My mother was also not the box.

She was the whole difficult sum of them, a frightened, loving, grief-broken woman who had hurt her daughter badly and cherished her completely and never found the words to hold those two facts together herself, and had died with them still unreconciled, leaving the reconciling to me.

Terry and I sat on the floor of her bedroom and went through it together, and we did not say much, because there was not much to say.

Our mother had been a whole person — capable of the cruelty that drove me away and the tenderness that kept a lock of my baby hair for forty-three years — and she was gone, and we were the only two people left who had ever been inside that box.