Integrating grief, letting go and holding on.
This morning as I wash my face, I glance over at my jewelry rack on the wall. Lined with earrings and necklaces, I often forget to drape myself with any adornment. When my son was young, he used to sit on the bathroom rug and run his fingers through the soft fibers and talk to me about Minecraft while I got ready for the day. He would pick out earrings for me and choose a scent of perfume. But as he got older, this tradition waned.
There is a knock on my open bathroom door. “Mom, do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” I say, setting down my mascara and turning to my son, now seventeen.
“Do you have an extra chain? This one broke.”
He holds out his open palm with the broken necklace chain and his dad’s fingerprint pendant. His aunt had made tiny silver hearts with their dad’s fingerprint on them as gifts for everyone after his funeral and my son had worn it around his neck nearly every day since. I hadn’t received one as I had divorced their dad 4 years prior to his death and was not welcome by his side of the family.
“You can have one of mine,” I answer. I glance up again at the jewelry rack. Dusty and tarnished, I lift the necklace of the dandelion globe I never wore and detach it from its chain. The clasp is unique: a cross 2 cm wide that fit through a ring 1 cm in diameter. I think how ironic such a symbol is for a man who stopped believing in Christ, and yet I am handing it over to my son to carry his father’s imprint.
Taking the chain, my son asks where the dandelion globe had come from since he’d never seen me wear it. “Your dad gave it to me several months before we decided to divorce.”
* * *
My best friend from childhood had sent me a picture on facebook of this very globe encasing two dandelion tuffs. “Thinking of you,” she said. So when it arrived in the mail one day, I thought it was from her. But to my surprise, it was from my husband. I had always loved blowing dandelions, but he would chastise me for spreading weeds. I always countered that I was spreading wishes.
The day I opened the box, he beamed when I saw it. He said it was his wish for us to always be together. I looked down and frowned. It was the first gift he had given me that I could think of in over a decade, and the first one I had not picked out and bought for myself and credited him for the thought. He was trying to get me to change my mind, wanting me to stay. I wanted to smash the globe and blow the dandelions away. Just like the tennis date he asked me on last week and the camping trip he proposed for next weekend, this gift was too little too late. He hated tennis and he hated the outdoors…and dandelions were just weeds to him. He couldn’t just backpedal his way into my heart by pretending he cared about things that were important to me!
I had pushed my anger down and smiled, hoping that by letting him put the dandelion seeds around my neck, he would take that as a thank you. I couldn’t muster the false words out loud. At bedtime, I hung that necklace up and never took it down again.
I had no other gifts or mementos from him to decide what to do with after the divorce. But I never touched that necklace. It sat there like a ghost on one side of the rack. I received necklaces from other men since then that I would occasionally wear, and I hung them up on the other side. But every morning, that globe stared at me, year after year, gathering dust, untouched.
* * *
My 5’9” lanky seventeen-year-old plops himself on the rug and threads the chain through the fingerprint pendant. I look at his reflection on the floor through the mirror, suddenly 4’9” and 10 years old again. This time, it is me that is choosing the necklace for him to wear, a reversal of roles.
“Mom, did you notice the Celtic infinity knot stamped on each end of this chain?”
No, I hadn’t. I’d tried to ignore that haunting globe, unable to toss it out.
When my son leaves for work, I take that globe outside. I stomp on it and pick up the dandelion fluffs. I let the wind steal the weeds, grateful my son can keep his father close to his heart for eternity.
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