My Grief is on Full Display

Photo by Melissa Reid Lambert

My grief is on full display daily. I have been wearing my grief, in a variety of forms, for the past 22 years. When my son died just hours after he was born, his tiny body was taken in a bassinet to the morgue and I was told that I was free to go home. I had to collect my bag, my clothes, my hopes and dreams, and leave the hospital without him. In the shock of a mere 24-hour period, I went from carrying my child within me to walking absently out of the hospital holding forms and booklets with titles like “When hello means goodbye” instead of my son.

When we got home to a house preparing to welcome another child, it became apparent he would soon disappear into the boxes his anticipatory things would be packed into. He didn’t come home and so he didn’t infuse his things – the clothes, toys, books, and trinkets – with his memory. I was lost on how to memorialize this child who only a few people had met, and who no one would get to know. You don’t realize you have a lifetime of anticipatory love and connection forming in your brain until you have to wrestle with the fragility of a tiny beating heart that stopped beating.

It was in these early days that I told my partner I needed my son’s birthstone in a ring. I wanted an expression of his existence that I could look at to remind me he had been.

I got a dainty emerald ring. Every morning I would put on my wedding ring, engagement ring, and his birthstone ring. Other jewelry could be changed; earrings, necklaces, and bracelets were optional. This birthstone ring was symbolic of his birth and death, and so I wore it faithfully, wanting it to be enough. Maybe I mean to feel enough. To feel like enough of a testament to my love and yearning for him. To be a worthy demonstration of the depths of my grief and an identifiable symbol of my transformation into a bereaved mother. Disappointingly and despairingly, to most it was simply a ring that went unnoticed and unmentioned.

Like grief itself, the ring was silent, secretive, and mine. I wanted someone to ask about the ring so that I could say my son’s name and proclaim that he existed.

In the bereavement group I attended, we designated dragonflies the symbol of our dead babies. And so, I would collect broches, necklaces, and bracelets with imagery and depictions of dragonflies. Along with my ring, dragonflies would adorn my jacket, wrist, or neck. As the years continued, I got a necklace with his handprint laser imprinted on it, his initials on a pendant, and another birthstone ring. A whole section of a jewelry box designated to acknowledging my grief. Over time, those pieces were no longer worn daily, however; possibly I had settled into my identity as a bereaved mother and the jewelry no longer facilitated that for me, and possibly because I got a memorial tattoo to keep him with me always.

Now, when I notice I am thinking about my son, I will grab a dragonfly broch or put on his birthstone ring. Rather than a yearning for others to see my grief, now these gestures are my own acknowledgment to that part of me that is his mother. That part that misses him, grieves his absence, and carves out space to reflect on him in that moment. And as I head out into the world adorned in my grief, I often make it a conversation starter to ensure people know my son existed and that I am his mom, “Oh this? This is for my son who died, his name is Flynn.”