"You're wearing your locket," Norman said, noticing the small silver oval attached to a long black silk cord around my neck. We were finished with lunch, and the dishes awaited washing. "Yes," I replied, not looking at him, knowing he understood what it meant.

I wear my locket on the bad days: the days of pain, of longing for my son, for the smell and touch of him; the days before we knew that kids could die, suddenly, painfully, leaving a tremor in their wake that would never still.

Standing at the sink, hands frozen as they reached for the faucet, my mind flashed back to that small room with glass walls where our son had died, and I had touched Ethan's hair, the pieces of burnished gold I now carried in this most precious little piece of metal.

When Ethan had died and the nursing staff had removed all the wires and tubes and machines, we were allowed to hold our son. He was so heavy; I had imagined that he would be lighter now, with his spirit flown. He weighed the weight of the world, the weight of lost dreams and hopes, unmade memories and the huge weight of our grief. I held my dead son and rocked him, slowly, singing, holding his head in the crook of my arm, gazing at his eyes now closed forever, unseeing, not knowing me or anything of this world again.

The nurses in their kindness had thought to clip a piece of his hair for me and put it in a shiny clear bag, zipped at the top. I found it as we were leaving; they would not let us have his clothes or shoes; having been cut off and destroyed lest traces of the disease that killed him still clung to his shorts and blue shirt.

Not long after Ethan had died I had remarked how bitterly I resented that my boys could never be together until death took them, too, and how frightful that thought was. So in my locket, a gift from my brother-in-law, are pieces of all four boys' hair. Because I was pregnant with Eliott when Ethan died, the locket had held only Evan's and Ethan's for a time, until Eliott's hair grew enough to cut. And so, too, with Eli. In this tiny glittery space, my four boys touch and intertwine; a part of them that they do not need, yet so necessary to my survival as a bereaved parent.

Norman rubs the locket. Glowing, it seems to respond to his touch, shining brighter for a moment as dad, too, touches. For an instant we all touch--four boys in a locket held by mom and dad--a fleeting instant, gone too soon. I must wait to hold all four boys at once.

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