So what are you doing with the rings?
newlyweds show off rings
When two widows meet, it’s not long before this question comes up. For many women, the wedding ring, and sometimes, an engagement ring too, have been constants through much of their adult life. In recent years, engagements have become so Instagrammable that professional photographers are involved. But even a widow from the BI (before Instagram) days, surely remembers the moment when her beau put a ring on it, setting in motion a chain of events that took her from single girldom to married womanhood.
My story’s a little different. For two and a half decades, I wore rings I’d bought myself. What I knew and continue to know about gemstones, gold, settings, and ring-fashions, would be dwarfed inside the diamond of a high school promise ring. When Jack and I moved in together, he’d already bought me a couple of rings we’d found together in flea markets. Neither of us felt the need to make it any more official than that.
Four years later his lung cancer diagnosis made marriage feel more imperative. It was mutual though - not something that needed to be formalized with symbols. Indeed, my engagement ring was fashioned from a strawberry at an impromptu proposal in front of friends in our ‘70s basement. Click here to read more about that fun night and many other significant events at The Bar.
When, two months later, we eloped on seven days notice, Jack took charge of getting wedding bands. By then, I knew he’d know that I’d want something non-flashy that would work well with my silver rings. I’d long-since eaten my engagement ring so nothing to match there! He went to a jeweller at Yorkgate Mall near his shop at Finch & 400. He ordered custom identical white-gold bands - small, unobtrusive. When he went to pick them up on wedding eve, they were large, shiny, very noticeable - not what he’d selected. The rings we exchanged that day were accidentally the “something borrowed” that most brides want. Our real bands arrived a couple of weeks later. For more about our elopement, read Friday the 13th, A Love Story.
When Jack died, 30 months after we married, I couldn’t imagine ever not wearing that circlet of gold symbolizing the happy time when we gave the world the most traditional demonstration of our solidarity in the face to cancer. I wore his, too, anchored by my own, anxious not to let it slip off my finger as it seemed his life had slipped through them. During my recovery trip to London just weeks after he died, I searched out a jeweller who could fuse them together for all eternity, but in the end, I couldn’t take them off, even for the few days it would have taken for the jeweller to do his work.
For more than a year, there they stayed, carefully moved to my ring bowl at night, and replaced again in the a.m., part of the emotional armour fresh widows don daily just to function. Then one day, I decided to put them on a neck chain, next to my skin still, but less obvious to the world. Again, the nightly removal ritual, the morning replacement.
And then I quit. Just one day. All of a sudden. Now, I’m ringless most of the time but when I leave Weston, I wear the silver ring Jack bought for me in a Polish silver shop and the one I bought before I met him as a statement of singlehood. But the wedding bands sit in my ring bowl.
On my rambles on the Humber River, I recently met a Weston-based jewelry maker. I didn’t know Amanda Schoppel was an artist when I first met her - I was more interested in her whippet, Rapunzel. When I learned of her profession, I asked if she could reimagine my rings as something representing the reinvention I’ve undergone since Jack died six years ago, she completely got the project. And me.
I eagerly await Amanda’s ideas, knowing the new piece will exist only because its composite pieces did: two eight-year-old, still shiny wedding bands. Just as the current me exists only because of the experiences of those years.
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