When I was three years old, my mother learned she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. Each day she sat for hours at our dining table, her dark hair tied back, surrounded by stacks of paper covered in dense, technical paragraphs. I watched from the kitchen doorway as she researched every available treatment: conventional, alternative, Hail Mary.

Over the next four years she consulted doctors, specialists, homeopaths, and healers. A surgeon cut the cancerous flesh from her body. She adhered to rigid diets and swallowed a mountain of pills. She flooded her body with chemotherapy and carrot juice. She was always looking for a way to survive.

When I was seven, the materials on the dining table began to change. Wrapping paper and ribbons took the place of highlighted pages as her arms worked busily under the dark fuzz of her shorn head. Scissors swished through gift wrap. Paper creased under her fingers. Ribbon was cut to length with one snip. Knots came together with a tiny creak. Swish, crease, snip, creak. She had begun assembling two chests of gifts: one for my older brother, Jamie, and one for me.

Into the chests went presents and letters for the milestones of our lives she would miss—driver’s licenses, graduations, and every one of our birthdays until the age of thirty. When the chests were full, my father carried them up to our rooms.

Each time I opened the chest, I could inhabit a shared reality, something she’d imagined for us many years earlier. Like a half-remembered scent or the first notes of a familiar song—each time, a tiny glimpse of her.

For years after her death, the pink cardboard chest sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom, and I would open its lid to run my fingers over the rows of neatly wrapped packages, each with a card threaded on thin, curling ribbon. Envelopes thick with typed pages were clearly labeled in my mother’s tidy handwriting, an invitation wrapped up in a warning: nothing should be opened before the proper time. Back then, the chest was too heavy for me to lift.

Over the last twenty years, the chest has traveled with me across a continent, moved from state to state and apartment to apartment, always the first thing I found a place for as the moving truck pulled away. It has lived in crawl spaces and in the backs of closets; my instinct is always to protect it. Tuck it away. Every year the chest has grown lighter.

Now only three objects remain inside.