I liked to sit next to her on her bed, counting each stitch as the needle bobbed through her skin. Most nights she just tightened what had come loose. But sometimes she’d produce a smooth white box and wink at me as she parted folds of soft tissue.

She’d unpick her seams stitch by stitch, thread gathering like spider silk on her fingertips. Then she’d hand me the raggedy thing—a hand, an ear, a knee joint—and say, “Go and find someone who can use it, honey.” Sometimes I did, and sometimes I just played with it in the yard and forgot it under the peach trees when the rain came.

She told me she kept her arms the longest. “I wanted them to hold you,” she said. “To cradle you in an elbow curve, feel the tickle of your hair.” But I quickly grew too heavy. All the groaning grocery bags that fed my expanding appetite and the piling of what she called my “sticks”—rackets, golf clubs, softball bats—made her swap them in. One night I saw her sewing on two broad-shouldered limbs with ropy tendons. They were very strong but hard to the touch.

She spent a while with two different legs: one was a ballerina’s, adorned with a single pink stocking my mother found hilarious, and the other was a sprinter’s. She helped me practice for recitals while poised on one leg, spinning in graceful circles, and ran with me the weeks before track meets, her runner’s leg pumping as her ballerina leg kept up on tiptoe.

I remember the night she picked me up from that awful party. Mascara running down my face, the sweetheart neckline of my dress ripped. She hadn’t said a word. But the next week another white box arrived. That night she sewed on two new hands the size of dinner plates, with thick fingers that could burst tracheas like blisters.

After Dad left, I found her with her ribcage hanging open, slowly unpicking the stitches that held her heart in place. The white box was on the bed, and she gestured at it with her chin. I opened it and lifted out a stone. Holes were bored through it for the thread to enter, but my mother used wire.

She tried on different faces for a while. Thick, soft lips and thin, bloodless ones; sharp hooked noses and baby-like buttons; round and slanted and hooded eyes. After I left the house she sewed on long, tan legs with a thigh gap, and smooth, hairless arms.

She tried many different hearts, too, but they all came unstitched in the end.

Sometimes she would tease me. “I’m sure I could find my old arms again,” she’d say. “When you decide to give me grandchildren.” Other times she sounded serious. “I would touch them so gently, with my own hands. Twine their hair in my own fingers. Kiss them with my own lips.”

But I couldn’t bear the thought of being unsewn. So I have never married, and never had children.

After many long years my mother’s hands began to tremble when she held the needle. Her stitches grew uneven, and her pieces would fall off in grocery stores, parking lots, and other people’s front yards. In the end she was cobbled together and sagging at the seams.

My mother died last Tuesday. Her heart gave out. She found it again, you know—the old one. The one she’d pulled out decades ago. She’d hidden it in a box on the top of her bookshelf. A different heart might have kept her going longer, but in the end that’s not what she wanted.

I know that, in her last days, she offered you all pieces of herself. That she held up wrists and thumbs and feet and said, “These could be good as new with a little darning and double-stitching.” I know that some of you have already taken a few things—that’s why I decided on a closed casket.

My mother was an all-loving, all-giving, all-forgiving person.

But I am not.

I need you to give my mother back. To return every single piece of her. Those her own mother sewed from the threads of her own DNA, and all those she lifted from white boxes and sewed on herself, as her lifeline unspooled.

Let me bury her beneath the peach trees. Everyone she ever was.

She will finally belong only to herself.