Tulas ad: What Terri Irwin Wears 👆

Terri Irwin hasn't been on a single date since Steve died in 2006. You won't believe what she's worn around her neck every day since. I've been a tour guide at Australia Zoo for 14 years. I give the Steve Irwin tour. The crocodile paddock. The arena. The Khaki Memorial at the back of the park where his statue stands in bronze with Bindi on his shoulders. I've told that story more times than I can count. I know every line of it. I know where people cry. I've seen Terri around the park a thousand times. She still comes through almost every morning before we open. She drives the little cart herself. She stops at the enclosures. She knows every keeper by name and every keeper knows. 20 years after her husband died on a boat off Batt Reef, Terri Irwin still runs this park the way he would have run it. She hasn't remarried. She's said in interviews, more than once, that she won't. She has not been on a single date since September 4, 2006. That is 20 years. In public. In front of a country that has watched her every single day of it. I'm telling you about a necklace. Terri owns real jewelry. Her mother's rings. Steve's wedding ring on a chain, the big gold one, which comes out for memorial anniversaries. Pieces that have been photographed and written about. She wears almost none of it in the park. But there is one thing I have never, in 14 years, seen her without. A thin gold chain. Delicate. A pattern of tiny gold beads and little lines spaced along it. If you saw it in a photo you'd think it was from the markets in Brisbane. Easy to miss. She wears it in her khakis in the croc paddock. She wears it in a dress at the memorial events. She wears it on television, under the collar of every shirt she sits down in. I have watched her climb into a jeep and over a fence and under a rope line, and that little chain goes with her everywhere. I noticed something else over the years. Her hand goes to it. Constantly. When she's listening to a keeper, when she's quiet in the cart, when a tourist asks her a question about Steve she has answered a thousand times. Her thumb moves across the beads, one at a time, slowly, like she's counting them. She doesn't even know she's doing it. For years I assumed it was Steve's wedding ring, worn down into a chain. I had a story in my head about her melting it, re-making it, keeping it against her chest. It was a sweet story. I had told a version of it to a couple of tourists over coffee. I was wrong. I found out last autumn. I had an older woman on my tour at the end of the day. Maybe 70. Australian. Sharp. She hung back after the group moved on. She told me she had worked in the gift shop in the mid-'90s, back when the park was still called the Beerwah Reptile and Fauna Park and Terri was in there herself most days, ringing people up and raising a baby in a backpack. She pointed at a photo of Terri on the wall by the memorial. One of the recent ones, from a conservation announcement. You can just see that thin gold chain at her collar. She said, "You know that isn't just a necklace, don't you?" I said no. I said I'd always figured it was Steve's ring, re-done. She shook her head. And then she reached up to her own collar, and pulled out a fine gold chain of her own. Same little beads. Same little lines. She said, "It's Morse code, love. The beads are dots and the lines are dashes. Hers spells one word. His word. She had it made the year after he passed, and she has worn it every day since. To everyone looking at it on television, it's just a pretty gold necklace. But she knows. And now you know." She told me Terri couldn't do what other widows did. She couldn't wear black. She couldn't cry at the shops. She couldn't let the grief show, because the whole country was watching her. The cameras were watching her. The park was watching her. Two kids were watching her. She had to walk out onto a stage 6 days after she buried her husband, in khakis, and say thank you to the thousands of Australians who had sent letters. She has not had a single day off from being Steve Irwin's widow since. "She needed something she could wear in front of all of it," the old woman said. "Something that let her stop being the widow for a second. One word. His word. In a code nobody could read." She was quiet. Then she said it. The word. Crikey. The chain spells Crikey. She wears his word around her neck every single day. On every tour. In every interview. In every photograph of her that has been taken for 20 years. His word, in a language nobody but her can read. Stop being the widow for a second. That is what the old woman said. And I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. More recently, Terri has been seen with a second thin chain tucked next to the first. The old woman told me what that one spells too. “Grandpa Crocodile.” The name Steve's granddaughter Grace calls the grandfather she will never meet. I asked her, carefully, where she had got hers. She told me the name. Tulas. A small company. They hand-code any name, any word, any date, any phrase, up to 22 characters, into Morse code along a fine gold chain. From the outside it looks like an ordinary necklace. Nobody in the world can read it but the person wearing it. I looked them up that night and I had braced for the kind of number a Steve Irwin ring would cost. 4 figures at least. It cost less than a full tank of gas. 14K gold-filled. Waterproof. Doesn't tarnish, doesn't fade. The clasp is tight. The chain adjusts while it's on. You put it on once and never take it off. Over 101,000 orders filled. Which mattered to me, because I was already thinking about who I was ordering it for. My father died 6 years ago. 38 years of marriage and then a heart attack. My mother is the strongest woman I know and she has spent 6 years doing exactly what Terri is doing. She has held it together for everyone. She has never once worn a memorial anything. When I asked her why, she said she didn't want to be the sad widow everyone tiptoes around. She didn't want that to be the first thing people saw when she walked into a room. I understood her completely. And now there was finally something I could do about it. I ordered one with his first name on it. Robert. And the year they got married. It came in a beautiful little box. I brought it to her kitchen on a Sunday and set it on the counter and told her she could open it when she wanted. She opened it right there in front of me. She lifted the chain out and waited for me to explain what she was looking at. So I told her. The beads and lines were Morse code and it spelled Dad's name and the year they got married. Nobody in the world would ever know what it said. She could wear it anywhere and no one would ever look at her with that face. The sad one. The one she hates. She held it against her chest with both hands and my mother, who has not cried in front of me in years, cried in her kitchen for 10 minutes. She put it on that night. She has not taken it off since. She touches it a hundred times a day without noticing. My aunt saw it and ordered one for her own late husband. My mother-in-law ordered 2 more. Every one of them said the same thing when the box arrived. Why did nobody tell me about this sooner. Here's what I think about every time I give that tour now. I stand in front of Steve's bronze statue with Bindi on his shoulders, and I tell the group about Montague Island, and the Barrier Reef, and the woman who was waiting at home. For 14 years I told them Terri Irwin was the strongest woman in Australia. Now I know what she's been wearing under her collar the whole time. One word. His word. In a code only she can read. You don't need to run a zoo. You don't need to have been married to a legend. You don't need the country watching you. You just need what Terri wears every single day. The brand is Tulas. They hand-code every piece to whatever you want. His full name. His word. A nickname only the 2 of you used. The last thing he said to you. Up to 22 characters. It comes in gold and silver, and it only ever means what it means to the person wearing it. Right now they're doing buy 2, get 1 free, with free shipping worldwide. Every piece is hand-coded to your exact message, so it takes a few days to make. The sooner you order, the sooner he's with you. If you've been the one holding it together, keeping him close in every quiet way you can, scared of being the widow at the grocery store, this is the one you can wear out in the world without ever having to stop being his wife for a single second. Or if you know a woman who has been through a loss, this is what you give her. Terri Irwin has worn hers every day for 20 years. My mother is going to wear hers for the rest of her life. Link's below: tulas.co/products/morse-code-necklace