There were two boxes filled with her some of her memories in my study. Boxes left over from emptying her apartment almost five years ago. I'd put off this task for so long.

Still smarting from being "disowned and disinherted", I guess. I went through each item in the two boxes. Hoping to find a clue, perhaps, some indication as to why I no longer mattered in her life. There were the bank statements from the 1990s, health records, a collection of scissors, photographs of people I never knew, and events I was never a party to.

Of the three hundred or so photos, I found five photos of me. A high school photo, two photos when I was about 18 months old, a photo when when we on vacation in Maine in 1960, and a single photo from one of those "four for a quarter" vending machines.

All the big possessions, the furniture, the curios, all were dispatched a long time ago. A dining room table and a couple of artifacts are all I hung onto.

Looking through the boxes were like looking the last few years of my mother's life. I separated the paper from the non-recyclables. The paper will be recycled, The rest is trash. There was nothing else to hold onto. 

I decided to toss away my mother's memories with the same emotion that she tossed me away. None.