How could anyone be expected to do this without breaking down. The question had echoed inside her head for the last hour, since she first unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled up her sleeves, and gingerly lowered her aching joints to the floor. Now she sat cross-legged in front of an open plastic bin; condensation slowly crept down the geometric panels on a glass of iced tea at her left elbow, acting as a prism for the early morning light and broadcasting colorful rainbows on the opposite wall. It left a puddle and most likely a ring on the hardwood floor but she no longer cared. Soon enough she would pull out of the driveway for the last time. Leafing through the pages of a child’s storybook on her lap, she admired the gorgeous pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations, remembering a bedtime ritual played out so many hundreds of times. Here was naked Mickey falling through the air into the night kitchen, his infantile genitalia leaving nothing to the imagination, a controversy questioned during an interview with the celebrated author-illustrator—how else was he to portray a naked toddler boy, he had answered without hesitation.

Her mind drifted back in time to soft twilight coming through west-facing windows in a cheerful upstairs bedroom, snuggled into yellow flannel sheets, the weight of her child’s sweet-smelling head resting upon her shoulder, his hair still slightly damp from the bath and his eyes growing heavy—how many times they’d repeated this ritual. Right through the first year of middle school, she guessed. She closed the book and placed it carefully on the Seuss-like tower of others destined for an unknown fate, allowing tears to flow freely down her cheeks. There were more important works penned by this author (how does one begin to assess?), that she’d pack into the box and load onto the moving truck in the morning.

Today, she was determined to give each childhood tome the scrutiny it deserved. This was the first large bin of nine, absolute cruelty. Worse still that many were book-plated and inscribed in her neat handwriting, with the child’s name and occasion. “On Your Fourth Birthday,” or “Christmas 1995.” Powerful reminders of the ephemeral nature of life and love. She imagined a day in the near future when another young mother might pull one of these beloved books from a bookstore or library shelf, finger its pages, and discover the bookplate and inscription, and hoped she would pause for a moment to reflect on the story of the named child within. She hoped with all her might that mother would never find herself of necessity repeating the exercise that now made her heart ache more than she ever imagined it could.