past tense: conjugating absence

Today I was talking to my masseuse, oddly enough, about some unpolished silver I have in a drawer, passed from my great grandmother through my mother, to me. We were talking about how tarnished silver has so many fascinating colors, it makes you not want to polish it. I think I feel some kind of compulsion to talk about meaningful, deep things with her because she represents a union of physical and spiritual well-being that can only be described as intentional and, of course, full of meaning. As a result I may force conversation sometimes, trying to appear integrated and whole, when I really come fractured, in knots, and adrift in the world. After all, what you pay a masseuse to do is clearly something you are at least partly missing in your normal daily routine. In my case, it is not a deprivation of human touch or visually appealing environment: I inhabit my office space like a home, changing the lighting and decor to suit, and at home my husband is a constant physical presence that comforts and calms. I come for relaxation, which is too easily left by the wayside even at home, where I can find things to work on and improve when I should be resting, meditating, praying, or otherwise integrating the spiritual and the physical. Talking about the unpolished silver, I started to say that "my mom always says" I should polish it before using it (she never did, because she rarely used it, of course). I caught myself, but didn't know how to conjugate the verb "to say." Clearly, she said it once, or maybe more. She does not say it any longer. Or does she? Every time I replay a memory of her speaking to me, does she "say on"? Does she have speech in my thoughts that continues beyond her lack of vocal chords? Certainly she lives in other capacities, too--in the thoughts of every one who ever knew her and calls her to mind from time to time. Can I say that she says anything--or is all her voice in the past tense, for me? Whatever life she now has is paradoxical: she lives and she does not live, speaks and speaks no more. Am I allowed to say that she still speaks to me, or is that admission insane? There are a handful of songs that reduce me to weeping on my knees in church, because I cannot hear them without her voice leading the singers. I hear it like an echo: faint, but undeniably present. I admit that I am still not very well acquainted with the grammar of loss.