Note: This piece grew out of the conversation that followed when I first shared my thoughts about the things we keep after loss. So many people wrote with their own stories, and each one carried the same quiet ache — the longing for continuity, the wish that our love could keep unfolding through the hands of those we’ve lost. Their words reminded me that we are not alone in this space. We are all caretakers of small museums of love, each of us finding our own way to let meaning keep moving.
Since losing Jess, I have learned that grief is always finding new places to make itself known. Lately, it has been showing up on the shelves and in the boxes that hold the small artifacts of my life and those that came before mine.
At first, I thought it was just another wave of missing her. But this feels like something slightly different. It is a kind of memory sadness that gathers in the things she never got to choose.
When I was in my thirties, I honestly did not think I would have children. It was not something I worried about or even spent much time considering. Life felt full enough. I did not question how the story would keep unfolding or through whom it would continue.
Once Jess arrived, even the ordinary things began to feel alive with new meaning. The vase from my grandmother, the photos on the wall, the small keepsakes I had carried through the years all began to belong to her story too. I could imagine her holding them one day, and for a moment, the past and the future felt perfectly joined.
Now that she is gone, that sense of connection has unraveled. I look around and see shelves of stories with nowhere to land. Every object seems to hum with the memory of a life that once included her.
There is the very fragile but “very so cute” porcelain rabbit she always wanted to play with. Every few years, she would tell me, with great seriousness, that she was finally big enough to keep it in her room. I always promised that someday she would. It still sits where it always has, and now it feels like it is waiting, too.
There is the vase from my grandmother that I thought she might want when she was older, and the small framed plaque she received for the compassion she showed her fellow students. Each piece still holds its beauty, but they have lost their destination. It is such a strange ache, this mix of love and loss wrapped up in things that once felt so full of meaning. They are still full of meaning, but now the meaning has nowhere to go.
For a while, I thought this feeling might be mine alone. But when I began to write about it, people started reaching out.
One mother said she feels the constant reminder that there will be no continuity, that the future ends with her. Another wrote that she has so many things she hoped her son would one day use, things that now sit waiting for no one. Someone else said she keeps a box of her daughter’s lip balms and uses them because her lips once touched them, and she will never again be able to kiss her.
There were parents who have kept every drawing, every badge, every ornament. There were those who cannot bear to part with their child’s guitar or school papers. Others spoke of being the last link in a family chain, the only child of an only child, the keeper of all the family history, holding things that will mean nothing once they are gone.
We are a quiet group of curators, tending to small museums of love.
Some people are finding their own ways to let the meaning keep moving. One mother gives her son’s belongings to his friends as gifts. Another is cataloging family items and writing notes about each one so the stories will not be lost. Some have started giving heirlooms to distant cousins just to keep them in the family. And others, like me, are still standing in the middle of it, not quite ready to let go.
I have joked that maybe I should create a storytelling giveaway. I would post a picture of something I have kept and write a short story about it. Where it came from, who it belonged to, and why it matters. Then I would invite people to tell me why they would want it. Whoever shared the most heartfelt story would get to keep it. I laugh when I describe it, but deep down, I think I mean it. It would be one way to let these pieces of a life keep on living somewhere, carrying their meaning forward through new hands.
It is easy to say that things do not matter, that they are just objects. But that is not quite true. They are evidence of love. They are the tangible ways we remember and connect, the physical proof that life happened here.
When I walk past the shelf where the vase, the rabbit, and the plaque sit together, I sometimes think they are waiting for her. But maybe they are waiting for me too. Maybe they are here to remind me that love once filled this space so completely that even the objects remember.
I do not know what will become of them. For now, they stay where they are, keeping company with the memories that made them matter. One day, I may know what to do. Perhaps I never will.
Either way, they remain part of the story that keeps unfolding, even when I cannot see where it goes. Love keeps moving. It lingers in the dust and the wood grain, in porcelain and paper, in the quiet corners of a room.
Maybe that is what these things were always meant to do. To bear witness. To hold the echo of a life that mattered. To remind us that what we love does not end. It only changes form, finding quiet ways to keep going.
Grief Heart Project 