On a nothing August Saturday, with little more on my mind than the afternoon races at Saratoga, I picked up a copy of the New York Post and headed home to fix myself a sandwich. Lurid crime, political scandal, questionable celebrity antics—I don’t remember what was splashed across the front page that day but (apart from the fact that I contributed to the features section for more than a decade) I’ve always admired the Post for its unflinching honesty about  what it is: a right-leaning tabloid obsessed with sports, neighborhood minutiae, unlikely deaths, and miracle medical cures. It’s the only hard-copy paper I buy.

What captured my attention as I leafed through this edition wasn’t the cheesecake snapshots or the racing column they still run, but a near inscrutable insert, which listed names and last known addresses associated with unclaimed financial assets and the institutions that held them.

I scoured the fine print for my name, which alas did not appear. But wait, what was this? Here’s Francis Pavia, the Uncle Frank of candy store infamy,  next to the name of a bank where he once kept a little money.

I texted his daughter, my cousin, and told her what I had uncovered.

Frank’s gone four years now, and she was sure she’d closed out his accounts after his passing, but she said she’d show up in person at that bank anyway and ask some questions.

A few weeks went by.

They don’t have anything for my dad, she reported, but there’s something about a stock fund that’s being held in Grandma’s name.

Grandma? Grandma died, quite demented, the poor thing, in 1997.

Philomena née Colaianni, or Phyllis, as she chose to Americanize herself, was born in 1919. She became a Pavia as a young woman when she married my grandfather Jerome. She had grown up poor in this country, and once, describing her family’s circumstances, said it wasn’t really such a burden not possessing things, but when there’s no food in the house and no money to buy any, that’s when you’re really feeling it. She was speaking from experience. And from her heart. Is it any wonder, then, that she matured into a sharp, canny woman?

She was tough and smart and always working at something, for a time operating a second-hand clothing store from her front porch. But the only formal employment we can document was a stint at a company called Fasco Fans, where she must have been on an assembly line. Noted as OCCUPATION on her death certificate is “fan maker.” She and Jerome—a charming junkman and jack-of-all-trades, and a real operator—hustled. And they made it.

Of my four grandparents, all of whom lived into my adulthood, I felt as if I knew her the least. I thought of her less often than I did the others. But as soon as that truth asserted itself into my consciousness (or my indwelling spirit, as the Franciscan Richard Rohr has posited), her name and her image started cropping up in my meditations. Somebody once told me to pay attention to such inspirations. Maybe God or the universe or some entity was trying to tell me something. I began devoting decades of the Rosary to her memory and to her eternal rest.

Thoughts of Phyllis became more frequent. My prayers intensified. Here’s the spooky part: All of this was happening about ten days before my cousin told me about the mystery stock fund. Understand that the business of Grandma’s life had long been settled, except for this one little thing discovered 27 years after her death. A communique from the other side? I’m not betting against it.

I’m not betting against it because I don’t believe there’s that much separating us, the living and the dead, especially from those we were tied to in life. It’s not as if I believe in ghosts (although I don’t not believe in ghosts) but I do believe in presence, spiritual presence. I believe in souls, and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that the soul—this animating energy—lives on and is transformed. Not that I can prove a single word of this (in the way I can demonstrate the square root of 16 is 4), but that’s the bridge we must all cross and recross, from faith to reason and back again.

After my cousin was stymied in her initial attempt to obtain more information, i.e., get ahold of that money, the matter devolved to me as Phyllis’s eldest grandchild and a rightful heir, and thus was cut a meandering trail through New York State’s various bureaus and offices. I landed up on the reason side of the bridge. A clerk in Surrogate’s Court remarked that as far as the court was concerned, I had done everything right, which I found encouraging, but, he went on, the State makes it very difficult to extract the funds—after having put me on the trail in the first place with the notice in the Post. That’s okay. Persistence is in my nature, and this terrier has found his sock.

As the so-called coincidences stack up—the cash stash nobody had an inkling of; the meditation and prayer alerting me to Phyllis’s presence; the only newspaper I buy publishing the state’s unclaimed-funds roster; my loopy ideas about the spiritual realm—I’m convinced there’s a mystical force in action here, pointing the way toward memory, family history, and heritage, toward inheritance and legacy.

Whenever anybody tells you it’s not about the money, it is, of course, about the money, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about it. My plan is to divide whatever funds there may be in equal parts among Phyllis’s grandchildren: my brother and sister and me, and our three cousins. Would she rathered the State kept that money? What kind of question is that?