What Remains After Loss: Finding Dad, Mom, and Brother in Dimes, Deer, and Belt Buckles

Written by: Niki Russo on May 21, 2025

For me, it’s dimes. 

Whether it’s her coming to me, or if I’m just allowing her love and memory to fill me in those moments, I’m not sure. But when I find a dime, she’s there… and there have been enough occasions when I didn’t know I needed her until I found the dime. And when I did (and do), I always smile, and say, either in my head or right out loud… “Hi, Mom.” 

But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time in my life when finding a dime or two meant getting some candy at Mechanic Street Market in Fitchburg, my childhood town. Smarties, Bazooka Gum, Atomic fireballs – dimes went a long way back then. Sometimes I’d find them just sitting on the ground, on the side of the road… but more often than not, my friends and I would find our dimes (and other coins) on our trips downtown. We’d hop on our bikes with a mission in mind – check every parking meter and pay phone for stuck nickels, dimes and quarters – and don’t forget to check the coin return slots. We were more successful than you might think. 

And it wasn’t just the dimes that went a long way – the joy and excitement over found money did too. It meant extra sugar for me – and for friends and maybe even for my older brother if I was feeling especially charitable that day. And no need to ask Mom and Dad? That was the best part. We knew better than to ask for money back then – things were very tight, and they were likely busy anyway – cleaning the house, paying bills, looking for my dad’s lost belt buckle, and whatever else passed for adult responsibilities back in the late 70s. 

Those were idyllic days, the joy and freedom of childhood with friends and bikes and made-up games; the comfort and safety of home, oblivious of how poor we were; the feeling of belonging to a neighborhood and knowing that this safety net, this bubble, would always be there. 

Until it wasn’t. 

My life in Fitchburg came to an end in the summer of 1982, as my mom and I moved to the small town of Millis, a place I’d never heard of. We left our first-floor tenement apartment in Fitchburg and now lived in a two-story colonial style house. I’ll never forget our first night there. I wasn’t happy to have left all my friends or, as I saw it, to have been taken from them – and when you’re twelve years old, being an hour car ride away might as well be across the country. Not everything from our old place had arrived yet – so I slept upstairs in my new bedroom on a sleeping bag on the floor. My mom was on a mattress in our living room downstairs. Without furniture in the house, our voices echoed as we called out to each other – trying to put happy sounds in this strange new place. But no matter how hard I tried, it still wasn’t home. That big house just wasn’t us – too much was missing. 

It was hard. We had a nicer place to live and it was ours, not rented, not at the will and whim of a landlord anymore. The yard was bigger. The house had four bedrooms and a garage, and there were two and half bathrooms. And I now had my own room. But I didn’t want my own room.

In Fitchburg I had shared a room with David, my older brother. Yes, we fought a lot – he was almost two and a half years older than me, and I played the role of annoying little brother to perfection. We had bunk beds. I was always on the bottom bunk, not because I necessarily wanted it, but because he was older and he chose the top bunk. I’d lay in bed and kick the underside of his bunk, pushing him up. He’d yell, call me names and ball up his socks and throw them down at me. It wasn’t always done in anger – a lot of the time it was done in fun, our little ritual. He’d stockpile balled up socks, prepared for warfare. 

The rest of our room was just a combination of our stuff – our Legos, Star Wars action figures, games and things. Old, mismatched bureaus for our clothes. The windows in front looked out onto a small porch that led to a shared driveway for the tenants of all three floors. My mom’s brown, beat up Toyota Corolla was usually in the front spot. My dad’s big, white Chevy van would park behind it, both when he lived with us and when he didn’t – though even when he didn’t, he was there most nights.

I was young and didn’t really know what ‘separation’ meant – it just became a different way of living, I suppose. But I remember missing him. Time steals a lot, but I haven’t forgotten missing him. 

On Mondays he’d come over early, because that’s the night he’d take us to our Boy Scout meetings. Those were always fun rides. Our troop was in a different town, a good half an hour or so away. My dad’s van had just the two seats in the front, so David and I would switch off sitting in the passenger seat or on the makeshift seat in the middle. There was one particularly long two-lane road on the way to our meeting – Lunenburg Road – and it had these white posts lining both sides. At night it looked like we were playing the old Atari game, Night Driver, the posts flying past us. We loved that. The back of the van had a makeshift living space, as my dad and his cousin used to go bowhunting for deer. Instead of setting up a campsite, they’d just stay in the back of the van. They never did get a deer, though one did casually walk by them once. I don’t know – maybe they just liked the idea of being out there with them – the deer – in the peacefulness of the woods. 

On Monday night, April 6^th, 1981, my dad came over to pick us up for our Boy Scout meeting, like always. David and I had been fighting, and my mom was at her wit’s end. My dad yelled at us, and told us to get in the van. He and my mom talked in our kitchen; my mom concerned for David, my constant baiting of him, and the difficult spot that put him in; my dad upset with where their marriage was and frustrated with himself for not knowing what to do or how to be a good father. They hugged, said “I love you” and, as so often is the case, moved on to the next ‘have-to-do’, with nothing really resolved. My mom prepared to go to her Psychology class at Fitchburg State and my dad went out to the van to bring us to our Boy Scout meeting and give us a lecture on behaving and all that.

There’d be time for resolution later….because we always think there’ll be time for resolution later. 

But there wasn’t. 

A year and four months or so after that night, I found myself laying on the floor of a bedroom I didn’t want, calling out loud hellos and sounds to my mom a floor below me, hoping they sounded happy and excited. I’ve little doubt that she hoped her responses sounded the same.

A short time later, some furniture and our other things arrived and the new house started to take shape. My mom bought some new furniture, almost everything from our old place in Fitchburg sold, given away, thrown out or left behind. But I insisted that I keep my bed – the whole thing. So, the bunk beds were set up in my new room – the room that now belonged just to me. I think it worried my mom – but I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to everything. 

In the summer of 1982, I turned thirteen years old – catching up to David. On that Monday night in April of 1981, after the lecture about behaving, silence came over the van. I leaned my head against the passenger window – it was my turn for the passenger seat – feeling angry and annoyed, my Scout uniform feeling uncomfortably tight. David sat in the middle, quiet, while the white posts of Night Driver flew past us, unseen. 

I struggled for a long time – with the guilt of feeling anger towards them both; with the knowledge that they were both upset with me…and with the simple fact that our time together ended in silence. 

“The Accident”, as it has always been called, is a blank space of time for me – my mind protecting me by burying that kind of trauma and pain. The short of it is this – we were hit head on by another car, driving in the wrong lane at a very high speed. 

I was the only survivor. 

I have no memory of any of it, despite witness and EMT reports that I was conscious the whole time. I am thankful for the brain’s ability to protect me, as I am not sure I am ready – even all these years later – to remember being broken and alone in the dark, screaming for my mom. No, I’m not ready for that. 

Just as I wasn’t ready to get rid of the top bunk in this new room of mine. So, it was set up in my room, and stayed there for years. I think I liked the enclosed feeling it gave me – I could hang a blanket from the rail above and hide in this small room within my room.

I’d kick the underside of the top bunk like I used to, but now there was no response. No yelling, no calling of names – no balled-up socks raining down upon me. 

Just silence. 

The dark and quiet in my new room was the hardest, I think. It’s when the thoughts would come. And I didn’t want to think; I wanted to hide. I was only about a year and a half removed from that night in April; a year and a half since my dad and brother died; a year and a half since my body was tossed through the windshield of a van, the broken bones and surgeries leaving me covered in scars. I’d lay in the dark and worry – about us moving, leaving our home, my school and my friends. I didn’t know what I believed in anymore, and was worried that Dad and David wouldn’t be able to find us in our new house, or what I even meant by that. Because it felt like the fears of a child, an irrational worry.

And while I was still just thirteen, so much of me no longer felt like the child that I was, the child that I should still be. So, I dug deeper, and I hid. 

And then…

And then the deer came. 

And that brought me peace. I don’t know how, but it did. They did. There were two of them, one large, one smaller. And they showed up near the top of our new yard not too long after we had moved in. My mom said, “look…” and I saw them through the window. They were stopped, just staring at the house. They moved slowly across the yard, then made their way into the woods. Together. That moment didn’t magically solve anything for me, but I felt a bit better.

My dad never got a deer on all those hunting trips. And now, here they were. They found us. So, for me, it’s also deer. 

I settled in the best I could in this new, strange town. The people there were wonderful; something I’d come to realize much later – they truly were. But my state of mind, my grief, that uncontrollable feeling of being lost and not understood – those feelings, and that version of me, just didn’t mix well with others. 

I moved forward – somehow, I moved forward. My family, my mom… and this amazing girl I met when I was seventeen helped more than I could ever say. That girl, Sharon, became my wife just six years later and our life together, quite honestly, is that ‘reason I survived’ I had long wondered about. We went to work, built a home, and four kids were born into our family in just under two years – our triplets Jared, Caleb and Bekah and Joe twenty-three months later. Life was busy, but so good… and every now and then I would see the deer, happy to know that they seemed to find us no matter where we lived. 

And then, in the year 2000, our moms died – nine weeks apart. Both in their fifties. Sharon’s mom first, after an eighteen-month battle with cancer – and then mine, from a brain aneurysm. 

But the comfort that these signs had once brought me was nowhere to be found. 

Not yet anyway. 

Time did what it always does – it marched on. Despite feeling frustration that the world refused to stop, or even slow down, to allow us a chance to catch our breath or even give us time to try and figure out what we were feeling – we begrudgingly moved along with the world. But I refused to march. 

The time soon came to clean out my mom’s house – and it was in that cleaning that I found the dimes. I had known about them before, but until that time it was just a silly thing my mom did. After the Accident, it was just the two of us. She now had a mortgage and just one income to pay all the bills and take care of me. There just wasn’t a lot of money left over to treat herself very often. So, she decided to save dimes. She had a small Snoopy dime bank that held five dollars’ worth of dimes. Once it was full, she’d roll them up in paper rolls from the bank and put them in a shoebox in her closet. Once she had collected a hundred dollars’ worth of dimes, she’d cash them in and buy something for herself. It was a nice tradition she had created – and it gave her something nice to look forward to. 

Cleaning out her house after she died was a difficult process – and when I came across the shoebox in her closet filled with fourteen rolls of dimes, I broke down. It was only seventy dollars’ worth, not a hundred, not enough for her to get herself something special. And that broke my heart. 

She deserved something special, always did – still does. 

From that moment, the meaning of found dimes changed. It wasn’t about candy money anymore. It was a sign from mom, a reminder that she was still here – with me – still loving me and supporting me. There have been many times when it’s simply just a ‘hello’, and I love the moment I give myself to say hi. But there have been other times when it makes me feel something more. In August of 2017, Sharon and Bekah were in a bad car accident, the other car blowing through a stop sign. Our car was destroyed, the other car flipping into a tree. No fatalities and Sharon and Bekah came out relatively unscathed. This accident happened on August 10^th, on what would have been my mom’s 72^nd birthday. Walking the scene shortly afterwards… I found a dime. Now, I know – it was likely there already – my time hunting for coins as a kid taught me that indeed, there’s treasure to be found on the side of the road. 

But I said, “thanks, mom”, anyway. 

So, for me it’s dimes. It’s deer. They are my signs. They are what bring my dad, my mom and my brother David to me – in moments of great need, and on just a random Thursday afternoon. They help keep my conversations with them going after all these years. And I love that. 

Do I think my mom is placing dimes in my path so I’ll find them and think of her? Or so I’ll know that she loves me? Do I think every deer I see is my dad and brother coming back to see me, to keep an eye on me? 

No, not necessarily. The logical, somewhat skeptical adult I am would say it’s all just coincidence. And maybe it is. But the kid that still lives in me – both the scared and confused grieving kid, as well as the kid who eventually learned how to move forward – they both like to think otherwise.

Who’s to say? And who does it hurt to believe? 

Ironically, it was my skeptical mom – and her experience – that opened me up to the idea of believing in signs. The dimes and the deer – those act, for me, as signs of connection to those I’ve lost. They generally aren’t requested – they just occur and appear. But my mom’s sign? That was different; hers was a demand. 

Cleaning out my mom’s house after she died led me to more than a shoebox of dimes. I also found the journal she kept detailing the day of the Accident, and the months that followed. It’s how I knew what she and my dad talked about while my brother and I were waiting in the van that night. I also found a letter she had written to a woman who was researching what she called, “mystical experiences.” I share a portion of her words here, as it is her experience to tell and should therefore be told in her own words. The letter begins with an explanation of what happened on April 6^th and then continues with what I share here… the moment that led to her plea. 

“One afternoon, they moved Steven out of Intensive Care to a room in the pediatrics ward. Neither of us was ready for the change – the sudden thrusting out from the warm, protected environment we were now so familiar with, to a strange, shabby room in an old wing of the hospital. Steve was in pain from the move; they had to adjust and readjust his traction, and couldn’t seem to make him comfortable. By evening, he had been screaming in pain for hours, and that’s when I lost my carefully maintained control. I raged at the nurses, and all the stored-up grief and anguish poured out until a compassionate nurse led me away and quieted me. 

I was left alone in the playroom across the hall, and it was then that I made my demand to God. I have never in my life, before or since, felt the deep desperation that I felt that night. The pain was unbearable. My husband – my beautiful son – dead. Gone forever. And for me, who didn’t believe in an afterlife, forever was pretty final. I didn’t want to believe that they were gone; I needed them to be all right. So, I asked God – if there was a God – for a sign.

If they were all right, if they were ‘out there’ somewhere together, if they were OK – then I wanted proof. A sign. I demanded a sign – a very particular sign. It was then that I asked for the belt buckle. 

The belt buckle will need some explaining. It was my husband’s – a silver and turquoise belt buckle that his parents had bought for him in Mexico many years before. He treasured it, but it had disappeared over the holidays, and he was distraught about it. He had not stopped looking for it, or given up hope that he would find it. So, it seemed to me that it was the perfect sign – proof that God was real, that there was a heaven, that I would see my husband and child again. But I just didn’t want the buckle to be found; I wanted it to miraculously appear on the kitchen table – that would sure be proof! Proof enough to convince the most skeptical non-believer. 

The night passed. Nothing showed up on the kitchen table, of course, and the business of coping went on. Steven’s condition improved. It was two weeks later that I went to David’s school; I had arranged to meet with his teachers and to get all of his belongings and papers. The teachers were kind. There was some art work and school records, and I took it all home. 

David had been in the eighth grade. The small pile of papers contained all eighth-grade records – tests, evaluations, and such, except for one. One paper was from the seventh grade, dated over a year earlier. Strange that it should be there. It was an essay that the students had done for English class to have their writing skills evaluated. The assignment had required the student to choose any object, pretend to be the object, and describe himself. 

I sat at the kitchen table, reading David’s paper. It was entitled, Buckled Down. These were his words:

‘Hi there! I’m a silver and turquoise belt buckle… I have a turquoise background and molded on me is a silver eagle. I spend most of my time hanging on a belt. I am usually on a man and I go with him everywhere.’ 

I stared at that paper for a long time. Why did David choose the belt buckle to write about? Remember that he could have chosen any object in the world. Remember that the assignment was done long before the buckle was lost, so it wasn’t on anyone’s mind. And remember that the paper should never have been saved in the first place; the rest of his seventh-grade papers had been discarded. As I sat there, staring, I remembered my demand, that the belt buckle show up on the kitchen table. 

The real belt buckle has never been found. Am I convinced that my prayer was answered? I’m not sure. Was it coincidence? Possibly. “I go with him everywhere.” My son’s prophetic words offered me a shred of belief that helped to carry me through all of the dark hours and days that followed. Steven recovered from his injuries, emotional and physical; and scarred though he is, he has grown into a fine young man, with unusual compassion and depth.

After many years of deep depression, I can finally say that I’m OK now too. I’m still not sure what I believe, but wherever David is, he is with his father. I don’t know if they’re ‘out there’ somewhere, but I do know that I have them both right here with me, in my heart. 

So that’s my story. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell it.” 

My mom wrote this letter in October of 1991 – ten and a half years after the Accident. She wrote it in the house that years earlier had us yelling and echoing to each other from separate floors… as we had to create a little fun and joy in the midst of such grief, loss, sorrow and change. She wrote this letter when I was no longer a broken eleven-year-old – but a twenty-two-year-old who was two years away from getting married and less than six years away from becoming a father. 

And she wrote it when she had less than nine years to live. 

Of course, none of us knew that. It’s rare that we ever see it coming. As I sit here now, thinking about my mom sitting at our old kitchen table in Fitchburg, alone, reading about the belt buckle – I don’t know what to think. But I know how I feel. 

And I believe. 

Do I think a glowing hand reached down and slipped that seventh-grade paper into the stack of eighth-grade papers for her to find? Do I think a year before the Accident that my brother knew of my mom’s future prayer and decided to write about the belt buckle? No – that seems a step too far for me. But what do I know? 

And that’s the beautiful thing about our own individual and very personal signs. They’re not for anyone else. They represent a connection we each have with the people we love. And, in my opinion, they’re not reserved for just those we’ve lost. We have these moments with the living – songs or stories or places or things that make us think of them, that connect us. 

And it IS all about connection, isn’t it? That is the love we feel, as a sign – whatever it may be – becomes remembrance, and that smile crosses your face or tears fill your eyes. 

Finding a dime makes me smile and think of my mom – every time. And I love that I have that with her – whether she is up there sprinkling dimes around me or not. And the deer – yeah, I live in a wooded area. Deer walk through our yard all the time. I see them at camp too. And every time, I smile and think of my dad and David. 

I don’t need a sign to think of them or love them or talk to them, of course not. But I like to think that the dimes and the deer are their way of reaching out to me – to let me know that they’re thinking of me, that they love me – and that it’s all going to be ok. 

To paraphrase my mom’s words – I can say that I’m ok now, too. I still don’t know exactly what I believe, but wherever my mom, dad and David are, I know that they’re together. And until I see them again, I have them all right here with me… in my heart. 

And until that day – I have dimes. I have deer. 

And I have belt buckles at kitchen tables.

By: Steve Roy

Comments are closed.