A Light for My Path

Eight years ago on Mother’s Day, we celebrated our younger daughter’s engagement. Her fiancé had proposed a few weeks earlier with a beautiful wooden ring that he made. But, she had asked me several years prior if, when she got married, she could have her grandmother’s wedding set to be engaged with. Rachel was an old soul; she cherished family heirlooms. She and her older sister spent every summer since they were toddlers with my parents in their little town in Tennessee. My mother died of breast cancer when the girls were 14 and 9. They were heartbroken to lose their grandmother, and Rachel wanted something to carry her memory with her into her marriage.

So, on Mother’s Day 2016, her husband-to-be asked me for my blessing and my mother’s ring and placed it on her hand.

They were married in February the next year, 63 years after her grandparents’ marriage. Rachel’s wedding band was soldered to the diamond ring on the side opposite my mother’s wedding band. She and her husband’s initials and their wedding date were engraved in her band in the same script as in her grandmother’s band.

It was a sweet, beautiful wedding, and family members who were no longer with us were reminisced about.

Two months later we were holding Rachel’s memorial service.

That was the hardest day of my life. Mother’s Day just one month later wasn’t much easier. We gathered as a family, but there was no celebration. Rachel’s husband wore her ring on a chain around his neck. He asked me if I wanted it back. I told him that the moment he put it on her finger, the ring was theirs. He was to keep it as long as he wanted to.

Seven years have gone by since that beautiful wedding, that devastating memorial service, and that mournful Mother’s Day. We have celebrated happy occasions since then. Most years we are at our older daughter’s house for Mother’s Day. The joy we share with her and the rowdiness of four grandchildren keeps me distracted and I can usually keep my tears at bay until I’m in the car on the way home.

Rachel’s husband visited us for a weekend this past February. It would have been their seventh anniversary. He handed me a ring box and said, “I think it’s time you had this back.” He also said if he ever meets someone he wants to marry, he would want us to meet her and give him our blessing. She won’t take Rachel’s place, but she will need to accept that Rachel’s family is always his family.

So, now I wear my mother’s and my daughter’s ring on my little finger beside my own wedding band. I don’t have long slender elegant fingers like theirs. The edge of my mother’s band has worn a bit sharp after 70 years. But, maybe someday one of my granddaughters will want their great-grandmother’s ring. And, if they have their wedding band soldered to it, perhaps it will take the edge off the hurt.

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Laura