My bones ache. The deep grief of the final week of sorting, sifting, deciding, leaving behind things in my mom’s home of 51 years is settling in.

I wake up each morning with an albatross around my neck and drag myself through each room again. Culling, looking, deciding, stepping away, and again and again.

No, I don’t want the china etched in silver nor the hutch that it sits in but I still want the hutch to sit in the dining room with the dishes because it’s always been there since I was six years old. The gravy boat stays on top of the larger bowls until Thanksgiving when I open the door, smell the woody oak, and carry it gently to my mother, my bare feet cool on the kitchen linoleum until it changes to tile and I became old enough to have my own slippers.

She ladles in the gravy and hands it to me. “Careful,” she whispers as my feet patter down the hallway toward the dining room table where the turkey platter already rests, the cream tablecloth brushes against my arms as I lift the boat.

“Corna-what?,” I ask.

“Cor-nu-co-pia,” my grandmother says. “It means a lot, enough, more than enough,” she says. “Look at the table filled with all the food. How lucky are we?”

But I didn’t feel lucky.

That same night, I’ll tuck myself in bed while my mother finishes the dishes, my grandmother and grandfather have left and the memory of the first Thanksgiving without my father becomes real again. It’s only in the dark that I cry. Pillow over my head, thumb in my mouth.

Don’t talk about our dad, my brother tells me. You’ll make our mother sad.

Instead, I feel sad most of the time. And while I know he won’t ever come back, I pretend—instead of being in the ground, he’s sailing on a ship trying to find his way home.

I open the cupboard once more. Breathe in the smell of trees. Breathe out the sadness.

I am still here. The tears now allowed to fall openly, alone in the house, my sobs echo against the empty walls.