Roughly two years after The Wanted singer died, Kelsey Parker has decided to get rid of her wedding bands because they became a 'painful' reminder of her late husband.
- Jan 9, 2024
AceShowbiz - Tom Parker's widow Kelsey has revealed the "painful" decision to remove her wedding rings two years after the singer's death. The Wanted star passed away in March 2022 at the age of 33 after a battle with a brain tumour leaving Kelsey to raise their two young children alone - and she's now decided the time has come for her to remove her rings because she has to face the heartbreaking reality that she's "not married anymore."
"It's something I've been thinking long and hard about for a while now, and as we end the first week of a new year, I have decided to take off my rings," she said in a post on Instagram.
"It felt really painful every time I looked at them and I have been torturing myself over when will be the right time. I know now there will never be a right or wrong time, but there does have to come a point in my life when I remove them."
"Of course I'll always be Tom's, he'll always be in my heart and I know I will forever be in his, but right now, in this world I'm not married anymore as much as that breaks my heart to admit."
Kelsey went on to share that she hopes to eventually give the rings to her daughter Aurelia, four, but is now considering wearing them on a chain around her neck or getting them framed.
She added, "I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. One day I'd love for Rae [Aurelia] to have them, but right now I want to do something special with them. I'm not ready to totally let go of them. I've thought about wearing them around my neck or framing them and putting them in the space I create with Tom's music stuff."
"Sometimes I wonder if I've left them on too long and other times I think I just expected to wear them forever. How do I protect and honour my marriage to Tom while not living in the past?... please do send me any ideas you have of what I could do with my rings, and no hate please!"
Kelsey, who is also mum to son Bodhi, three, from her marriage to Tom, recently released a book called "With or Without You" about dealing with loss and she admitted it was like "therapy" for her.
She told Closer magazine, "I needed someone to tell me 18 months ago that I'll be OK, I will have bad days, but good days too, and that you can still live a happy life after loss. My life without Tom is very different to what it was. I'd give anything for it to be different and to have him here with me, but that's not what's happened."
"I have to live with my grief. It's learning to live with your grief and still lead a happy life, which has been part of my healing journey and one I wanted to share. I am hoping it will help people who are going through grief or loss or any kind of trauma."
"Putting it all down on paper was like therapy for me. It was very hard to relive it all, and there were a lot of tears. But there was laughter too. Tom taught me how to have fun, how not to take things seriously, and that life is just too short."
