I regretted not having a long braid when my mother died

July marks one year since we buried my mother. She left this world far too soon in February 2021 - she was not even 62 years old.

Several months after her death, I found a plastic bag with her hair in it, along with a note she wrote in 2013, explaining that she left that lock – so soft and flat – for when she passed through. "I wanted to leave something alive," she wrote, "so I left my hair." out, living and having lived in Maine. Hair in our culture is important. In the right hands it can be powerful, just like my mother's hair is in that plastic bag - a reminder of her, a piece of her still on this earth. But in the wrong hands, hair can be dangerous. I know it was used in a way to cause harm: my sister once found a jar full of hair, corn and teeth under the stairs of a house she was staying in on the Mohawk reservation, a curse which her boyfriend at the time had told her about. We are not the only tribe to consider hair a sacred part of the body - most in the United States, Canada and Mexico know the value of hair, its importance.

Growing up, I was always vigilant about my hair, or at least my mother was. Every comb or brush in our house has never had a single strand on it. After brushing or combing, you were asked to take all hair and flush it down the toilet.

I don't believe in curses, but I still have this pang of guilt and even a hint of fear every time I see my hair falling at a hairdresser or the hair of a loved one on the floor, like my wife's, whose hair I cut from time to time.The value of the last two cuts is wrapped in towels and stored in the laundry basket , and something inside me - something deep...