I was nine years old when my mother died. Colorectal cancer. We were both too young for her passing. I didn’t even know how to dress myself yet. I wanted to wear my blue sailor suit to her funeral. She’d loved those navy trousers and the matching jacket with white piping. I loved them, too, because when my mother dressed me for special occasions, she would squat low to the ground and tie a white silk ascot around my neck, and I would stare at her staring at the perfect knot between her fingers, and I could see up close how much she loved me. She smelled like black licorice and a leathery fragrance I now know to have been Hermès Doblis, which was discontinued ages ago. I once paid two hundred dollars for the dredges in an ancient bottle, having caught a faint whiff of childhood coming from some lady in a Marriott elevator. I forked over the cash right then and there and gave her instructions on where to leave the bottle after she’d retrieved it from her room. A bellman delivered it to my suite that evening. With the door closed, the world locked out, I popped the cork on that tiny glass vessel with its gold stickers and purple velvet bow, and I breathed in those final drops, breathed them in and in again until nausea knocked me to my knees. I barely made it to the toilet before vomiting up my tuna-and-rye from the conference buffet. The Doblis went in the trash. I haven’t smelled childhood since.

That sailor suit. It didn’t fit. I guess it had been a while since my mother had played dress-up with me. Two days before the funeral, my father walked in on me struggling to button the double-breasted coat. With zero affect, he said, “Take it off. You’re too big for that now.”

I knew exactly what he meant by that. He meant the darling outfits my mother loved so much. He meant the little-boyness she treasured. I remember looking in the full-length mirror and seeing for the first time what my father must have seen all along, made even more cloying by a recent growth spurt. The gold buttons on my suit barely stretched to their buttonholes. The cuffs on my sleeves and pants rode high above my wrists and ankles. I looked like a boy wearing doll’s clothes. I looked like a twit.

The next day, my father cut the tags off a brand-new Brooks Brothers suit that was slightly too big on my nine-year-old frame, and still it was nicer than any suit he would ever own in all his life. “You’ll grow into it,” he said upon inspection. With the rare nod of approval, he added, “Wear that to the service.”

I did.