The last box I loaded into my mother's moving truck weighed almost nothing.
I lifted it and felt the shift inside—something soft, something small. I opened it right there on the tailgate.
A tomato pincushion, the felt faded to a tired pink. And a scarf, the one she wore every Christmas when she sang in the choir. The choir director always said it reminded him of holly berries.
I remember pricking my fingers on her sewing pins as a child, sitting under her table while she hemmed someone else's curtains to pay the gas bill. The scarf still smelled faintly of her—talcum powder and candle wax.
My mother had been gone eight years by then. I'd kept that box in my closet all that time, never opening it, never letting it go.
The moving truck was for me. I was leaving the oil patch town where I'd worked as a vet tech for thirty-two years. No husband, no kids. Just a house full of things I'd told myself were important.
I put the box back in the truck without closing the flaps. I drove four hundred miles with the pincushion rattling against the scarf, and I didn't cry once.
Now the scarf is on my new coat rack, and the pincushion sits by my sewing machine. I don't need to keep them in the dark anymore.
I was wrong for eight years. Grief doesn't want a shrine. It wants the door left open so the light can find its way back in.