A Sign from My Dead Mother

I have a story that I’ve only told a few people on the planet.

In the months after my Mom died, I went through what is probably normal: I wanted a sign. Not to know that she was ‘all right’ (I was sure she was), but to know that she was still here, somehow. I had a good friend whose wife had died, and he had the same desire and got an amazing sign that was indisputably from his wife. I got chills hearing it. (I won’t relay that here as it’s not mine to tell.)

One day, I entered our walk-in closet and saw a dry cleaner’s bag with the headpiece of the veil my Mom had worn at her wedding. I froze. Had there been a break-in? Had my daughter (a little obsessed with Say Yes to the Dress on TLC) found it?

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The headpiece of the veil had been in a garment bag with my wedding dress. My grandmother had made the veil for my Mom and my Mom used the netting to make a veil for me. The headpiece sat partly disassembled. My Dad and I found it when cleaning out my Mom’s things after she died. I decided to keep it with the rest of the veil and put it in the garment bag with my dress, which hung at the very back of my closet.

Once I safely ruled out a break-in, nothing else was disturbed, I reached to the back of my closet, pulled out the garment bag and placed it on the bed. In the 11 years since we married, the plastic on the garment bag had degraded and was gaping open. On further inspection, I saw little black spheres.

Mouse turds. Of course. What must have happened is mice got into the closet. They made their way got into the open garment bag, left turds and, for reasons known only to them, dragged the headpiece into the main area of the closet.

This was all making sense. I opened the bag and rescued my dress, looking for mouse damage. Nothing. It looked the same as when I had worn it 11 years earlier. I braced myself looking in the bag, expecting I might see a mouse carcass or two. I didn’t.

On further inspection, the mouse turds were not turds at all. The hanger had a black foam covering.

The black foam had disintegrated and lay in turd-like balls at the bottom of the garment bag. So, not the mice.

I asked my Hubby if he had, for some reason, reached into the garment back and pulled out the headpiece and, ya know, left it on the floor of our closet. No.

I know the wedding-dress obsessed daughter was the obvious culprit her. But she had a certain reverence for the dress and would never touch it without permission. Even if she had, she has a pretty dominant rule-follower gene as well as an overactive guilt gene so would have crumbled during the the cross examination you all know I gave her.

The only answer is Mom sent me a sign. She’s still here.