This was how, a few months ago, I found myself rummaging through my closet at 1 a.m., hand poised over the shoulder of a muted mauve trench coat. Four years ago, I spent $40 to get this coat tailored to fit my narrow shoulders, the most I had ever spent on a single piece of clothing. Since then, I have worn the coat only a handful of times, shivering regretfully in the foggy San Francisco evening as the slick fabric pulled heat from my body and the detachable hood flew off my head. And yet, I still kept it, guiltily, in the back of my closet all these years.

“Keep only things that inspire joy,” I remembered.

“But you don’t understand,” I wanted to say.

Years ago, I had admired that coat on my mother, when I was small enough to be swallowed up by it. When I pored through old photos of her — a favorite childhood pastime — there she was in that coat, standing in front of the university where she had once worked, perched on a rock by Niagara Falls, always grinning happily despite the hardships she had endured performing forced labor in China, and then as an immigrant with my father in America.

The day of her cremation, I carried a box of her favorite clothes to go with her. “In case she gets cold,” I told the mortuary employee. I included the long floral dress she wore to Nanjing to see her brother for the first time in 24 years, a fuzzy red sweater she had worn for days on end, a soft button-down shirt. But I had kept this coat. I couldn’t discard it now, not for such a frivolous reason as decluttering. The coat was part of the shrine I was only beginning to realize I had built.

Other parts: the nub of strawberry-flavored ChapStick my mother had used in the hospital, sweaters that my grief had made me too small for, a plastic jar of 500 paper cranes I had folded, my entire graduate thesis. They were all things that had been bought or constructed with so much love, made more significant because we’d once had so little.

I thought of how, less than a decade ago, the most expensive piece of clothing I had ever bought to that point was my senior prom dress, an ill-fitting peach-colored sack that I found on sale for $15 and still had to think long and hard about purchasing. In that old life, material things were love, and now these remaining objects were all I had.