My mother still had my baby tooth in her purse

Dear Delyara, My mother died at eighty-three. While clearing her handbag, I found a tiny envelope with my name and the words first tooth, age 6. Inside was a yellowed baby tooth. Mine. I am fifty-eight. I had completely forgotten losing it. I called my sister and asked whether Mum kept hers too. She did. One tooth from each of us, still travelling in the purse she carried to the grocery store, church, hospital appointments, everywhere. I cannot understand why she kept them there instead of in a drawer. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she liked knowing pieces of her children were close. When I held that tooth, I thought about my mother bending over a six-year-old version of me, pretending the tooth fairy was real while secretly putting this tiny piece of my body into an envelope she would keep for more than half a century. I spent the final years helping her remember medications, bills, names, appointments. Dementia took so much. Yet somewhere inside her handbag, she had quietly carried proof that before I became the daughter managing her decline, I was once a little girl whose missing tooth mattered enough to save.