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When my father moved from his rambling house to a three-room apartment, my siblings and I were enlisted to help.

Since we didn't know what to do with all the stuff from our childhood home, we crammed everything into his new digs. The silver and crystal that was brought out for company, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, 1965 edition, the dusty boxes of report cards extolling our virtues as friendly, co-operative children, the massive dining room table with its 12 gold flocked chairs — we transferred all of it.

"Have I told you how much I love this place?" my father would ask.

"You have, Dad."

"I come home from work, make a coffee and relax in the Florida room. I just love it."

The Florida room was a narrow, enclosed porch overlooking a parking lot. I don't know what it had to do with Florida. "That's great, Dad."

My father was telling me he had no intention of leaving his apartment and moving to a nursing home.

Sorry, Dad.

We put it off as long as we could, longer than we should have. But when his arms were too weak to hoist himself from his chair, when his legs were too feeble to carry his weight, we moved him to a home. We thought that if we brought some items from the apartment — a pink velvet loveseat, a blue ottoman — maybe that would cheer him up, maybe he would rally. As if upholstery had magical restorative powers. He was there for five days, and then he died.

Once again, we had to pack up the stuff. My two brothers, my sister and I held a family meeting to figure out how to close the apartment.

We sat in his living room with our coats on, four adult orphans wishing we were anywhere but there. It would have been more comfortable if we could have taken our coats off, but all the windows were open to let in fresh air. In the weeks before we had to move him, our father sealed up his apartment, sat in a chair and smoked, and a bitter stench still lingered in the place.

We sorted through the items quickly because no one wanted much. We all had our own stuff, and our father had suggested the furniture might be worth an interesting sum. We spent the rest of the afternoon shivering and discussing what we would do with the proceeds from a sale. I was considering a trip to Andalusia.

I arrived one morning to prepare for a meeting with a woman from a high-end consignment store. I displayed the crystal and silver on the dining room table, lit one of my father's stale cigarettes, sat on the pink loveseat and calculated what we'd make from this bounty. I figured we'd clear about $40,000.

But I miscalculated. It turned out the woman wanted … nothing. Apparently, the furniture that I thought was so exquisite, that I used to sashay around pretending to be Scarlett O'Hara receiving gentlemen callers, was faux French Provençal from Eaton's. The market was flooded with the stuff and nobody wanted it.

Adios Andalusia.

I took a green garbage bag into my father's office, opened it wide and tossed in some old bookends. Then I sat at the desk, fired up another cigarette, opened the top drawer and nearly choked on my sadness. There was his handwriting on squares of white notepaper: reminders of doctor's appointments, shopping lists, little conversations with himself in script so familiar I could hear his voice.

I closed the drawer and opened another. It contained a number of plaques honouring my mother's charitable work. One of them had her photo mounted between two acrylic plates. I already had the picture, but how do you throw out an item with your mother's face on it? You don't.

I had been there for an hour, and all that I'd managed to throw out were the bookends and a chipped mug. My brother came by to pick up some documents and spied the mug in the garbage.

"You're throwing that out?" he asked.

"It's broken," I said.

"But that's the mug that held the pencils on the shelf by the phone."

I pulled it from the bag.

It was becoming clear that we were never going to have the place cleaned out by the time the lease expired. There was only one thing to do: renew the lease.

Just because my father couldn't stay in his beloved apartment didn't mean everything else had to go. I could keep the apartment and pay the rent on all the relics of a former life. And when my husband and I died, our sons could inherit the lease and stuff in the boxes of hockey trophies and Mother's Day cards and the old pine table around which we've spent so many happy hours. And then their children, if they were creative enough to make space, could cram in the mementos from their childhoods, and nobody would ever have to let go of anything again. Then I remembered the building was going to be turned into a condo.

It's been a year since the furniture was trucked off to a flea market and the garbage collectors carted away the rest. Yet still when I think of the chipped mug, the acrylic plaque, the pink velvet loveseat, I want it all back.

Gail Kerbel lives in Toronto.

Illustration by Birgit Lang.