My wedding ring

My wedding ring.  

I never took it off for the 33 years we were married. And I kept it on for a while after Jody died because I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. It wouldn’t have passed what Megan Divine refers to as the “nausea factor”. If you’re grieving and the thought of doing something makes you nauseous, don’t do it. Honor that feeling as well as your grief.

Jody loved to sneak peeks at me sitting on our sofa, dangling my left arm and hand over the side, absently rotating the ring with my thumb.

I’m actually on my third band. The first one was lost in 1996 while swatting a fly on a New Hampshire lake beach and it flew off, burrowing deep in the sand. We looked everywhere for it, got on our hands and knees, while our fellow beach goers joined in the search. We returned the next day with a rented metal detector, but we never found it.

A little boy who was observing it all asked Jody in a concerned voice, “Can you still be married?”

Shortly thereafter we purchased ring number two.

In 2004 we went to a hometown Texas jewelry store, and bought Jody a new, bigger diamond ring. She was looking at several in our agreed upon price range, then spied this gorgeous ring, with a not-so-gorgeous price tag and started to turn away. I stopped her and said, “Why don’t you try it on?”

She did, and it fit like Cinderella’s slipper. Much to her delight I said, “Let’s get it”, and she hugged me tight and kissed me. The jeweler threw in a new and bigger band for me. 

That was ring number three. My last one. It is said that jewelry is a lousy investment, and maybe it is on a strictly financial basis. But the memories, the stories, the feelings are priceless.