The first stranger who asked me to make one for her — I cried the whole drive home.
I lost my mother on a Tuesday in November. Three weeks later, I sat at my dining room table with a small jar of her ashes and a mold I had ordered online. I needed something to hold.
The pendant I made that night was imperfect — a little cloudy, slightly uneven. But it was warm in my hand in a way I hadn't expected. I wore it to her funeral. Her sister noticed. Then her neighbor. Then a friend of a friend who had lost a child.
I never planned to start a business. I planned to survive. Keepsake grew from that first piece the way grief grows into something else — slowly, with resistance, and then all at once.
Every pendant we make starts the same way: someone hands us what is irreplaceable, and we hold it with both hands.
