Pearl Connection Bracelet

A limited edition bracelet celebrating the life of those who passed young. A percentage of all purchases will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

I strung these pearls while listening to different NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts when Regina Spector’s came on. I thought of my friend, Jamie, who loved her music and checked to see if maybe he had heard it before he passed in 2016. I saw her Tiny Desk Concert came out in 2022.

It had been years since he’d passed, but I immediately began to tear up. He would have loved her Tiny Desk Concert.

Jamie was diagnosed with cancer in high school, and in our senior year, the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted his wish to meet her which he was thrilled about. He and his family flew to New York for a private concert. He told me that after the concert when he had time to speak with her, he pulled out a little journal I had made for his birthday in the seventh grade filled with my favorite quotations and showed her. Jamie was one of the most thoughtful and sensitive people I knew at our school growing up, and I couldn’t believe he had kept that little journal all this time (and even brought it to New York with him on this special trip).

While stringing this bracelet, slowly tying knots by hand after each and every pearl, I felt compelled to keep going even though I had reached the length I had planned for. I ended up creating the Pearl Connection Bracelet.

The full circle of the bracelet celebrates and remembers the fully lived life Jamie had. The extra strand of pearls connected to the full circle that represents the unique sense of loss and grief from him having passed so young at nineteen after battling cancer bravely for a few years.

A professor in college once lectured about the sociological construction of death; there’s a typical sadness and understanding of the death of someone who lives long into adulthood—my grandmother passed at almost 96, and it was (and still is) difficult, but she had lived for nearly a century.

When a younger person dies though, whether they’re a child, adolescent, or adult, there’s often a slightly different kind of grief and sense of loss because we feel they died too young. They hadn’t quite lived long enough.

Jamie will always be nineteen. I wish I could see what he was doing today—probably teaching math and practicing tae kwon do. I would ask him if he’d seen Regina Spector’s Tiny Desk Concert.

So the connecting strand of pearls is an expression of grief. I wish he could have lived longer. The full bracket is an expression of joy too because I’m still shaped by him. His memory still brings warmth to me as it does the many others who had the pleasure of knowing him. We’re still connected.