My wife’s wedding ring came back to me in the mail nine years after she was buried in it. It arrived in a padded envelope with no note, postmarked from three states away. It was hers, and the inscription was still inside: our date, the misspelling and all—the jeweler got the year wrong in 1981, and we never fixed it. I sat with it for a week before I called anybody, because I could not think of a single question that had a bearable answer. Finally, I called the cemetery and asked them to check her grave.
They sent two men out, and they were very decent about it. When they finished inspecting the records and the burial site, they came up to the house and told me something I wasn’t prepared to hear. They said the ring had never been buried with her. According to their records, the casket had been sealed with no jewelry listed among her personal effects. I showed them the envelope and the ring, and one of them immediately asked where I had gotten it. When I told him it had arrived in the mail, he exchanged a look with the other man.
The older one asked me to turn the ring over. I did, and he pointed to a tiny scratch beside the inscription that I had never noticed before. He said it looked like a mark used by a local jeweler decades ago, but the shop had closed before my wife died. I called the number he gave me anyway, and a woman answered from what turned out to be the jeweler’s old workshop. She listened to me describe the ring and then went completely silent. Finally, she asked whether my wife had ever owned another ring.
I told her no, but she said there had been a second record under my wife’s name. It was dated 1981, only weeks after our wedding, and the description matched my ring exactly except for one detail. The record said the ring had been resized twice and collected by someone who wasn’t me. I asked who had signed for it, but the woman said she couldn’t tell me over the phone. Then she asked me to come to the workshop because she had something that had been left there for forty-five years. Before I could answer, she added, “Your wife told us never to give it to you unless this ring came back first.”:::
