Since the day she died, my grandmother has communicated with
me through jewelry. While I have become increasingly comfortable sharing such confidences
without the concern of how nutso they sound, I do have what I consider a decent
amount of loose evidence to back up this assertion.
My grandmother was the youngest of 9 children, and the only
girl. She then gave birth to two sons, one of whom had me, and then four boys.
So, in the span of about 60 years, our particular branch on the family tree had
my grandma and me.
Grandma Leona’s father was a jeweler. I don’t know the
specific details of his work or history, and these may be beyond retrieval. But
I do know that Grandma Lee loved her jewelry. And as she particularly
appreciated monograms, and we shared the same initials (LM), and the same
birthstone (diamonds) and as I was the only girl for quite some time, I was in
line to inherit a decent chunk of shiny, sparkly things that wouldn’t be
mistaken for anybody else’s. Lucky for me, I have always been quite an avid fan
of anything sparkly enough to get my attention, so this arrangement did not
hurt my feelings at all.
Around the time of my 13th
birthday, Papa and Grandma were in town for a visit. We were sitting in the
snack bar of either Gemco or Target (I forget when it changed from one to the
other), and my grandmother began talking to me about the significance of this
age. About how, in the Jewish faith, (had our part of the family remained
faithfully Jewish), I would have had a Bat Mitzvah to usher me from childhood
into adulthood. And as an impromptu back-up ceremony, my grandma reached into
her proper leather purse, pulled out a small gold and diamond ring wrapped in a
tissue, and handed it to me. She said that it had been her own mother’s and I
was now to wear it and take care of it as the responsibilities of womanhood
were upon me. This awkwardly timed coronation was slightly overwhelming, since
I kind of embarrassed by the “W” word, and had expected little else that day
besides a soft pretzel and a blue raspberry Icee. But I have never forgotten the exchange, and
for the better part of 30 years, I have never taken that ring off my greatly
responsible finger.
---
My brother Geoff and I were at Denny’s when we got the call
that Grandma had passed away. We cried, and got our food to go, and paid the
bill. And then we packed our suitcases and flew across the country to gather in
mournful reunion with the rest of our extended family. Thus began a new rite of
passage, as we learned the customs, both formal and just plain human nature, of
laying a loved one to final rest. My eyes were locked on Aunt Joni’s every move
that week. She knew what to say to comfort my heartbroken, bereaved Papa, who
was without his wife for the first time in more than fifty years. She knew what
needed to be done, who needed to be called, who needed to be consoled, who
needed to be fed. In the Jewish faith, as with so many others, feeding and
mourning seem to go hand in hand, as if to remind ourselves- We Eat, Therefore
We (still) Are. So, off to the store I
trotted with Aunt Joni, to load up on food for the mourning masses. And as I
was putting the nova lox on the check-out belt, I felt a sharp surprising
pinch. I turned my hand over and saw that the bottom of my ring must have
caught on something (what? I have no idea) and snapped. This was enough of a
catalyst to allow my already edgy emotions to cloudburst into tears. As I
sobbed with the wretched sorrow that of ALL things, THIS- my Grandma’s special
ring- would pick such an inopportune time to break, my aunt exclaimed,” You
know what this means, don’t you?? When someone dies and something they gave you
breaks, it means that they’re with you!! That’s Grandma! She’s here!” Aunt Joni taught me another memorable lesson
that day. Sometimes, things we perceive as sorrows are actually something altogether
different than we imagine.
---
Several years and two children later, we were planning a
trip to Florida so the boys could visit Great-Papa on our way to Disneyworld. Our
departure was about a month out, and I was troubled that I couldn’t find my
special ring. I had taken it off while pregnant with Grant, and hidden it very
carefully in one of the “very careful hiding spots”. Apparently, I had hidden
it TOO carefully, as all the typical spots had been checked and re-checked,
with no luck.
It was a Saturday night, and with two children under the age
of five, staying up until our eyes couldn’t stay open was about as wild and crazy
as we got. On this particular night, my eyes were open long after John’s as I mulled
over where on earth my ring could have gone. I missed it. It represented my
Grandma, and I particularly wanted to be wearing it when we visited my Papa. And
worse, I couldn’t think of ANY other possibility than one of the few trusted
and appreciated people that worked in our home might have taken it. I hated
this thought, as it seemed like a betrayal to even mentally accuse either one
of them! Or- as John would probably mock if he were awake- maybe the door had
been left unlocked and someone had come in, made a beeline for my Grandma’s
special ring, and left, taking only that. Who knows? Anyways, my conscience
liked that theory better.
So, as I mulled this problem over and over, I considered
looking up the pawnshops in our area. Wouldn’t that be where someone would take
a valuable ring to get money quickly? Maybe it was sitting somewhere within
blocks of our house. Perhaps I would check them on Monday. My Papa and Grandma
were of a generation that loved to give savings bonds as gifts, and my next
thought went to the idea that if I couldn’t find the actual ring, maybe I could
find something very similar on eBay. I spent hours combing through the many
listings for anything that resembled my unique, Art Deco ring from the 1930’s. As
my options dwindled and I realized how late it was, one last thought occurred
to me. I supposed I could have the same ring re-created, if I could remember
what it looked like. I wore it for so long. Could I? At that moment, a very
clear picture of it flashed in my mind, and I grabbed a piece of paper to
doodle a quick rendering. And then, the reality of how late it was forced me to
put the subject (and myself) to bed for the night. Those boys would be relentlessly
awake in precious few hours.
They were, indeed, up with the sun, and between the lack of
sleep and the constant needs-on-parade, I utterly forgot all about my midnight search
and anything to do with it. Sunday and then Monday came and went without a
thought. The boys were screeching around the backyard as our sliding door
opened when John came home from work that Monday evening. He was taking a large
sip of Diet Coke out of his trademark Big Gulp cup, when I saw the sun glimmer
against something gold on the tip of his pinky finger. I squinted in disbelief
and asked him what was on his hand. After what seemed like an eternity to
swallow one sip, he finally said, “Oh, weren’t you looking for this a while
back? I have a headache and it fell out from behind the sinus pills in the very
corner of the medicine cabinet."
I ran inside, with my mouth in the proverbial agape
position, and grabbed the drawing I had sketched out just two nights prior.
With a swarm of incoherent exclamations and gestures, I pointed back and forth
between what I had drawn from memory and the actual object, materialized and in
the flesh, right back on my hand, where it would NEVER leave again. (Like,
EVER!!) They were so alike, even down to the size, it was unreal.
---
A few years later, my dad had married a woman so uncannily
like my Grandma (in looks, in personality, in intelligence) that none of us
were quite sure what to think about such a thing. Of course, with my father
being readily compared to Dr. Frazier Crane, there was already a humorous
episode that mirrored our situation. Their circumstances, the way they met, it
was almost as if Grandma was pointing her finger from her perch, moving this
woman around like an extended chess piece. My eyebrows wrinkled as I noticed
every move with great clarity, but life experiences hadn’t yet given me the full
confidence to trust what I instinctively “knew”.
One day, she was explaining to us how she INSISTED that my
dad continue to wear his wedding ring from his second wife on his right hand.
She said that at first he was uncomfortable with the idea, but when she threatened
to wear it herself if he didn’t, he put it back on. Her logic was that it was a
beautiful ring, and that beautiful jewelry shouldn’t just sit around collecting
dust in a box. Wear it, or why even own it?? This was possibly the most
perplexing tangent with my Grandmother to date, and I mentioned that my mom had
given me a ring with her engagement diamond from my dad in it. The ring was
rather large, and not something I would wear every day, so it sat in our
lockbox and didn’t get worn. She had inspired me to consider what to do with
it.
I received an e-mail that night, that I was to get the ring
out of the lockbox, that she and my dad were going to make it into a necklace
for my birthday and Mother’s Day, so figure out a design and get it to her
ASAP. There was no arguing with his wife when she had made up her mind,(and of
the many ensuing arguments we DID have, this wouldn’t have been one of them!)
so I jotted out a little notion of what I thought it might look like and handed
it over. When she gave me the little box on Mother’s Day, once again, I couldn’t
believe my eyes. It was BEAUTIFUL. And she had dismantled an old cocktail ring
of her own mother’s to surround my parents’ stone with a sea of tiny, sparking
diamonds. No big deal, she said. She hated that ring and would never wear it
the way it was. The entire scenario was so uncharacteristic of my prior
experiences with his wife, and so suspiciously sanctioned by my channeling grandmother it was as if I was watching a
movie of it. I recall whispering a little “Thanks, Grandma” .…. My gratitude
was to the Universe through all its forms and manifestations that day.
---
It was three in the afternoon as we pulled into the driveway
after school. I instructed the boys to go straight to the bathroom and then get
changed for karate. As I walked towards our bedroom, I noticed the wind was
blowing the curtain through an open sliding door that had been decidedly locked
when I left. In mid-sentence, I barked orders for them to walk straight back to
the front door, NOW NOW NOW. I’m serious, get out NOW. I remember grabbing the
phone from the kitchen on my way out the front door and calmly calling 911 in a
fog, as I watched a man come into vision, wearing a dark jacket and pants despite the early
summer heat, and walk right down the sidewalk in front of our house. “I think the man who was in our house just
walked right by me.” I said, loudly and calmly, as if from another mouth,
another mind. They instructed me not to follow him and to get as far away from
the house as the phone would allow. I watched him as he walked away.
Later, I would learn, he had walked away with my very own
wedding ring, along with every last monogrammed diamond L of my Grandma’s
jewelry. Irreplaceable. I cried. I raged. I drew out every last piece I could
remember in reliable detail. I filed police reports. And then, I learned a new
lesson.
I let it all go. The desperate attachment I had fostered
under lock and key for so many years, to a tangible, wearable history of my
connection to the past simply disappeared. It vaporized and instead of the
empty loss I always dreaded, I felt strangely freed. And Glenda the Good Witch
waved her magic wand over my head to remind me that it was never the Ruby Red
Slippers in the first place. The power had been in me all along.
The two pieces I was wearing were all I had left. I cherish
my remaining great-grandmother’s ring, given to me by my grandmother on the day
I became a woman in the Target/Gemco snack shop, but I no longer cling to its existence. And, by some
otherworldly orchestration from beyond, the symbolic beginning to my parents’
own union was safely around my neck while my children were safely at my side.
---
I hesitate to put the next part of this story to paper, but
it is a necessary, humbling requirement of the whole, and one I feel an
involuntary compulsion to tell. Anyone who has navigated the duration of
decades together should have no trouble
relating to my testimony, and anyone who hasn’t, probably wouldn’t understand
regardless. People are complicated
animals, made up of matter and energy and dynamics we think we can wrangle into
controllable forms of harmonious civilization. And just as one person can
perceive the snapping of a ring as heartbreak while someone right next to her
perceives it as magic, there are times, sometimes important ones, when our
vision threatens to change the story in irreparable ways.
We are showered with seemingly trite advice at our wedding and
baby showers, that is completely un-relatable at the time. And just like the
sets of china or pacifier straps that come wrapped in pretty paper, some of
that advice sits in closets gathering dust for years, while other advice proves
indispensible in a desperate way when you least expect it. You hear about life
having its ups and downs, about falling in and out of love a thousand times
over the years. And that means exactly nothing. Until you’re faced with the
reality of what that looks like. What it feels like. The anger and guilt and
confusion and inability to see clearly, to know what to do, to fathom how it
could possibly ever get better. Like the
running advice you hear about hitting the wall. Or childbirth. You try to
imagine it and there is no such thing UNTIL. YOU. HIT. THE. WALL. Until you
experience a never- before -unlocked sequence of cause and effect that is
involuntary and doesn’t involve you, even though it involves every cell, every
nerve, every fiber of you. Until you experience the times that make you grasp
that we are mere borrowers of these bodies, of these lives. We create such
significant chronologies with our time, and then we understand, maybe a few
times if we are lucky, how not attached we are to any of it.
This realization, these moments of detachment, can be
jarring to the very foundation of your existence in ways that make a mockery of
the sense you thought you had. They can make you question everything you think
you know, and how you think you know it. Nobody has found a way yet to quite
adequately word that on a Hallmark wedding card.
And so, one October evening, as my brother and his wife were
waiting for me to get ready, I was in the bathroom of my hotel room, staring
past myself in the mirror. It wasn’t a conscious thought, it wasn’t an
intentional one. But it was one I had thought before, in the angry, convoluted
haze of deep depression, in the foggy, groggy, middle of some endless cycle of
night and day nursing my beloved babies. In the deeply buried patterns of
mistrust and fear that were etched from life’s experiences. I glazed over,
looked through myself and thought, “Fuck it. I’m done.” I don’t care what
happens. To any of it.
I saw something slightly shift in the mirror, heard the
faintest little “tink” of something hitting porcelain, and watched my parents’
engagement diamond slide down the sink in slow motion, stopping about an inch
away from going right down the drain. And I heard one word, somewhere in my
head, that said all of it.
PRICELESS.
Both my hand and my head reached out and snatched up my Grandma’s
warning before it was too late. Repairing my necklace took a lot less time and
agony and patience and love to fix than repairing what was broken within me,
what was on its way to breaking within us. But I have learned that certain
attachments are deceptive and fleeting, while others are as infinite as the
connection between our lives here and what is to come. Figuring out which ones
to hold tight to and which ones to release is one of the most important lessons
we will ever learn.
