Exploring this box of memorabilia is both therapeutic and crushing at the same time

I

am 44 years old, and I have just opened the box holding pieces of my mother’s life.

There is no order to the stuff I find. I get a glimpse of her childhood, turning the pages of a scrapbook she put together as a teenager. The pages are yellowed and no longer sticky. I see her report cards, her principal’s letter of recommendation to seminaries in Eretz Yisrael. There is her second-grade class picture with Mrs. McAllister, and her seventh-grade class picture with Mrs. Werner.

The baby milestones book her mother prepared for her is in this box, too, and I flip through it hungrily. I never knew that my mother weighed 7.5 pounds at birth and that she began eating solids at four months.

I read the birthday cards her family wrote her throughout the years, pulsing with good-natured sibling rivalry and affection. In the card her younger brother wrote to her when he was in fifth grade, he refers to her as “the queen of our family.” The typewritten speech she delivered at her graduation as class representative is folded over, and her yearbook is autographed by friends wishing her the best that life has to offer.