“At least they were halfway organized,” I said to my sister as we sifted through our parents’ stuff. It was an odd reunion for the two of us. We’d shared little for most of our adult lives, seldom wrote and talked even less frequently. It was only with the passing of our parents that we found our way back to each other, first dad in ‘95, then mom five years later. Now here we were, side-by-side, working together. Whether we kept their house or sold it, the stuff inside would have to go. What a job.

“These are papers here.” And the desk drawers held in fact a lot of important documents: tax returns, insurance policies, bank statements, bills and receipts, you name it. Most of these were in folders and labeled, thank goodness. The rest … well, we were just going to have to fudge a bit with some of those things.

People don’t generally plan for this kind of event. There were no color-coded post-its saying “Keep this” or “Throw this away.” Who in their right mind would prepare their house for someone to go through from top to bottom and figure out what to keep and what to toss? Nobody, that’s who. So my parents were sane after all, it turns out, at least when measured against this (minimal) standard.

There were racks and racks of clothes, afghan upon afghan (the fruit of mom’s busy hands), sewing doodads and medicines and cleaning supplies and jars and plastic bottles filled with wood screws and metal screws and nails and nuts and bolts and tacks and washers (both plastic and metal). Wires and cords and cables, orphans all of them, now coiled and held fast with a twist-tie or rubber band. Coat hangers and coat hangers and coat hangers. There were bundles of paper clips and boxes of staples and balls of rubber bands and bigger balls of aluminum foil and tall, tall stacks of paper bags — my god, stacks and stacks of paper bags, enough paper bags to keep a corner grocery store in business through a bumper year and beyond. Old clocks and watches and door stoppers and handles and things for which we probably no longer have names. There were newspapers, of course, piles and piles of newspapers, generally moving, as you pulled them off the top, from recent to less recent to something not even remotely recent and then to what was only vaguely historical and barely still of the (past) century. But we might need those someday! I could hear the argument, from either my mom or my dad, they formed a rare united front on this point. I began to understand where I had learned my packrat tendencies.

It took us several days to get the job done. In the end, I was grateful for all those paper bags; we put many of them to good use. (Our parents had been right after all!) The house now stood empty. It echoed if we spoke. (I think maybe it echoed even when we were quiet, but I didn’t mention this to my sister.) We’d sifted and sorted our way through the remnants of our parents’ lives. It was a sobering moment.

I wasn’t surprised by anything we’d found. Although sometimes quirky and idiosyncratic, it somehow struck me as consistent with the bits and pieces of people’s lives, bits and pieces that they collect and gather and categorize and store, not for posterity’s sake but just because that’s what you do with the bits and pieces of your life. You put some here, you keep some there, and after a while it takes on a shape of its own and you call it “home” or something like that. But of course it’s just stuff. In the end, it’s just stuff.

As I said, I wasn’t surprised by anything that we’d found. But I was disappointed. I have to admit that I was disappointed by what I didn’t find. Especially when I learned about my friend. Her mom had been the kind to read poetry (this would have been quite foreign to my parents), and as she was going through her mother’s things after her death, through her mother’s poetry books, scraps of paper fell from between the pages, a small deciduous Idaho forest right there in the living room. They held notes, these scraps of paper did, handwritten notes with page numbers penciled in to point to poems or fragments of poems that had touched her then when she could still be touched and now could only be read as something of a map of her heart as it once was. Still, I thought, she had that much. A map of her mother’s heart. Had she known earlier, my friend could have read those to her, her favorite poems, the ones with her favorite parts, the ones that bore her penciled marks and touched her heart, during those months when her health was failing. But she’d found the books too late.

It seems to be a common story. I was looking for something other than insurance policies and bank statements and nuts and bolts and orphaned cables. Like my friend, I would have appreciated a sign of life, a life behind the obvious one that I knew, or thought I knew, a life I’m sure, even today, that my parents must have had but I’d never bothered to ask about. I’d thought of the questions too late.

I suppose I can picture the house of my friend’s parents, if I try. It’s maybe not so different from the one my own parents used to live in. And if I could stand there now, in my parents’ house, and if she could stand there now, in her parents’ house, I think we might hear something similar, if we listened closely. If we listened closely, in the silence that comes with absence, we’d hear it there, the echo of things left unsaid, the echo of what’s left behind.