It couldn’t have been simpler: Mix equal parts of water and flour. I decided on a third of a cup of each; I don’t eat pancakes the way I once did. I opened the kitchen cabinet called the bake center ­– my wife was quite an organizer, and kitchen design was her thing – and reached for a snazzy-looking measuring cup that was part of a set. But right beside it sat a battered old cup, oxidized to almost black, that leaped up at me. It was my mother’s Depression-era measuring cup that she’d given my wife and me when we were setting up housekeeping over sixty years ago. It’s always been a pain to try to read the embossed figures inside it, but that old cup followed us wherever we went all those years. There’s no telling how many times it’s measured sugar, flour, milk, or raisins. It’s earned its bruises and discoloration honestly. So I picked it out in favor of half a dozen options and measured out my batter mix and water.

As I rinsed it and set it to drain dry on the counter rack, I realized I was handling it with the same gentleness I normally reserve for my wife’s precious Limoges tea set. The thought of the hands that had used it – first my mother’s and then my wife’s – infused it with a value unrelated to the intrinsic.

Those of you who are, or have been, in my situation will appreciate the process of converting a home that once sheltered two people into the refuge of a widow or widower. It’s almost impossible. There are tools, utensils, furniture, and mementoes that were, in effect, the property of the deceased partner, or at least meant a lot to him or her. You can get rid of them slowly or all at once in a yard sale; but with each disappearance the home changes subtly, negatively, and you realize that the end of the effort is empty space that once expressed the vibrancy of a life.

What do you do with a queen-size bed that once allowed intimacy on cold nights, but was also large enough for empty space: physical expressions of unresolved disputes? I feel like a tiny bug in a rug in that bed, and make sure to switch the sheets 180 degrees each time I launder them. Of course, the lump of my little dog here and there during the night helps. I should change to a double, or two singles for my son’s occasional visits. But that’s not going to happen. There’s still “her side” of the bed, her bed stand with her books still on it, and her reading lamp. I can’t think of moving them, not without incipient tears.

Books! I had no idea she had so many. I’ve sent boxes and boxes of them to the library, and I’m not halfway through them. What will this place be like without those shelves of self-help manuals, classics, concordances, and novels set in war-torn countries? She had a fascination with the interplay of principles and personalities under mortal threat, and took special delight in the stories of young French girls (her secret identity) tweaking the noses of brutal Nazis in occupied Europe. During her last years I must have read to her a dozen or so of them. And now I’m supposed to get rid of them? It doesn’t feel possible.

She left a CD, to be inserted into a car’s audio, that takes the driver on a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield. Each year, while I retraced Pickett’s Charge or Chamberlain’s defense, she must have been taking the tour – and making notes in the accompanying booklet. When I picked it up, her notes fell out ­­– I felt a flash of my old irritation at her casualness – written in pencil in that familiar handwriting: “Rodes comes down Mummasburg Rd. attacks at Oak Ridge.” You think those notes are going into the trash?

As a child, I helped one day to clean out my deceased great-aunt’s apartment, and took a silent pledge to never accumulate so much stuff. But it’s awfully nice still to have my tools in a good shop, my guns and fishing rods neatly stowed, and the exercise equipment now set up in the living room. She left me literally dozens of pots and pans and kitchen appliances, of which I use maybe six. The dishwasher, I run every few months just to make sure the water in the pump isn’t toxic. There are family photographs everywhere, and Inuit carvings I sent her from the Arctic. A crystal compote of unknown provenance that sings for long moments after you ping it. They need to go, but in my generation, or another?

If I used logic and considered the feelings of my children, who, I presume, will have to deal with all this, the house would resemble my long-ago Yankee prep school dorm room: just what you need and nothing more. But the vitality of the place would be gone, as well as the few things we owned when we started out, and the later additions that made her so happy. This old cup I’m passing on to my kids. But I’ll be using it pretty shortly. I need to try again on the pancakes. Please don’t ask.