The Braids

Her hair had always meant a lot to her. The only blonde in a family with dark heads. People talked about her fair hair from the moment she was born. Relatives, family friends, strangers; all had something to say. She knew that her Iranian great-grandmother, the one she was named after, had wished for a blonde grandchild when her son married an American wife.

Her head was sensitive though, so as proud as she was of her hair, she hated to brush it. She and her mom went through rounds where Mom insisted they brush it and others where Mom just left her alone. She would end up with a bird’s nest of hair that would take Mom forever to untangle. They tried all sorts of kid-safe detanglers over the years.

She only cut it short twice, and then only to her shoulders. She would enjoy the newness but let it grow down her back again because that’s how she loved it. It was long when she got sick.

She was scared when the doctor said they’d need to shave some for the biopsy, but it was such a small spot for the needle to go in that she wasn’t sad about it afterwards. After she stopped being able to use her left arm and leg, her mom decided to keep her hair in braids. It was the easiest way to prevent tangles over the months of radiation treatments and lying down to rest and riding in the wheelchair. It was terrifying when her Mom gave her showers because transferring was even scarier when she was naked. So, her hair would get washed once a week and braided and rebraided all the days in between.

One of the three times she wept while she was dying was when she asked her mother if her hair would fall out. She fretted as chunks started coming out, but to everyone’s relief, it only shed where the radiation hit her scalp. Her long hair covered where she became bald and no one could see it unless they moved her braids. Months after treatment ended, new hair grew in. Curly, like she’d always wanted.

Mom didn’t make her bathe once they got home from her Make a Wish trip. She was too unsteady to transfer out of the chair at the door to the bathroom and somehow make her way over to the shower chair, since the doorway was too narrow for a wheelchair. For those last few weeks, Mom washed her with cleaning wipes the hospital had given them.

On her last night, she got sick. Vomit in her braids, and Mom couldn’t get her to a shower. Her mother and older sister and grandmother washed her. They used dry shampoo in a cap that the hospital had sent home with them to clean her long hair. Darker than when she was little but still the lightest in her family. Her sister carefully rebraided her clean hair before she went to sleep.

She died with her family around her and her hair in braids. They took her body from her mother, dressed in a nightgown, with her stuffed purple sloth in her arms. A gift for her thirteenth birthday only weeks before.

A few days later, her family went to the funeral home to retrieve her ashes. The director approached Mom, a folded sheet in his hands. He started talking about locks of hair, and then opened the sheet. Her mother felt pure shock at the sight before her; those golden braids cut from her dead child’s head with no permission, no question and presented to her like gruesome trophies.

She was left with a sealed urn and her daughter’s hair. Hair that meant so much and should have been on her head and in the sparkly purple urn with the rest of her. Instead, her braids resided in a plastic bag that her mother hid in a drawer.

They stayed in the drawer for months, haunting her mother. Until her grandfather died. Then, her mother and sister and older brother placed her braids in her glittery pink purse and buried it with her grandfather so that he could return them to her.