New life for old bling (A tale of two rings...or maybe several rings)

Once upon a time, there were two rings.



One mine, one his, they sat upon our fingers from the moment we did this:


Until the day I had to do this:


The day I had to go into the funeral home, say goodbye to my husband of only 19 months for the last time, and have our daughter say goodbye to her daddy--a man she'd never remember alive on her own.

I hadn't seen him in the two days since he'd been killed, and as I sat in the waiting room of the funeral home, bracing myself for whatever I might see next and trying to prepare myself for the physical damage, I asked the funeral director how bad my husband looked. I don't remember his answer, but he gave me a manila envelope with Charley's personal effects.

His car key.

His wedding ring.

Other than the cycling clothes he was wearing, his now-broken helmet, and his riding shoes, they were the only two things he had on him when he died. I slipped Charley's ring onto the middle finger of my right hand and tried to quell the sob building in my throat and the tremors in my body.

I went in and said goodbye to him, whispering to him and sobbing my way through 45 minutes, unable to look at him or touch more than his right hand, laying on the table in front of me. He was so cold.

When I was able to contain myself a bit, I brought Anna in to say goodbye. And then we went home. I didn't really know why I wanted it, but I asked my sister's husband to take a picture of Anna and me together in our front yard, so I could always have a way to remember what I had looked like after saying goodbye forever to my best friend and husband. As a result, the photo above is the first one I have of me wearing Charley's ring, only an hour or two after I first placed it on my finger.

Aside from the odd day or week here and there, that ring has been on one of my hands every single day of the last five years, two months, and fifteen days. Up until nine days ago, that is.

But there's a second ring to this story too. My ring.

Charley and I picked out my engagement ring together, before we were officially engaged. Being ever so practical and responsible, we bought a relatively inexpensive ring setting--only $600 at the time--because we didn't want something we couldn't afford to pay for. Sure, there were prettier, fancier ones that I liked better, but we were quite proud of ourselves for being so well-behaved.

And Charley, being the especially practical and money-driven half of the pair, took to the Internet to find and buy the perfect diamond for my engagement ring. Leave it to him to try to track down a killer deal for a really nice diamond. I mean, really--Who buys a diamond on the Internet?, I wondered at the time.

Even though we were already informally engaged (is the technical term betrothed, then?), we didn't tell anyone we were planning to get married, because I wanted the man to formally propose to me, with the ring. And I wanted to be surprised.

A hard thing to pull off, when the fiancee is me--a planner, a talker, and a wants-to-know-when-things-are-happening kind of girl.

But he did manage to surprise me, two days before Christmas in 2002. We'd gone downtown to look at the Christmas lights, and as we were standing in Pioneer Square, he pulled the ring out of his pocket and proposed. The when and where of his proposal was only a minor surprise--I'd given him an informal deadline of Christmas, so I could finally tell my family...and seeing as it was the last night we'd see each other before Christmas, he was kinda running out of time and opportunity--but what stunned me was the size of the diamond. I'd told him I'd be thrilled with anything between a third and a half a carat (remember, I said I was a talker and a planner), and I also knew we couldn't really afford much more. So when he pulled out my ring with a honkin' huge diamond in it, I was floored. I had the biggest, goofiest grin on my face all evening--including when we went to a swanky bar and got celebratory martinis afterward (mine vanilla, his...couldn't tell ya)--and all I could say, repeatedly, was "Wow" whenever I looked at my hand, decked out with its fancy, beautiful new ring. I couldn't take my eyes off it.

I loved that ring. I loved wearing it. And I loved wearing it even more once I had my plain wedding band soldered alongside it and once Charley wore his ring every day, because it meant we were married. I remember checking in at the airport for our red-eye midnight flight for our honeymoon and Charley and I murmuring between ourselves at another couple ahead of us in line, giggling because, to us, their shiny, unblemished wedding rings (well, the man's, at least) screamed Honeymoon-bound newlyweds! to us. We knew Charley's ring was every bit as conspicuous.

I wore my wedding ring on my left hand for about six months after Charley died. But as the initial fog and numbness started to wear off, it started to hurt to see my ring on my left ring finger. All it did was scream to me that my husband was dead, that I was no longer married, no matter how badly I wanted to still be. So one day in late January or early February--between six and seven months after Charley died--I swapped hands. Charley's wedding ring went on my left middle finger, and my wedding ring on my right ring finger. It felt strange, uncomfortable, constricting, like it was never meant to be on my right hand at all. Which, I suppose, is exactly correct.

As an active lurker on the YWBB at the time, I'd read all the many posts from people who memorialized their loved ones in different, semiunique ways. A small amount of ashes carried in a pendant on a necklace, ashes stored this way, tattoos, ashes stored that way. I'd buried (or interred, technically) all of Charley's ashes six days after he died, and it never even occurred to me at the time that I didn't have to do anything with his ashes right away or to keep any of them with me. A few of the ways people on the YWBB chose to keep a part of their loved one with them seemed a little odd to me, but one method in particular caught my attention: making a diamond from the ashes. Charley being a chemist by schooling and profession, I knew it was something he would have thought was rather cool. We'd talked numerous times about some of the different man-made alternatives to natural products, and I knew Charley was almost always a proponent of a man-made option versus strip-mining, raping, and pillaging the earth of its natural resources. (Think going with Corian countertops instead of a granite or marble slab.) Making a diamond from his ashes was something that might be right up his alley, I thought.

But it was rather crazy-expensive too...not to mention that I didn't have any of Charley's ashes in my possession. I'd have to pay at least $300 to open and close the niche to get any ashes out of his urn--an act that seemed sacrilegious in a way...not to mention frivolous and a poor use of money. Which I knew Charley wouldn't (have) appreciate(d) at all. So I never did it, but man, did I wish I could.

Even though I knew I wasn't really going to make a diamond from his ashes, the idea still stubbornly stuck in my mind. At the time, the company could only make yellow or blue diamonds, and I saw a custom ring in their gallery pages that was absolutely gorgeous. Simple yet contemporary, with a blue stone in the center, I fell a little bit in love with that ring.

Not too long after I started lusting after that blue diamond ring, I went into Cost Plus for something on a late January evening. Couldn't tell you what I bought, but a ring the cashier was wearing caught my attention. I complimented her on it, and she told me it was made out of blue topaz. I'd never really paid much attention to colored gemstones in general, nor to blue topaz, but I knew it was Charley's birthstone. And it was a really pretty ring, so I paid extra attention that day. And somewhere along the way, my brain coalesced the multiple threads into one thought: it was painful to wear my own wedding ring and I loved the blue diamond ring I'd seen made some from someone's ashes, but I couldn't get my own ring made from Charley's ashes...but that blue topaz ring was pretty, and it was Charley's birthstone, and it was blue like the diamond made from ashes, and....

In one of my daily phone conversations with my sister, I must have babbled out something along those same, incoherent lines. (I babbled a lot of nonsense in those days, so maybe it seemed saner than most things I said.) But my sister listened closely, it turned out, and a week or two later, she and her husband gave me a surprise gift a few days before Valentine's Day: one very beautiful blue topaz ring.



I stopped wearing my wedding ring altogether and started wearing the new "Charley ring" on my right hand and Charley's wedding band on my left hand. It was just easier that way. It hurt less. My wedding ring went into a box in a dresser drawer.

And since I was being such an A+ griever and widow, I wanted to be on top of memorializing Charley in "appropriate" ways. So as I rapidly approached the first anniversary of Charley's death, I did what any practical, coping-well-with-her-loss widow would do: I had my diamond put in a necklace, finished just in time to wear for the first anniversary festivities.


(If you look reeeeeaaaaaaally closely, you can see the necklace just above Anna's right shoulder. This picture was taken the night before the first anniversary, during the family barbecue I had on Tuesday night.)

I think back now on how delusional I was and just shake my head. I had no idea what would still lie ahead of me. I was so focused on making it through the first year and on the plans I'd made to "be okay"--for moving to Sandy, for having another baby--that it never even occurred to me that the grief might not end just because it had been one year. Nor did it occur to me that I didn't have to do a damned thing with my ring in the first place.

So naive, in hindsight. But how on earth was I to know? The grief books I read weren't terribly useful and barely talked about life and grief after the first few weeks or six months, much less a year after the death. I didn't know at the time what a blog was or that any young widows or widowers wrote any.

And like with moving out of our house, it did help to wear my diamond in a necklace instead of in my wedding ring. Living in a new house, wearing a different piece of jewelry around my neck: they were easier than living with the enormous grief and fear that he really wasn't ever coming back.

But I rarely wore my necklace. I'd put it on for special occasions or times when (I suppose) I wanted him to feel closer--Christmas, Anna's birthday, the annual death anniversaries, our wedding anniversary--but most of the time it sat, unworn and neglected, in my jewelry box. And often times when I wore it on nonsignificant days, it simply felt a little too emotionally loaded for everyday use.

It was such a waste of a beautiful diamond--a diamond that I loved and that was at the core of some of my happiest memories with Charley. On the third anniversary of Charley's death, I remember wishing I still had my wedding ring to wear, just for a day or two. Sometimes I thought it would be so nice to occasionally have a ring to wear on my left hand, so that my hands didn't scream "SINGLE MOTHER!!" quite so loudly. I briefly looked into having a different stone--an aquamarine or something subtly colored--set into my wedding ring so I could at least wear it from time to time, but like with paying money to open Charley's niche, paying more money for something so trivial just seemed silly, particularly when I could buy a colored gemstone ring with a bigger stone for less than I'd pay to put a smaller one into my wedding ring. The math of it just didn't make sense.

So I did nothing. But shortly after I moved into our house in Milwaukie last year, I found myself in a jewelry store in late April. And there was a beautiful peridot ring...on clearance, for a ridiculously good price. And with Mother's Day (remember, my most-hated and difficult widow holiday) coming up in just a few short weeks, how could I not listen to my inner girl calling out a siren's song for that ring?



So I bought it on the spot, after about five minutes of hemming and hawing and mild guilt, and I informed Anna of what she bought me for Mother's Day when I got home. (And to this day, over a year later, she still refers to it as "the ring what I bought you for Mother's Day." How cute is that?!) And for a month or so, I wore that pretty peridot ring on my left ring finger--where my wedding ring should have been--and my blue topaz Charley ring on my right hand; Charley's wedding band sat in my jewelry box.

I reveled in feeling less single for a change...more normal...still married. Charley was just away on an extended trip for work, right? But after three or four weeks, I'd fulfilled my need to feel pseudo-married for a while, and I took the ring off my left ring finger. Charley's wedding band went back onto my left middle finger, and I alternated between the peridot and blue topaz rings on my right hand. (And believe me, Anna kept tabs on what ring I was wearing and when. She definitely preferred when I'd wear "her" ring.) I still wore my diamond necklace on rare occasions, but they were even more seldom than they had been in the previous years. My naked wedding ring sat alone in my jewelry box.

And so it went until this April. And somewhere between finding out I was getting a surprise tax refund and getting paid a small amount for helping to coach the dance team, I came up with an idea to redo my wedding ring. I didn't even know that the desire was still swirling around in my subconscious, until it popped up fully formed as I sat on my couch. At one point I thought it would be something nice to do for the fifth anniversary of Charley's death. But me being me, it didn't happen in time...nor did I even think about it at the time; I was too busy enjoying Anna and our summer together.

But for no real reason at all, I impulsively put on my necklace before going to Saturday brunch at a semi-swanky restaurant with two college friends in late July, while Anna was out camping with my parents. And since I had kidless time on my hands and the diamond on my neck, I decided on the spur of the moment to swing by a jewelry store--much loved and frequented by one of my dearest widow friends (translation: there'd be nothing shocking about my history, or my jewelry request)--near my house on my way home. And then my desire kindled into full force.

And yesterday, I finally got to see my idea fully fleshed out.

Before:


...and...

...after:


(Okay, that's actually not the best of pictures, but I liked how Anna's holding the box. =))



I toyed with the idea of melting down both Charley's and my rings--or at least mine as a minimum--and having a new ring made from their gold. I had little attachment left to my wedding ring--I'd been keeping it in case Anna ever wanted to use it someday whenever she gets married--so I didn't have any problems with the thought of melting mine down. But Charley's ring was a different matter altogether.

His ring was what I'd become attached to, what I'd worn virtually every day for over five years. Wearing his ring was comforting and, surprisingly, wasn't painful. He loved me, he married me, and he wouldn't have wanted to leave me or Anna: that's what it said to me as I wore it day after day. And despite that I'd talked through the first insanity of my idea via the Widow Am-I-Freakin'-NUTS?! Hotline to my widowed friend, to get feedback if I was totally crazy to think of doing something so permanent to his, ours, my ring, I still wasn't sure how I felt about irreversibly altering his ring.

But after I talked to the designer (instead of a salesperson) last week, we came up with a design and a strategy that was simpler, affordable, and, for me, more meaningful: we'd use his ring and set my diamond into it. No melting, no combining, no changing what, at heart, was there. It would still be Charley's ring, exactly as he wore it, but we'd simply add elements from my own engagement ring--the diamond set on the diagonal, with six smaller diamonds around it--shuffle them around a bit, add a few new things--the full bezel on the diamond, the texture on the ring--and then leave my wedding ring intact, ready for Anna someday.

And I love my new ring. It's gorgeous and beautiful.


But it still feels weird to have it back on my finger. The old balance and wear has shifted a bit, and it doesn't feel the way it used to. It's beautiful, and I love it, and it's exactly how I wanted it to look. But it's still hard to look at it for longer than a second or two right now, because there's no arguing that I shouldn't be wearing it the first place. In a saner world--in a normal world, it still seems some days...one that didn't shift off its natural axis five years ago--I should still be wearing my wedding ring on my left hand, and Charley would still be wearing his. Alive. We'd hopefully have another child by now (and hopefully we wouldn't have killed that child by the time he or she left their Terrible Twos and Demonic Threes). We'd be...in all honesty, I don't have the slightest clue what we'd be doing. I can't even imagine it anymore.

I love my new ring. But it still doesn't change that, right now, it reminds me that he's dead, still, and he's still never coming back, dammit all to hell.

I knew that I'd likely have some sort of backlash reaction once it was done. I was excited to get it and see how it turned out...until I got the phone call yesterday that it was finished. Then it dawned on me that I didn't necessarily know how I was going to react. Grin from ear to ear, much like when I first saw that diamond set in a different ring almost eight years ago? Or would I burst into tears on the spot?

Amusingly, Anna was really excited about seeing it finished. "Mommy, I can't WAIT to see your new ring!!" she kept telling me, from the time I picked her up from kindergarten, through lunch, and up until we made it into the jewelry store later that afternoon. And then she kept exclaiming how much she loved the ring and how beautiful it was. (I'm either raising her right, or else creating a horrible monster for the future. ;o))

As I was playing around last night, taking the photos to go along with this post, I got a semi-inspired idea for a photo. After spending so much time in August (and over the previous year) pouring through wedding photos online to get ideas for photographing my friends' wedding earlier this month, I inevitably saw lots of photos of the wedding rings together. Often they're artfully arranged on some interesting or poignantly significant backdrop, so I had a fiendish idea, spurred in part by an exchange with a man in the jewelry store yesterday afternoon when I picked up my ring. The man--old enough to have a son in his mid- to late twenties, who was either freshly engaged or about to be and at the store picking up his fiancee's engagement ring--made some crack to Anna/me how "Mommy got everything" and "Daddy lost it [the ring]." He'd overheard enough of my conversation with the designer (as I was oohing and ahhing over my first impression) and Anna's interjections to surmise that it had been Daddy's ring and that I had redone it somehow. What he had no idea about, however, was how I came to be in possession of the ring. No doubt he assumed I'd cleaned up in the divorce and that poor ol' Daddy was left with absolutely nothing, not even the ring from his finger. I simply laughed and said, "Only in a manner of speaking," in response to his ill-bred joke. A few years ago I would have fumed or else stuttered through some half-formed, tearful response that included the words husband and dead in some combination, but at five years out it's easier most times to just let people think whatever they want. The truth often makes people uncomfortable or else upset, and I've gotten tired of dealing with their reactions. (Although I do confess that, in hindsight, I would have gotten great delight out of telling him, "Yes, but he only 'lost' his ring when the coroner had to pry it off his cold, dead finger"...but I'm not that quick on the spot...and I would never have said it anyway. My mother drummed good manners into me from too early an age. But boy, it might have been fun!)

But the irony of his assumption struck me, and I thought of a perfect, telling backdrop for my wedding ring shot last night, a la widow style:

I was internally hooting over my cleverness. Except I think it kind of backfired on me, because it's a little too true and cuts a little too close to home. Charley's death is the only reason I have this ring.

And perhaps it's part of the reason why it's hard to look at it for any length of time right now. At the moment it's more of a (temporary) reminder of what should have been and what was lost, than it is a happy bit of new bling.

But give me a week at most. I'm sure I'll be back to my giddy girly happiness over getting to wear my beautiful diamond again every day and having a pretty new/old piece of jewelry to show off. (Because honestly, that's one of the main reasons why women wear fancy jewelry: so it's noticed and complimented!) And besides, none of my family or friends has seen it yet, to add their oohs and ahhs to the mix. All I have at the moment are my daughter, myself, the jewelry store staff--and one jackass, bitter old man.

When the coroner pried it off his cold, dead finger, indeed. Pffth.

But oooooohhhhhhhhhhh, I do ♥ me some new bling! =)