22 We Three Rings

I need the guidebook. Where is it? It must be here somewhere! You know, that thick wedge of a tome listing everything every widow needs to sort through her grief, spruce up her psyche and, while she’s at it, conform to all those weighty, if unspoken, societal expectations? That one. I can’t find the fookin’ thing. I know it’s here somewhere. Grrrrrgh.

Oh, heck! I forgot! There isn’t one! All I have to guide me, from now on, is the drift and druthers of my own personal needs. Which aren’t all that reliable. The fact is, I am utterly discombobulated and unsure of what to do next, or when to do it, or even whether to do it. When should I refer to my husband as “my husband,” and when should I refer to him as “my late husband”? When should I remove his name from the checks? How soon is too soon to attend a party? How should I respond when a stranger makes some passing comment that assumes I’m married? And what on earth should I do about Chris’s Facebook page? Shut it down? Keep it up forever as a memorial? Talk about Figuring Shit Out.

The thorniest issue, for me, is determining how long to wear my rings. I knew what to do with Chris’s ring: put it on a chain, hang it in my closet. After the wake, the funeral directors asked whether I wanted to have it buried with his ashes. No thanks, I said. I want that ring. I gave him that ring. I slipped that ring on his hand. That ring remained there for two decades, softening and molding to the shape of his finger. I plan to keep that ring for evermore, or at least until I give it to my son.

As for my own rings, I’ll give them to my daughters someday: the slim gold wedding band, purchased from a shop off the Boston Common; and the engagement ring, its two small diamonds flanking a ruby. Chris bought it from a Manhattan jeweler named Bobby (not lying) Satin, and he presented it to me about a month after he’d popped the question while cross-country skiing in New Hampshire. It was, and I dare you to challenge me on this point, the best proposal ever: He released the binding on one ski, dropped to his knee, said, “Will you marry me?” and then, when I shrieked my affirmative, double checked, “Really?!?” Then apologized for not having a ring. As though I cared.

The ring came later, at a restaurant in Hudson, New York, where the lovebirds gazed ceaselessly, meltingly, into one another’s eyes, and the gentleman told his affianced that she deserved something better than a diamond. “I decided you’re a ruby,” he said. “Because rubies are rarer.”

This ring and its unembellished marital companion remain on my left hand. How long should they stay there? Six months? A year? Two years? Once again, I have nooooo idea. In the first couple of weeks or so it was a non-issue: I still felt married. Of course I wore them. But now, as the icky-sticky reality of life without Chris continues to gum up my world, it is hard to believe that I’m anything but alone. He is so not here. I am so not married.

I raise this issue with the grief counselor. What should I do about the rings? I ask her.

“That’s a good question,” she says. “What should you do about the rings?”

Beats me. How long should I wear them?

“That’s a good question,” she says. “How long should you wear them?”

I have this feeling that I’m expected to wear them for a year.

“Why a year?” she asks.

Why a year? I dunno. I guess I’m thinking of the jahrzeit, I tell her. You know, the Jewish tradition that marks the first year of mourning. There’s just something about twelve months. It seems like the expected length of time. And I don’t want to seem like I’m being disrespectful and failing to honor Chris’s memory, especially with his family. I don’t want to hurt people.

The grief counselor gives me a look of frank assessment. She’s a smart lady.

“You know,” she says. “You know, when you lose a spouse at a young age, you’re dealing with the grief. You’re dealing with the reality of being a single parent. And you’re dealing with everyone else’s idea of widowhood—and how widows should behave. But only you can know what you’re going through. Only you can know what feels right.”

What am I going through? Everything.

What feels right? Nothing.

Back in high school, I auditioned for a role in The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico García Lorca’s incredibly depressing play about grieving women in Andalusia. The audition required me to pair off with another student for an improv, and we were told to act out a scene in a hospital as though awaiting news of a friend in a coma. All I did was stare at the ground and rub some dirt across the palm of my hand, but I made the drama teacher cry. She didn’t give me a part, though. Instead I was assigned to run the sound effects with my mother and, even more exciting, appear onstage as an extra during a funeral scene. For this I wore a long black dress with a heavy black hooded cloak and stood with other similarly dressed girls, all of us clutching rosary beads and weeping. Afterwards, Dan went up to Mama and said, “Amy looks awful in black.”

Such was my intro to mourning and widowhood. This black-on-black perception of things stuck with me for a dozen or so years until I became an actual mourner, and I then I realized that the grief of our popular imagining is not the same as the reality-based grief that manifests itself in so many kaleidoscopic and wacky forms. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that it’s possible to laugh at a wake until tinkly keyboard Muzak was piped into the funeral home gathering for my sister Lucy, a classical pianist who whipped off Brahms like nobody’s business. The ironic merriment this caused was almost worth the injury to our ears. Almost. In truth I nearly wound up grabbing the mortician by the shoulders, screaming STOP THE MADNESS!! and then spraying bullets into the stereo with my Kalashnikov. There were no such moments that I can recall in The House of Bernarda Alba.

But the rings.

What to do? Keep them on my left hand? Move them to my right hand? That would require some adjustment in size, which I’d rather not make (to either the rings or my fingers). Online widows support groups where I occasionally lurk feature long discussion threads on matters of ringdom. Some widows still wear them after five years. Some take ‘em off and stick ‘em in a drawer. Some wear them on necklaces. Some have them melted them down with their spouse’s ring into some significant new piece of jewelry. Once again the message is: Do What Feels Right.

I’m not sure What Feels Right. I’m not sure anything, from this point on, will ever Feel Right. But after a few more months of wrestling with this issue, I have determined What Feels Wrong: the rings. The precious metal on my left hand has assumed the weight of a lie, a gargantuan lie, and it presses and burns and mocks me. My husband is dead; I need to acknowledge that to myself and the world, just as I stood before the world and swapped vows and rings with Chris. To pretend otherwise is to diminish the gravity and eternity of this loss. He’s not wearing the ring. He’s not married any longer. There may not be a guidebook for clarification, but if you crack open the Gospels, you’ll find that little tale of the Sadducees trying to trap Jesus on this point—remember that question about the wife who cranked through seven brothers? They want to know which bro would be her proper husband at the Resurrection, and Jesus’ response is, basically: Get a real question, Sadducees! There is no marriage after death! This is me rolling my eyes!

So off they come, the rings. Onto a pretty gold chain they go. Sometimes I wear them around my neck. Sometimes I hang them in my closet, where they dangle and mingle with Chris’s, the three of them clacking softly whenever I swing the door.

The weight on my hand has lifted, now. The lie is gone. In its place is a lightness, sad but not unbearable, that I sense with relief and reckon as a mercy. My hand feels naked, but at least it tells the truth.