My mother’s skin was dappled from the decades she sat at baseball games and beaches. Little copper spots and tiny white flecks, “sun scars,” the dermatologist calls them, because I have them too, and as new wrinkles and spots arrive, my hands remind me of hers. She would’ve been seventy this month.
At sixty-one, her wrinkles were few, but her sunspots recounted her globe-crossing childhood and teenage years, a Navy kid, frequenting the beaches of Hawaii, Germany, Virginia, California. Her feet cracked from a habit of walking barefoot, or in sandals year-round, for as long as I remembered.
I opened a tube of lotion to soothe Mom’s worn heels as she reclined on the hospice bed which replaced the living room couch. From the bed she could see outside the sliding-glass door, sparrows splashing in a fountain, monarchs grazing rose bushes.
After my siblings and I grew up and moved away, Mom filled goldfinch feeders and pots with geraniums and gardenias. She filled a chicken coop of fancy-breed hens, and the grandkids, eight in total, would roam the yard and scoop them up as if they were cats. The hens peered through the glass now as my mom lay in the hospice bed.
The weekend had been full of visitors, so I asked Mom if she wanted to rest. She shook her head, “Let’s look through my jewelry box.” Then she swung her legs over the edge of the bed to sit upright. These bursts of energy were so frequent I started envisioning my visit with less finality. She had, after all, undergone an experimental treatment to blast away the cancer that circumscribed her tiny frame.
I returned with her jewelry box, yet opened it reservedly. Her charm bracelet I fingered first, knowing its weight of memories and places traveled, then I lifted her modest 1970’s wedding band with its miniature diamond.
“Take my newer ring,” she said, fanning out her hand. “It’s worth more.”
“But this one, I remember you wearing,” I said. Then I sorted through the earrings, avoiding eye contact. Now I wish I had looked up at her to better remember the moment—to further see how she felt about my frugality or modesty, my denial of what this exchange meant.
“Feel the baby kicking, Mom,” I said, as I grabbed her hand and pressed it to my belly.
“Yes,” she said, “I feel it!”
A month later, I wore the charm bracelet and a newly purchased, black maternity dress to Mom’s funeral and burial. Her friends commented about my growing belly, and I don’t remember crying.
But I do remember thinking often of the night we opened her jewelry box. She pressed pieces into my hand, souvenirs she wanted me to have. Her tired, cracked feet and her life fading as new life swelled in me.
When I miss her and I’m flooded with regret at having cried so little, I sometimes look at her charm bracelet—the tiny, silver memories that once decorated her wrist. Charms totaling more than fifty, some mythical creatures like a unicorn, a gargoyle, some historical, a revolutionary war cannon, a Dutch wooden shoe, all of sterling silver.
There’s an old-fashioned baby shoe she may have received when she became a grandmother, adopting the nickname “Mammie.” But more likely the charm came from her own mother, elated to adopt her in 1954 when a seventeen-year-old girl gifted her baby, birthing future family. A birth mother my mom never knew till a reunion the internet and providence made possible was to happen in later years.
For all the places my mom loved and visited, there are charms such as a pinecone, a cruise boat, an armadillo, a pineapple, and a hula dancer—some from places I visited with her.
The charm bracelet reminds me that life speeds past youthfulness and on into thickets we choose to remember or choose to resist, such as cancer and the end. But the bracelet also represents a string of events that pivoted my mom to the end. To the place where I can remember and celebrate her and the ways she loved and shaped me. She taught me to care for the elderly, to befriend the lonely. She urged me to notice birds, the names of flowers, grammar, history. She explained Ephesians 2:8-9, God’s grace, given not earned.
A grace that insists I quantify Jesus’s perfection when I despair and think, Could I have prayed better, felt deeper, cried harder? And was I wrong to fly back home to my own family, instead of staying by her side for those last few days?
That string of a charm bracelet links events and memories that surmount and gather to reach an end. Is heaven the end? I try to comfort myself with thoughts of a future reunion, but regret crashes into the present and past when I remember prayers for my mom to beat cancer were feeble because I was instead thinking of myself.
God’s grace given not earned—I revisit this often, with new weight. For God weighs all the rebellion—mine, yours, the whole world’s combined rebellion against our Creator—and declares us guilty. Yet God, in love and kindness, strung a series of events, changing history forever.
Jesus, born in Nazareth, walked dusty roads, stunned crowds with his miracles. God incarnate, the guiltless Savior, became a substitute for the guilty. A mystery fully explained in Scripture and grace fully dispersed to the needy.
These are reminders I need, so I let the charm bracelet sit out this week as I wrote and reflected again—as my mom’s seventieth birthday passed and she’s not here to celebrate with so many who remember her well and loved her so much.
And I think she’d like that her charm bracelet stirs me to remember her. To cherish those days we went to the beach and the trip we took to Paris. Everyday things too, like grocery shopping and talking on the phone when I lived in another town and then another state. To string together both laughter and tears, uncertainty and yet hope.*
*(Romans 5:5) (see Romans 5:1-11 for full meaning)
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