The hairbrush lay on the wooden floor beneath the dressing table in my dead mom’s bedroom in my childhood home, which was up for sale in old Palo Alto. It was a fading shade of purple, with a light crack on the handle. It still carried the faint scent of the coconut oil she would generously apply to her hair and mine, then brush it gently. It was our evening ritual where Mom and I talked about her childhood pranks, her comforting advice when I got my first period, my first unrequited love, the heartbreaks that followed, until that tragic moment when Dad slipped into a coma after that dreadful car accident on the highway. The hairbrush had been Mom’s birthday gift from Dad on her fortieth, wrapped in pink gift paper with white hearts. I ran my fingers along the crack, carrying traces of her palpable grief the morning we learned Dad had departed to another world without saying goodbye. That was the time she confined herself to this room and shut the door on me. I watched her through the keyhole, her fingers laced between the hairbrush’s prickly bristles, tears rolling down her blotched face, mascara smeared under her eyes. That was the time when Mom did nothing but stare at the mirror, brushing her hair vigorously. That was the time when Grandma came to live with us and tried to coax Mom out of her sickly state. That was when Mom first discovered blood stains on her toothbrush. That was when she became frail and weak. The glow on her face and personality faded. That was the time chunks of her lustrous black locks fell on the floor like the leaves withering away from the branches of the trees in our garden. That was the time when the hairbrush slipped from her wobbly hands and fell on the floor with a thud.
While Mom recovered from those painful bouts of chemotherapy, the brush was no longer needed. It lay forgotten in a dusty corner while Mom wore a short bob wig until her hair grew out. It was never the same. Mom went about her chores and even took a job at the neighborhood salon, where she cut, oiled, washed, blow-dried, and brushed other people’s hair, but never ours again. I moved out to study medicine and visited home on holidays. I never dared ask her to comb my hair and had forgotten about the brush until today. I wonder why it was still there. Grief had a strange way of making people hold on to things even when they had no use for them. There were still stray strands of her hair caught in the bristles. I could still picture her face in the mirror, now smeared with dust and cobwebs. The way her pink lips curved into a smile as she hummed a tune. The way she stared into the sunset sky, hues of pink and bruised purple swirling in her dreamy coffee-brown eyes. I clutched the hairbrush, embedded with Mom’s memories. My heart oscillated between ache and relief knowing she passed away in her sleep. The silent echo of the brush against a scalp and the smell of coconut oil will soon fade, like the purple color of the hairbrush, and the wavering shades of the sunset sky I could now see from the window.
