Since October I have been carrying around with me Michele’s wedding ring and mine. At first I kept them in my pocket. Her ring was returned to me in a small zip lock bag and I figured that anyone who had touched it would have been wearing gloves. I left it in the bag as I wanted the person who last touched it to have been her. After several weeks of toying with it I wore a hole in the bag and held her ring in my hands for the first time since her death.
For the next several weeks I carried both her ring and mine in my pocket. Sometimes my pants pocket, sometimes my shirt pocket. One at least one occasion, bending over in the men’s room I managed to spill both rings out on to the floor; for several frantic moments I scrambled around searching under the lavatory and in the other stalls until I found both again. Clearly I needed to find a better way to keep both with me.
At the time I had been wearing a thin gold chain of Michele’s, with a pendant made from quartz laced with gold. I put the pendant away and hung both rings from the chain. That is until this afternoon. When I went to take my tee-shirt off prior to a shower the rings got caught up in a fold of the shirt and the chain broke.
I broke Michele’s chain.
For the time being I have put the chain and our rings aside. In a odd bit of snychronicity it was almost exactly nine years ago that we first got our gold bands and starting wearing them. Somehow it seems appropriate to set them aside now.
At least that’s the plan.