The last thing I wanted to do after my mother died was go through her things. She had been very private in life and it felt like an intrusion after her death. I wanted to leave things where they were—how they were when she was alive.

I wanted the cuckoo clock that hung over the mantle in her bedroom to stay where it had always been for forty years. I wanted it to strike noon and play that harmonic Swiss melody forever. I wanted the lovely German figurines to dance out of their doorways, kiss, and dance back out of sight they way they had when I was five and sitting on her lap eating a bologna sandwich, the way they had when I was twelve and she was giving me the talk about my maturing body, the way they had when I was eighteen and she was pinning back my hair for prom, the way they had when I went away to college, or came home to cry, heartbroken, in her arms, or the way they had on my wedding day, the day my daughter was born, the day we found out she was sick, even the day she passed on.

That melody in that room was life itself. I craved the continuity it provided. I needed it to stay the way it had always been because that meant she could never really be gone.

But that’s not how life goes, is it? My brother wanted to start going through her things before she was even gone. He thought it would be therapeutic. He thought she’d be able to give us insight into the objects that she loved and that we had taken for granted as meaningless tchotchkes all these years. I said no. I thought it was disrespectful to pack up a life that was still being lived, even if that life was barely holding on, even if that life was dangerously teetering over the edge. I thought that if we packed up, we’d be rushing her into death and I didn’t know what I would do without her. Now that she’s gone, I still don’t.

So we waited. Our lives stood still as we watched hers leave her, lightly fluttering away bit by mercifully small bit every day. We lived to be by her side while she lost weight, hair, and the color in her cheeks. Her skin began to sallow and her eyes began to bulge. Her bones were like fine china, barely protected by the papery thin skin wrapped around them.

And then she was gone.

And then she was gone and I was still fighting against packing up her house. I needed more time. More time to sit amongst her things in my childhood home. More time to sit at her vanity and rifle through her jewelry and perfume like I was still small and playing dress up. More time to process that she was really gone and that this house couldn’t be ours anymore, that this house needed to give its love and light to a new, young family. That it could provide stability to them. That the memories of our laughter and tears would reverberate endlessly, fattening them up with our love, love, love.

That’s how it needed to be, my brother was right. So we began packing up the house, going through items and deciding what to keep and what to throw away, deciding who should get what. it felt wrong and I imagined her walking through the door any minute asking us what in God’s name we thought we were doing.

We saved her room for last. The things in the rest of the house were ours in some way, but that’s not how it was with her room. We were both hesitant to go in, knowing we had to touch her things, get rid of her things. We each took two fingers worth of scotch—liquid bravery, she always called it—and set to work.

It still smelled like her. That was comforting. Going into her bedroom with the warmth of the scotch in our bellies felt like walking into one of her hugs, or lying in bed and burying our faces in her thick red curls. I knew it was going to be okay.

We did the dresser first, then the closet, side tables, under the bed, and finally the vanity. It felt like a mechanical process and we were treating it so—easy in, easy out.

Until we got to the cuckoo clock. It had been a wedding gift from our father’s parents, handmade in the Black Forest and shipped specially to them from our last remaining German relatives just in time for my mother to walk down the aisle. It was a masterpiece. Glossy, strong, and ornate. After my father died suddenly of a heart attack when I was just a little girl, it was this clock that kept her going. It sang to her through her mourning. It roused her in the mornings and gave her the strength she needed to get through the day as a single mother of two small children. It lulled her to sleep at night with its rhythmic ticking. It was all things to her and it was all things to me.

I didn’t want to take it down. We had to. This was our clock—mine, specifically—and it would find a new home in mine. It would give me everything it had given her, plus a little piece of her too.

But when we took it down, we found a little hollow in the all that must’ve been carved out before the clock was placed. In it was a single key with a note that read, “To my dearest Daisy, may you always remember you’ve got the key to my heart. Only you can unlock what’s really inside. –David” and on the back it said, “PS this key will unlock something hidden in this house.”

A note from our father. A treasure hunt.

The house had already been packed up, but suddenly it felt very important to see what the key unlocked. We began thinking about all the things we stowed away that had keyholes and started methodically unpacking as we went. It was a mess and we didn’t have any luck.

But then my brother remembered that she never let anyone light a fire in the hearth below the clock in her room. We always assumed that the flue was full or she didn’t like the ashes so close to her bed, but it was really because a small wooden box had been hidden in its recesses.

We took it out and it looked much cleaner than it should have been, given the years it spent tucked away. We tried the key and sure enough, it worked.

She had been there. She had added to that box over the years. It was stuffed with photographs, childhood awards, everything. And sometime before her death, she had added to it one last time.

Toward the bottom were dried flowers from their wedding, a locked with our baby pictures inside, and a painting of a field of wildflowers. Those were his gifts to her—our father was a gifted artist.

There was a note, too, dated just a week before she passed: “Calliope and Wendell, I love you both so dearly. I’m sorry I must go. This box contains all of my life’s treasures. Everything I have done in my life has been for you. Everything is for you.”

She left me the diamond earrings I had been looking for to bury her with—earrings she wore at all special occasions such as her wedding, our births, his funeral. She left Wendell the cuff links our father was wearing the day they met.

She kept little piece of them, little pieces of us, safe by the clock. Little pieces of the family that we once were. Little pieces of the family that we were no more without them.