Is there any way to use a jQuery overlay to confirm/reject node deletion?
You might be able to do that with:

https://drupal.org/project/ctools_automodal_admin


  Provides automatic modal support for any hook_menu() paths that have
  'modal' => TRUE defined. This makes it easy to add optional modal
  support in any contrib module and helps reduce the burden on module
  developers to support modals.


If you added the node delete path, perhaps node/%node/delete to the modal paths, it may just work.