From their cold, dead hands comes a memento you will cherish forever.

KathleenKern
3 min readJun 11, 2022

This Father’s Day, let Precious Tributes™honor your Dad incarnately.

Earrings made of human hair (Anna Sparr, via Wikimedia Commons)

June has come, and across the country, grateful children of all ages are preparing to honor their dear old Dads.

But for many, Father’s Day is clouded by the loss of their patresfamilias. They yearn for one more conversation, one more hug, one more stupid Dad joke.

That’s why we, here at Precious Tributes™, have developed new, more intimate ways to keep your Loved Ones with you.

Some marketers advertise thumbprint jewelry for keychains and necklaces to grieving families. They take cursory prints of the deceased from ordinary embalmers and send these prints to China or Vietnam, where low-wage workers turn them into gold- and silver-plated jewelry.

All Precious Tributes™ jewelry is manufactured in the USA. We work solely with Precious Certified Embalmers™, who gently take the print from your father’s recently alive hand using the best clay polymers and send them to our skilled artisans. These talented professionals craft the print into our unique designer jewelry from Precious Metals™ only.*

And why stop at a thumbprint? Look at this stunning teardrop cascade necklace with all ten prints hanging from a delicate rose gold chain. Or this fingerprints charm bracelet with your father’s photo laser-etched on the clasp.

For piercing jewelry, which requires something smaller, we can lathe the teeth of a Loved One into tears, globes, or hearts. Are you a fan of forehead piercings? If our embalmers take a photo of your Loved Ones’ eye before it begins to deflate, we will turn the image into an actual ceramic Third Eye. Or better yet, you take a picture of the Predeceased’s eye yourself while he is still with you!

The media famously reported on vials of blood that Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton wore around their necks to remind them of each other when they were apart. But as Thornton has reported, the blood was merely a fingerprint smear in a locket. Precious Tributes™, however, can provide you with vials in several sizes, containing an anticoagulant that will preserve your loved one’s sanguine source of life for years. If you prefer that it dazzles like a ruby, access the blood of your Predeceased loved one and use our kit to keep it fresh. If you like amethysts, give the kit to our embalmers.

The Victorian Era turned mourning into an art form. Intricate patterns woven from the hair of the deceased bordered or were enclosed in lockets, brooches, hairpins, or picture frames. Precious Tributes™ is currently the only corporeal memento manufacturer that carries on this tradition. Former carpet weavers now working for fair trade co-ops in Pakistan undertake this intricate craft for us.

Fathers, of course, are not likely to have as much hair as female Loved Ones. But look at this gorgeous ornament filled with silver chest hair, lit from within by a silver LED light. Suitable for a Christmas tree or the front window, it will shine like your father’s loving spirit watching over you. If your father died of Covid-19, we can enclose his hair or other bodily artifacts in these colorful blown-glass representations of the virus as seen under an electron microscope.

If you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, why didn’t I see all these enchanting possibilities before my father was cremated?” never fear! We offer a lovely array of bisque china figurines that might represent his interests, e.g., golfer, woodworker, gardener, harpist, taxidermist, or geocacher. A hole in the bottom allows you to pour a small quantity of his earthly remains into these exquisite handmade memorials to what he loved. (We recommend using a small, wide-mouth canning funnel.)

Are you thinking in terms of a genuinely life-long homage? At Precious Tributes™, we can use your Loved One’s ashes to make premium ink in three colors that matches quality inks used by the most prominent tattoo artists working today. This Father’s Day, why not take off your shirt, turn around, and show your family a tattoo saying, “Dad always has my back?”

*All jewelry is available in Precious gold™, Precious white gold™, Precious rose gold™, and Precious silver™.

--

--

KathleenKern

Worked for Christian Peacemaker Teams (http://cpt.org) from 1993–2020. I also write novels and do what I can to stop fascism.