This paper is a reading of Joyce's death and short-lived resurrection as a zombie in Season V. I will discuss various incarnations of the mother as corpse in terms of the Lacanian category of the Real. I'll show that the dead mother is figured in two ways--as a corpse, and as a zombie. Each addresses a version of the symbolic value of maternity, and Buffy and Dawn's effort to experience their dead mother's love as a Real, as opposed to symbolic, thing. Paradoxically, motherly love is most vigorously experienced by encounters with the dead, not the living, mother. I'll use my reading to make the larger argument that BTVS employs death as a figure for the Real, mapping that inarticulate category onto everyday life experience.