The Lip Balm, The Hats, and We Keep

Nobody sends a casserole for this one.

Nobody checks in on the day you open a desk drawer and find a lip balm you gave him for Christmas, still sitting there, mostly used up. Nobody prepares you for what it does to you to breathe in the inside of his hat.

Tom kept a Burt's Bees mint cocoa lip balm in his desk drawer — the one I put in his stocking that last Christmas we had together. I still work at his desk sometimes, and for a while I'd use that lip balm while I sat there. It's gone now. Used up. But the tube is still there. I haven't thrown it away.

Tom also wore an Irish cap and a fedora, both so him I couldn't pick a favorite. At some point I picked one up and breathed in the smell of the inside of it. I wasn't prepared for what that did to me — tears, immediately, from somewhere below thought. I put both hats in plastic after that, not to display them, just to preserve whatever was left.

Grief researchers have a name for moments like this: "grief bursts," sudden temporary upsurges that ambush you in the middle of an ordinary day. There's a reason they hit as hard as the big, expected ones — objects don't know he's dead. A lip balm doesn't know it's the last gift he opened. A hat doesn't know the smell trapped in its lining is one of the only physical traces of him left.

Psychologists call these "linking objects" — things that carry outsized weight because they're tied so tightly to the person. For a while, they function almost like a physical extension of him still being present. Which is exactly why letting go of them, or even just touching them, can feel like a second loss.

Here's what I want you to know if this is you: there is no correct amount of time to keep his things. No rulebook that says the drawer should be cleaned out by month six. Our faith doesn't ask you to detach from what you love or pretend objects don't matter — we're a sacramental faith, one that believes physical things can carry real spiritual and emotional weight. So when the grief burst hits, you don't have to talk yourself out of it. You can let it be exactly what it is: love, with nowhere left to go except through you.

Listen to the full episode: "What We Keep — The Small Griefs Nobody Names" — Episode 9 of Mosaic: Beauty in Every Broken Piece.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-we-keep-the-small-griefs/id6784076332?i=1000785938275