My mother kept a jar of buttons on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Not for any practical reason — she had a sewing kit for that, tucked in the hall closet behind the winter coats — but because she liked the way the light came through them in the afternoon, how each one threw a small colored shadow on the wall.

When she died, I was the one who had to decide what to do with everything.

My sister said to throw it all away. “It’s just stuff,” she told me over the phone, from three states away where grief apparently had a different gravity. “Keep what matters and donate the rest.” She spoke in the clipped, reasonable tones of someone who has processed loss efficiently, who has a therapist and a label maker and a subscription to a mindfulness app.

I kept the jar.

I also kept a single knitting needle — she lost the other — a ceramic rooster that always seemed to be judging me from the counter, and a dress I’ll never wear, moss-green with small pearl buttons, the kind of dress that requires somewhere to go.

The apartment smelled like her for about two weeks. Then it started smelling like me. That bothered me more than anything.

People say grief is a wave. I think they say this because it sounds poetic, and also because they haven’t had time to think of something better. What it actually is: more like weather. Sometimes you’re fine — you’re on the subway, you’re eating a sandwich, you’re laughing at something stupid on the internet — and then there is a shift in pressure, something barometric, and it’s coming. You can’t outrun it. You don’t try. You just find somewhere to stand until it passes.

A button fell out of the jar the second month. I was reaching past it for the dish soap and caught the lid wrong, and one button dropped — a small brown one, the kind that comes with dress shirts and always gets lost — and fell into the drain before I could catch it.

I stood there for a long time.

Then I said, out loud, to no one: “Sorry.” Which is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me.

The ceramic rooster I moved to my bedroom because I couldn’t look at it every morning. Then I couldn’t sleep with it staring at me. I put it in the closet. I took it out again. I’ve had this argument with a rooster three times.

My mother bought it at a flea market in 1994. She said the man selling it told her it was antique, which she didn’t believe, but she liked that he tried. “People who make an effort deserve some reward,” she said. That was her entire philosophy, in a sentence. She gave people the benefit of the doubt and she meant it, which is harder than it sounds, which most people don’t realize until it’s too late to tell them.

In November, a woman on my block stopped me and asked about the jar. I’d taken it outside — I don’t know why, I was cleaning the windowsill — and she was walking a dog that had no interest in walking, only in existing very still on the sidewalk.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it vintage?”

I looked at the jar. It was just a mason jar, the cheap kind with the rubber seal. Through the glass, the buttons were layered in shades of cream and brown and dusty blue. It did look beautiful, actually. I hadn’t noticed in a while.

“It was my mother’s,” I said.

She nodded like that explained everything, and it did, and she moved on, and her dog eventually followed.

I still haven’t worn the green dress. I’ve taken it out of the closet and held it against myself in the mirror and thought about it seriously, the way you think about a decision. But wearing it somewhere seems like it would mean something, and I’m not ready for it to mean anything yet.

Maybe in the spring. She always liked spring.

The jar is back on the windowsill. Some afternoons, the light comes through just right, and the buttons throw their small shadows on the wall, and I stand there at the sink doing nothing useful, just watching, which she would have understood completely.