Last week, my mother died.

It wasn’t unexpected, and yet, when it happened, it was. Because nothing prepares you for death. Especially not your mother’s death.

And although our relationship wasn’t close, but was often fraught with arguments and misunderstandings, especially when I was younger, I feel her loss now like a punch to the stomach – swift, painful, leaving me stunned and unable to breathe.

I think of all the things we didn’t do – we didn’t go shopping together (the few times we did, it ended badly, with hostilities and bruised feelings), we didn’t share each other’s clothes, we didn’t confide in each other. When I was a teen, we circled one another like wary dogs. I was convinced she didn’t care what I did or who I became.

But then I realized, while going through her belongings in search of wills and deeds and titles, that she’d kept virtually everything I’d ever made her – a homemade valentine I created when I was six, using red and pink construction paper and way too much LePage’s glue, a couple of pencil sketches I’d done of the beach house we stayed in every year in North Carolina, a paper I wrote for a college English Composition class. Things I’d long since forgotten about. Things I thought she had no interest in.

I went through boxes of stuff, boxes filled with old photos and class pictures and postcards, letters and baby bracelets and graduation certificates. Here were mom and dad as newlyweds, posing by the seashore. Here was the Christmas ornament my little brother made out of clay. Here was dad’s self-winding watch. Here was his death certificate.

And it struck me that after we die, we leave behind precious little to show we were ever here. An entire life, fully lived, is reduced to a shoebox of stuff. Some pictures. A wedding ring. A driver’s license. A few handwritten letters. A pile of out-of-date clothing nobody wants.

An entire life, gone.

But cliched though it may be, the memories I have are mine to keep. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones that make me laugh and cry at the same time – those memories are mine, forever… until I’m gone, and my own kids have the unhappy task of sorting through all of that stuff.

So I vow to start clearing away the detritus of my life when return home. I don’t want my children to go through the pain, the expense, the headaches of dealing with the aftermath of death like I’ve had to do. I don’t want them to wade through a sea of clothes and shoes and those little tchotchkes that I think are cute, but that I know they’ll throw straight in the bin.

I’m sitting now at my mother’s kitchen table, and I remember how at dinner she always served my husband first, and put an extra helping on his plate.

“Why do you do that?” I asked her one evening at the dinner table. “Why does he get special treatment?”

Her answer? “Because he’s a man.”

At the time, it raised my feminist hackles. Now? It makes me laugh. I even find myself putting an extra helping of veggies or the biggest steak on my husband’s plate – “More for you, sweetie – after all, you’re a man!”

Instead of dwelling on what my mother didn’t give me, like enough of her time or the kind of syrupy-sweet mother-daughter relationship you see on The Brady Bunch, I think of what she did give me. Stubbornness. A refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. An unwillingness to settle.

And in the end, that was enough.