Happy Mother’s Day, for all the usual reasons.

But this year I also want to say this: thanks for keeping so much stuff.

I never thought I’d say that, and you wouldn't have either. I used to joke with you that the day after we buried you with your Black Sambo money box I’d hire a skip bin to sit on the lawn and start hurling teapots, Tupperware and teddy bears out the front door.

You’d fire back that if I did that, you’d look down from heaven and curse me for being so cruel. Then together we’d figure out a way to close that impossibly full kitchen drawer.

But this Mother’s Day, I’ve come around. This Mother’s Day is different.

It’s the first without you. You left us peacefully just two days ago, with Dad by your side. Your last words were to him: ''I love you too'’.

Since subtly entering your life over a few years, in the last 12 months Alzheimers overwhelmed you with terrible speed. It locked off from you your lifetime of memories and took your independence so quickly it was hard to believe.

But what is never got at was your happy spirit.

You still smiled virtually all day, every day. Even when you slept.

Deep down the rest of us might have feared that in your place, if our masks of self-awareness were pulled away, we’d reveal more suspicious souls. Not you Mum. You were good and happy all the way through. Right up until the end.

That’s a big comfort to us, and it helps us on this day we’d love to be celebrating with you. It’s helping us not dwell too much on the cruelty of what happened to you and happens to so many other people with dementia.

Still, we wish we’d had just a little time to grab your memories before the door to them shut. I’d have loved to sit down with you to record your story. You told great tales of doing knock-and-runs on the Soviet Embassy as a schoolkid in the 1950s, or of sneaking into the house next door after it had been abandoned by the Petrovs. You loved telling us about the scandalous ring of grime in their bathtub.

But there was not the time for recording those words. It all happened too quickly.

So that’s why I’m now looking differently at your habit of a lifetime and saying thanks for all this stuff.

In recent weeks I’ve been helping Dad make the house a bit more manageable, taking on cupboards, drawers and boxes that’ve been packed tight and untouched for decades. My sisters have done the same with your wardrobe.

And as we work our way through these places, your story tumbles out everywhere.

You valued people. You seem to have kept every birthday card anyone ever sent, not just to you but to all of us. You kept every funeral notice and prayer card for anyone who was special to you. You kept every address book. Every postcard. Every letter.

You were so proud of your kids. Any mention of us, from school newsletters to newspaper articles, was torn out and put away, and not necessarily where you’d expect. That’s why you can’t ever throw out one of your cookbooks without flicking through it, because inside Crockpot Cooking for Friends you might just find a precious letter or photo, like the one we never knew existed of you as a teenager putting sunglasses on a labrador.

I was touched to discover you’d kept just about every sports column I ever wrote. Even as it became hard for you to concentrate on the words, you’d still ring me up to tell me “There’s so much in the paper!”. It was as if I was responsible for it all and it was all good.

You always loved children. It was your job for 30 years with Family Day Care, and when you retired it became your passion as a grandmother. You were a soft touch any time a charity teddy bear was on sale. You left probably 100 teddies boxed and bagged around the place and on beds in spare rooms. They were tools of the trade for someone who has loved being a Nanna since she held her first grandchild through to her tenth.

You loved kitchen gadgets, even the most ridiculous ones. Despite some of our protests (really, Mum needs a donut maker?), you acquired pie makers, lettuce spinners, apple corers, bread makers and various blenders. But good for you Mum. These gadgets mightn’t have had much enduring use, but for a few days they made you feel like a kitchen revolutionary.

I could go on and on. I can infer meaning from your troves of mini shampoo bottles souvenired from hotels. Or your collections of tourism teaspoons or tea towels or, from that fad in the early 90s, anything to do with ducks.

Stuff gets a bad rap these days. Many of us try to live lives free of clutter.

But Mum, I consider you a poster girl for sentimental hoarding.

By never throwing out anything you attached some meaning to, you’ve made sure we'll not be those children trying to connect to a parent through too few clues when it's all too late.

John-Paul Moloney is a Canberra Times journalist.