission also had to be sought. Their reactions varied and included that of the uncle who used the opportunity to tell her he hoped she had a good therapist because she sounded like a very depressed person but added: "Be gentle opening that grave, because my twin babies are there." When Gordon asked her mother if she wanted to reside in the old grave with her parents or the new one with her husband and, ultimately, her daughter - the reply was straightforward. "You're the only one that matters to me. I don't care about anyone else." Finally the arrangements are in place and the day of the re burial arrives.

EVERYONE arrives at the nursing home. My husband, Arthur, gets in the ambulance with my mother because if she becomes agitated, I'll go into a panic, and I want to be calm. Gary drives me through horrible traffic on the East Side, over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. I look at nothing on the way. We arrive at the cemetery, this urban necropole, and we can't find our way to Section IX, where my father is going to be buried. We ask a grave digger, who answers in a Polish accent and gives directions that are incomprehensible. I can imagine driving around the cemetery for the rest of the day while my father is buried once again without me, because of my habit of lostness.

Then Harry finds us. He leads, us to Section IX, and to the open grave, where there is a gray, wooden box on a platform above a raw, gaping hole. Everyone leaves me. They leave me with, my father. I touch the box. And this makes me very happy. Then I weep because I understand fully for the first time how much of my life I've lived without him. How little of our lives we've shared. The weeping is comforting. Anna and David come over and they touch the box. I introduce them to their grandfather. Then I ask them to leave me alone. With what? The box? The bones? The dust? The remains?

What remains?

I don't want to ask Harry what the grave diggers found.

The ambulette with my mother and Arthur arrives. Two of my friends are late, and I keep trying to stall, but Harry says, "There's another one going in right next to him at eleven forty-five. We can't wait.

I agree to start.

Gary intones, "In paradisum," and it begins. My friends arrive. I keep my composure until the words, "May the Lord shine his face upon you," and I break down completely when I try to read the prayer "For consolation at the death of my father, David".

We throw blossoms on top of the coffin. I'm terrified that my mother's wheelchair will hurtle over the edge, but she wants to brought closer so she can throw petals herself.

Then the coffin is lowered. It is a long way down. I see it travel, covered with petals, with the stones I put on it to stand for earthly delight.

Then it's over. It's time to go. Another "party" is collecting. I feel their impatience to bury their own dead.

Everyone embraces. There is tremendous exhilaration in the air. My mother says to me, "I'm so proud of you. My one and only."

Gordon, eating breakfast with her son David the next morning, realises, now that it is finally done, that she is not only not sad, she is happy.

"THERE was something to touch, to be lowered, to put flowers on, and dirt, and a few stones. A thing to which it was possible to bid a farewell. This has made a great difference. What I have taken from the cemetery is a sentence that keeps running through my mind like music: "Love is stronger than death". I say this to David as we eat our eggs and toast.

He says, "You should write that down before you forget."