All of us have talismen, those special objects that serve as an emotional ballast in our lives. Maybe it’s that special necklace that grandma bequeathed, the one-of-a-kind painting that used to hang in your parents’ bedroom and is now in yours, or perhaps that priceless photo of your precious children when they were toddlers. For so many of us, glancing at these mementos or holding them in our hands takes us back, helps us feel connected to those who mean, or once meant, so much to us. We know, of course, that at some level these are mere objects, yet were they to disappear from our lives we would be truly bereft. It’s complicated, isn’t it? Sorting all this out is what we hear from Rosemary Colt.
Rosemary M. Colt is a retired English teacher who hasn’t retired from writing. She lives in a retirement community in Providence.
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When my mother wasn’t wearing her diamond engagement and wedding rings she kept them in her bureau. As a child, I often tiptoed into my parents’ bedroom to admire them because like everything about my mother, they were beautiful. Family lore has it that one day my mother left the rings on the edge of the bathroom sink and they vanished; a futile search followed. A few days later my father was burning trash in the backyard incinerator and saw something glittering in the ashes; lo and behold, there were the rings. The theory was I’d found them in the bathroom, wandered down to the incinerator and dropped them. The story was known in family lore as the miracle of the rings.
Just before she died my mother gave me those rings. Years later I gave my daughter the engagement ring and kept the guard. More years passed and my husband died, and then not long after, our youngest son. One warm day that January I was walking and took my gloves off to feel the sun and be happy again; when I got home the guard ring wasn’t on my finger. I retracing my route, staring down at the pavement and searching in the gutters—to no avail.
Then a few months later, another miracle; sorting through papers on my desk I found my self staring at that ring, which was sitting in the middle of a page half way through the pile. I took a deep breath to ensure I wasn’t hallucinating before allowing myself to believe in the ring’s reality. Perhaps, I thought, my mother had played a role in the ring’s reappearance. For months I’d felt—although it went against what I believed about the finality of death—that her spirit was near during the months of grieving for my husband and son. In a very real sense her acceptance of her final illness had been a model of how to handle death with grace.
In the years since then I’d willed myself to imagine my mother’s presence and the miracle of the ring seemed to prove she’d been with me, not as a ghost but in the strength of my memories of her. More practically, I interpreted the ring’s reappearance as her reminder to take better care of my belongings–I promised myself I would.
But unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. Some months later I was out one night and against my better judgment–it was a little too large for me—I wore that ring. It was dark when I started home and so warm I took my gloves off, just as I had a year before. When I got home and looked at my hand, the ring wasn’t there. I returned the next morning and retraced my steps but this time there was no miracle; I won’t see the ring again except in my mind’s eye, where it still glitters. But this time I read my mother’s message differently; I’m always with you, she says, and you don’t need a material object to remind you of me.
