Till Death Do Us Part

I lost my wedding ring last year. It didn’t fall down a well and it wasn’t stolen; it just disappeared. One morning I dressed for work and couldn’t find the thing. I assumed it had migrated to one of its usual haunts: the crack between the couch cushions, the bathroom shelf, or the key tray beside the back door. I had a habit of taking it off and forgetting where I’d put it down, but it always turned up in a few hours or days.

Not this time.

It was an easy ring to lose, because it was a hard ring to wear. When my future wife and I went to the jeweler’s to pick our rings, the salesman wrote down the wrong size. Unable to believe that any grown man could have a 6 3/4-size finger, he ordered me a 7. When I put it on for the first time, the heavy gold band slipped down my finger like a quoit in a ring-toss game. Thinking fast, the salesman stammered: “It will fit better after a few weeks of this gal’s home cooking.” At the time, I weighed 160 pounds. Despite 16 years of that gal’s cooking, I am no heavier than the day I married her.

On our honeymoon, I ran my Pinto into a snowbank outside Bishop. The ring shot off my finger and rattled down the heater vent. As I recall, my spouse was not terribly interested in the damage to the car, but was extremely anxious that I locate the ring.

The ring was so loose that I didn’t dare wear it to swim, or to garden, or even on especially cold days. Once while I was walking in a New Jersey snowstorm, the ring flew off on the downswing of my hand, tinkling across the pavement like a fugitive sleigh bell. It even came off as I slept, ending up on the carpet or in the tangle of the sheets. For years I promised myself that I’d get the ring resized or have an insert made for it, but it just seemed easier to take the thing off whenever I feared losing it.

Over the years I occasionally lost track of the ring, discovering it later wherever it had been set down or fallen. Thus I was not overly worried when the ring first disappeared. That would come later, about a week later--when my wife first inquired why I wasn’t wearing it as I was heading out the door to work.

In a hurry as usual, I joked: “I’m sorry it had to come to this. I’ve taken up with a barmaid. See you in court.” Later that day I e-mailed her: “Kathleen: don’t know where the ring has gone off to. Will search for it tonight. Too cheap for a divorce anyway-- Michael.”

That night we both scoured the usual places, but the ring was nowhere to be found. I figured that it would turn up within a few days; when it didn’t, I began to search for it myself, pretending to clear the clutter off my desk, shaking out throw rugs, rearranging my bookshelves. Still, no luck. After three weeks, I sat down with the woman who wore an identical band for some serious talk.

Sometimes in marriage, conversation is a device to reinforce what both parties already know. I didn’t really have to say I felt awful to have lost the ring, as though I’d broken our bond; she didn’t have to tell me that she didn’t want me to suffer over it. But we said these things to each other, coming away a bit closer, somehow, for the loss. Still, I couldn’t get the ring off my mind. Every morning I would dress, pack my briefcase, pick up my keys and head out the door, feeling a pang as I glanced around the shelf for the ring and remembered, without having to remember, that it was gone. Then I would drive off to work, racking my brain for a recollection of where I might have left it. It was not a good way to start the day.

When I was a small boy, my grandparents presented me with a gold signet ring emblazoned with my initials. It was a fantastic act of largess from the perspective of a kid whose weekly allowance amounted to a dime. I really didn’t know what to do with the ring; it was an unexpected windfall, and it frightened more than delighted me. There was a sort of grim responsibility attached to the thing that far outweighed any pleasure I might have received from seeing my initials etched in gold on my finger. And then I lost the ring. You could stretch me on the rack today and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you where, or how.

What I could tell you, in exquisite detail, was how my relatives gave me hell over the loss. I was reminded a hundred times how valuable the ring was and how fortunate I was to have received it. (Mine is an old-fashioned family, not averse to applying guilt in hopeless situations.) I have an aunt who broached the subject last Christmas, as though the ring had vanished yesterday.

And so it was that I was primed for grief over the lost wedding band. Lest my conscience rest, a few of the women where I work took a rather intense interest in the matter, first observing that I wasn’t wearing the band, then inquiring as to how I might have been so stupid as to part ways with such a wonderful object. As if that weren’t enough, one of them gave me a lurid description of how she would fix her own husband if he were to lose his wedding ring. Yet another provided a sermon on the symbolism of wedding rings--and the hidden psychological reasons that I might have had for losing the ring.

When I was in the Navy, I knew a guy who lost two weeks’ pay and his wedding ring in a craps game. His wife took a frying pan to him, and it wasn’t over the money, either. After about a month I was starting to wish somebody would toss a skillet my way and get it over with. Guilt was eating me up. I remembered how my mother-in-law described her husband losing his wedding ring, how her face looked the same way as when she spoke about losing her first baby.

After two months I knew the ring was gone forever. That helped, and it also was a good thing that my wife knew enough to remind me that the loss of a metal circle didn’t affect what we meant to each other. Still, I felt stupid and sad, because the ring had been more than a symbol of what we had; when something particularly bad happened, I’d take it out and read the inscription inside, “K.B. to M.M. 12-17-82,” and I’d know that, no matter what else the world brought to us, that it really was like the wedding vows, in sickness and in health . . . till death do us part.

I went through something like grieving over the ring, and then was done with it. But I never stopped missing it, having my marriage sitting there in gold on my finger. Eventually I adopted a theory that the cleaning lady might have brushed it into the trash can. It might not have been true, but it spared me responsibility for a loss I could never make up.

It’s funny how things work. I never told the cleaning lady, but I couldn’t meet her eyes after I secretly shifted blame from my shoulders to hers. I just let her do her work once a week, but I quit chatting to her about things. All I ever told her was that I’d lost my ring, somewhere, three months before, but she might have suspected more. At any rate, it surprised me when she met me at the door one afternoon with a smile and a handshake, inside of which was my ring, which she said had been stuck against a coiled extension cord beneath the bed. Before I could find my voice, she said:

“I am very glad to find this ring. It is a very important thing not to lose. Like love.”

I thanked her a dozen times and then read the inscription inside before returning my marriage to the third finger of my left hand. Then I called my wife at work. “Wonderful,” she said, over and over again. It certainly was.