About East Coast Pearls
Pearls with a Story — The Art of the Reveal

My story with pearls began before I even knew it.
When I was just nine months old, my biological mother and sister were killed in a car crash. I came into this world already acquainted with loss — learning to walk, to talk, to grow up, all while carrying something heavy I couldn't yet name.
But life moves forward, and it brought me moments of wonder too.
When I was fifteen, my dad and step-mom took me to a fair where someone was opening oysters and crafting jewelry from the pearls inside. I was transfixed. Something about watching that hidden, luminous thing emerge from its shell stopped me completely. I begged them to let me have a pearl party for my sixteenth birthday — and they said yes. Friends and family each chose an oyster, the pearls were revealed one by one, and the room was filled with the kind of joy that only surprise can bring.
Life moved on, as it does. The memory of that night faded into the background.
Then came the losses that would change everything.
My dad — my rock — had been living with dementia. Watching someone you love slip away slowly is its own kind of grief. He passed, and I was still finding my footing when, just ten months later, I lost my step-mom to breast cancer that had spread to her brain. Ten months. Two people. The grief was enormous — the kind that leaves you unmoored, unsure of what comes next.
I found myself scrolling through Facebook one day when I came across someone doing oyster openings live on camera. Something in me lit up. I became obsessed, only this time even more deeply than before. Starting East Coast Pearls gave me something to pour myself into, a reason to get up and create when the world felt very quiet.
I couldn't fully explain the pull until a friend finally said to me:
"It makes perfect sense that you are drawn to pearls. They are created from discomfort — something beautiful from pain. And that is pretty much the story of your life."
She was right.
Then came the moment that confirmed everything.
While clearing out my parents' home after they were gone, I found a small plastic bag tucked away among their things. Inside it were the pearls — the ones my dad and my grandfather had chosen the day of my sixteenth birthday party, all those years ago. They had kept them. All that time, they had kept them.
I knew then that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.