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Yesterday I went to a real estate closing. For months we've been trying to sell my mother's house, the one she was living in when she died of lung cancer a year and a half ago. For a while it looked like one of my sisters might move in, but finally that didn't work out, so we put the house on the market. It lingered and lingered, and eventually sold for 20 percent less than our mother had paid for it in 2005. Yet that is the least of our losses.

My sisters and I spent four emotional days going through the house's contents, unearthing long-forgotten objects in a kind of family archaeology. So many things brought me back, with mixed sorrow and pleasure. A set of copper-plated mugs we used for iced tea in summer. A little sign reading "Chien Méchant" (Mean Dog), that we got on a trip to Quebec and hung over the kitchen bed of our faithful Dalmatian, Captain. I opened up a cloth bag to discover the building blocks I played with as a toddler; later I came across a wooden footstool I'd been allowed to crayon on, until the colors all merged together into a purplish chaos.

We dug out boxes of stuff from our mother's long-ago childhood. Toys, diaries, a still functioning 1930s-era Victrola, complete with 78 rpm records. Both my grandparents came from farm families in Ohio, but my grandfather had gotten a job at a chemical company and worked his way up into management; by the 1920s he had some money and was in a mood to splurge. How many Americans owned a home movie camera in 1930? Oscar Hook did, and so now we have these fluttery, silent-movie scenes of my mother and uncle riding ponies, playing dress-up, and cavorting at a lakeside cottage while men in woolen one-piece suits play pickle on the sand.

Looking at these images of Mary Ann Hook's well-appointed childhood, you'd think she would have grown up spoiled. Yet somehow our mother turned out to be a singularly kind person. People were drawn to her lavish and quirky personality, her deep delight in life, and her irrepressible hopefulness. She was generous – with her time, her money, and her laughter. When my sisters and I talk about what we miss most, it's that laughing voice on the phone. At the end of her life she showed immense courage. "I'm not sorry for myself," she told me a few weeks before she died. "I've had a great life. But I'm sorry for all of you, because I remember what it's like." She had grieved the loss of her own mother intensely, and she knew what lay in store for us.

Among my mother's possessions were objects we wished we knew more about. Who exactly are all these ancestors staring dourly out from the leather-bound 19th-century book of photographs we found in a box? Our mother could have told us – indeed, she probably did tell us, but we never wrote it down. Then there was the family furniture we divided up, including the bed I had used as a boy – an antique beauty, hewn out of some lovely hardwood or other, walnut perhaps, that has been in our family for almost a century and a half. We tried to recall what our mother had told us about it. Was it our great-uncle John who made that bed, or our great-grandfather Milt? And whose house – or farmhouse – had it been rescued from during a terrible fire, thrown from an upstairs window as the house burned to the ground? When someone dies, all these objects remain, but so many of the stories vanish, forever.

At last we had the house cleared out and ready for its new owners. I stood for a while in the bedroom where my sisters and I had helped our bald and bedridden mother dress, had fed her, assisted her with the bedside commode: this terrible, lovely intimacy of the end of life, its neediness and physicality mirroring what we ourselves had presented as babies nearly half a century earlier, when our mother loved and cared for us. Standing there in the empty room, I couldn't believe she was gone. I still can't.

Larkin will soon understand something about death. Already she is fascinated by the song "My grandfather's clock," with its refrain of "when the old man died," and by the recent demise of our snowman in the yard. "Frosty melted," she says, pointing at the spot where he stood. It is a precursor to understanding that people, too, melt away, leaving us with memories and an aching awareness of loss.

One of my few giant regrets is that my mother's life and my daughter's overlapped by a mere six months. There are scenes I'll remember forever, like standing at my mother's door with our brand-new baby, as my mother, already gravely ill, wept with joy; or propping four-month-old Larkin up on the bed at the nursing home, and watching her topple over like a little doll, which my mother found so amusing. "Do that again!" she laughed.

Molly and I are doing what we can to connect Larkin to the woman we call "magical M.A." We tell stories, show photos. My mother loved the long-running musical, The Fantasticks, and when I put Larkin to bed I sing her a dreamy ballad called "Soon It's Gonna Rain." In the living room Larkin rides the painted tin rocking horse Mary Ann once rode, or pages through a Raggedy Ann book inscribed to my mother from her mother in 1938.

Recently I pulled another book down from Larkin's crowded shelf – a copy of The Little Prince my mother gave us for Christmas in 2005, three weeks before Larkin was born. My mother was in the middle of chemo, but her handwriting was still strong as she wrote out a message to the soon-to-be born grandchild whose gender (and thus name) no one knew yet. I love you so much, she wrote, Whoever you are. Love + Hugs Always, M.A.

The line haunts me: I love you so much, whoever you are. To me it conveys our mother's gift for cherishing others as they are, as well as the knowledge that she would not be here to love our child in person, not for very long, at any rate. Nothing is permanent, except perhaps our human desire for permanence, grounded in biology and expressed through love, longing, and grief. My mother wrapped up a gift of love and sent it into the future. It's a gift I will try to unwrap for Larkin every day of her life.