And it was sad, standing in those echoing rooms, but it was not the erasure I’d feared, and I have been trying since to understand why, and I think it is this.

A full house holds a life in place; you can point to the recliner and say there she sat, to the table and say there we ate, and the objects do the remembering for you.

When the objects are gone, the remembering has nowhere to live but in you, and so it comes home.

Standing in the empty front room, I was not further from my parents.

I was closer, because there was nothing left in that room but the memory of them, and the memory was mine, and it had moved, in the emptying, from the furniture into me, where it would go on living as long as I did.