A Box With A Strange Name
Esme was fourteen the summer her grandmother died.
She had loved her grandmother with the particular ferocity that only granddaughters give. Her grandmother — Helga, eighty-seven, sharp-eyed and quiet-voiced — had been the family's central column. The funeral was the first proper funeral Esme had been to. She had not cried in public. She had cried for most of the night before, alone in her room, in a way that her mother had not interrupted.
Two weeks after the funeral, Esme's mother and her aunt began clearing Helga's small flat. The flat was in a tall apartment building, with a tidy living room, a kitchen that smelled of cardamom and bay, a bedroom whose books had been arranged for sixty years in the same careful order, and a small storage cupboard at the end of the hall.
Esme came along to help. She was glad to. She had not, until that summer, understood what *clearing somebody's flat* meant emotionally. By midday she did. It meant going through somebody's life backwards, holding objects that the person had loved, and deciding what to keep, what to give away, what to throw out. It meant making, very fast, a thousand small decisions on behalf of a person who could not weigh in.
Esme was given the storage cupboard. Her mother said: "Just sort everything into piles. Keep, donate, recycle. Ask me about anything you're not sure about."
The cupboard was full of boxes.
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