THE SILVER BELL: A STORY ABOUT GIFTS, GRIEF, AND WHAT WE CARRY
Why we tell stories
I’ve always believed that the objects we keep — and the ones we resist — carry our deeper stories. In my coaching work, I help people listen to these stories inside themselves: the ones that shape how we love, create, work, and move through the world.
This is one of mine. It’s a story about gifts, grief, change, and what becomes possible when we soften. I share it here because I know many of us hold a “silver bell” of our own.
The silver bell
My mother was a gift-giver. Her gifts were: Intense, surprising, colourful, expensive, practical, impractical, random, too much, pleasing, disappointing, often unwanted. Now that she’s gone, I meet her around the house through those objects.
I chose to live far away, across a sea and an ocean. The gifts weren’t something casual; but carefully chosen, packed into a box, padded with soft treats and way too many plastic bags or in her huge suitcase, between way too many thermal layers.
“I’m in a shop,” she would call me at random times, holding a shirt, a vase, a bowl, a scarf, a hat, a belt, a bra, a…. “I’m ok”, I would say. “I don’t need anything”, which really meant, “I don’t need you”, which really, really meant “I need so much I don’t know what to do”.
After many, many years of mutual hurt feelings, we managed to find a way. I gave her a short list of approved shops that she can “go crazy” in. They had beautiful objects with prices that I could never justify, but my mom could.
A vase, hand-painted with brightly coloured flowers on a light blue background, with matching cushion covers; a set of retro style high-quality plastic bowls, three sports bras, with a price tag I could feed my family for a week; a handmade African hot plate from bottle cups, a yellow giant pencil sharpener for sharpening carrots, and a hollow pink silicone pig that can very effectively attach itself to different body parts. Currently used as a bath toy or as a party piece, getting people to guess its original use (an egg yolk separator).
And then there’s the silver bell. The gift she gave me for opening my business. The type you find on the desk of an old-fashioned hotel, or maybe a dry cleaner's. It might make some sense if my business were a retro vintage shop or some holistic therapy place. But I run an online communication consultancy.
“It was either this bell or a silver magnifying glass”, her proud face on the screen said. “It was a hard choice”. My eyes would roll by themselves. I placed the bell on a shelf and often told its story. It became our office joke. It was the proof of my mum's inability to give me what I needed. Every time I told its story, another scale was added to my well-worn armour that protected my heart from her.
After she was gone, many of the stories I told about her and about her gifts still held the same thread we stretched between us. A thread of love and hurt. The days and months passed. One day, I found the bell hidden in an old box. I took it out and rubbed the dust off it to bring back its shine. I imagined my mom rising from it like a genie from a lantern. I smiled and placed it on the entrance table in my home.
In its new location, the silver bell found a new life. My daughter loves to hear its ding, our guests admire it, and the sun rays kiss its silver and send reflections around the room. Seeing it from their eyes, I realised I never really looked at it, never noticed the delicate flowers decorating it, the shine of the silver or the quality of its ding. It was never an object of beauty for me. I was never free to receive her gift.
I knew something had changed when I told the story of the silver bell again. My chest stayed unarmoured. Instead, I could see my mom sitting with us, and once the silver bell story ended, my listeners shared their stories. Stories about their moms, their gifts, their bells.
I looked at my mom’s ghost and realised that was her true gift to me. My mom used to bring people out of their shells with the ease of squeezing a lemon. She could sense the stories people wished to share but were too scared to, and knew how to ask that question that nobody dared to ask. Family and strangers, awkward teenagers and frail old people, straight and queer alike, at a gathering or in the queue, it didn’t matter to her.
Now I am full of stories that are bursting to come out, and I see stories around me in people’s eyes, in their hands holding an object tight, a small movement of the head, or a distant smell.
As the bell sounds, I feel her love spread inside me. I see her standing by my side, proudly whispering, “That’s my girl — the storyteller.”
If this story spoke to you, you might enjoy the kind of coaching I offer — spacious, creative, and centred around the stories we tell ourselves and the stories waiting to be told.
I work 1:1 with people who want clarity, direction, or a deeper understanding of their inner world.
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