You would think, clearing a whole house, that you’d fight over the good things — the furniture, the jewelry, whatever had value — and we didn’t, not once, because we had both arrived at the same understanding without discussing it, which is that the things worth keeping are almost never the things worth money.

Terry did not want our mother’s good china, which was worth something; he wanted the watermelon magnet off the refrigerator, which was worth nothing and which had held up our lives in that kitchen for forty years.

I did not want the antique clock the estate company got excited about; I wanted a chipped coffee mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GARDENER that our father had given our mother as a joke and that she had used every single morning for thirty years.

Value, it turns out, is the wrong axis entirely.