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Illustration by Juliana Neufeld
My mom wanted me to wear her wedding dress when I married. We never discussed why it was important to her although I suspect, being her only daughter, she hoped I would feel some sort of connection to the dress. That I would perhaps want to wear something that held special memories to her. After all, she wore it when she married my dad.
Or maybe she just liked it and wanted me to like it as well.
I didn’t. By the time I got married, some 30 plus years after she wore it, the dress was dated. Yellowed and stained, with a high neck, long sleeves and a puffy skirt that enabled the dress to stand on its own, twentysomething me wasn’t putting a pinky through the sleeve. I didn’t even try it on in childhood dress-up when I nosed about in Mom’s hope chest.
And then mom died and I inherited the dress, still in the blue dry-cleaning bag. My brother didn’t want it nor did my daughters. I couldn’t bear to throw it away, knowing she kept it for nearly 60 years. I took it, found a place in the closet in a spare bedroom and mostly forgot about it.
In the days and weeks after she died I had so many items of hers to go through – photos and letters, clothes and bags, necklaces and broaches – her life in so many little things. The wedding dress was the easiest to manage.
And my feelings for the dress hadn’t changed. I had many regrets when my mom died, but not wearing the dress wasn’t one of them. Yet, I kept it. And I began to wonder if that dress was in my closet for a reason.
It started when I sorted her photos and papers. Mom was a pack rat. Old letters and cards. Recipes clipped from newspapers in the 1950s, old TV guides and soap opera magazines, unpaired earrings, crafts my brother and I had made for her at elementary school. Things were just clumped together, not organized in any sort of fashion. But treasures emerged.
Amongst the scattered items, I found her mother’s wedding invitation from 1923 and fading photos of that wedding. More sifting and I found her grandmother’s wedding invitation – an afternoon affair in the 1800s. It wasn’t long until I found hers. It was with a book of matches and a napkin, both inscribed with mom and dad’s name and wedding date. But then, I found an even greater treasure: an 8-mm film of their wedding.
For four minutes, I watched long gone family members brought back to life. My aunts and uncles looking their best: smiling and laughing. My mom’s dad beaming as he walked his daughter into church. My dad’s mom, whom I only knew as 80-year-old woman, twirling around the dance floor with her sons. And my parents, alive, happy and showered with confetti as they left the church.
My breath caught to see my dad, gone now more than 20 years, young, handsome, with a grin on his face, as he started his life with my mom. And my mom, laughing as their dance together was interrupted when someone cut in. Four minutes to see them again wasn’t nearly long enough. But I watched her in that dress, and while I didn’t love it, it did look lovely on her.
So, for fun, I took the dress out of the closet, put my arm in the sleeve and realized mom would have been the only person who had done that before me. I hugged the yellowed fabric against me, then put it back in the closet, momentarily regretting I hadn’t tried to wear it for her, so many years ago.
I closed the door and looked down at the carpet. Small dots – blue, orange and pink – laid at my feet.
I looked back at the dress and thought about the cloud that hit my parents when they came out of the church. Could it be … confetti?
I carefully picked the pieces up and put them on the dresser then shook the dress for more pieces, just to be sure it was that, but nothing fell out. I put it on the bed, and gently looked through the lace (the entire outer sheath was lace) but there was nothing to see. I turned the dress over. The back had two flowers where the skirt joined the bodice. I folded back a piece of the flower. Trapped inside were more little pieces. My parents married in 1962 and here I was, feeling like I had a little part of that day. I almost cried.
I put the pieces in a small plastic packet and hid it in my dresser.
Eventually, I found a woman on Etsy who was able to save the pieces in a resin pendant. Given to my daughters for Christmas, their mouths dropped when they heard where it came from.
Since Mom died, I keep stumbling on these little bread crumbs of memories. The confetti were just another crumb. I think my mom would be happy. The dress turned out to be a bigger gift than I think she knew. Or maybe, somehow, that was her plan all along.
Andrea Adair-Tippins lives in Whitby, Ont.