Three years after he died, I still haven't opened the bottom drawer of his old dresser. Not because I can't, but because opening it means deciding what to do with what's inside. A watch that stopped working in 1998 and he never had fixed. A folded piece of paper with my childhood address in his handwriting. Three coins from a country that doesn't exist anymore.

I've catalogued the drawer's contents without actually opening it. I know exactly what's there because I placed each object carefully in the weeks after - one drawer, deliberately, instead of giving them away to the charitable impulse that takes everything in those first months. The drawer is doing what grief does: holding everything still while life moves around it.

Sometimes I think about what happens when I die. Someone who never knew him will open it then. They'll hold the watch, feel nothing, make a practical decision. The objects will just become objects again. All this weight I've been carrying will cost nothing to throw away.

I found myself standing in front of the dresser last Tuesday for twelve minutes. I timed it without deciding to - some compulsion that arrived without announcement. His hands used to pause at thresholds too. I carry the people I've lost in my body, not just in my memory. I am so much like him it frightens me now.

When did you last hold something belonging to someone gone? Not to examine it. Just to feel the temperature of an object they once touched. Does it still feel warm? Does it feel like anything at all, or have even the objects learned to move on without us?