In the back of one of my closets is an unopened FedEx box from my mother. My 92-year-old mom died on March 8, 2019, and this box was delivered on March 11, 2019, as though it was mailed by the dead.

The box is probably nothing. Mom had trouble throwing things away, so she’d often mail discarded items to me, her only daughter, instead. I got a package about once a month, usually like this one: a box about the size of a soccer ball. I received several used tablecloths, her father’s plaid bathrobe, mismatched cutlery, her mother’s apple corer, suspenders, an ashtray (Mom hadn’t smoked in 70 years), wooden coat hangers and knee-high, fluorescent-orange socks. My unopened box probably contains broken pencils and used place mats, and maybe something she picked up for me at the Treasure Chest, her assisted-living facility’s thrift store. She once sent me a clown trivet she purchased there.

Right now, that package sitting unopened in my closet is the best piece of mail I’ve ever received — because it could contain anything. My mother and I had a difficult relationship, and toward the end of her life she would say, “Tell me something good you remember.” I would dredge up what I could. But now I wonder whether these boxes of broken things she habitually sent were her trying to discard her bad memories. Or were they an instrument of repair — gifts that she genuinely thought in her dementia would help me see how loving she really was? The only choice I have to make now, though, is how to receive her last gift — and how I’m going to construct my memory of her. I’m not ready to open that package yet.

Sarah Sloane