Rings and Things and Buttons and Bows

Dolly's rings, which I slipped from her fingers during a long-ago hospital MRI and later dropped into a cardboard box, were tossed to the back of the storage space at the head of my bed with other once-important stray buttons, and bows. Unbeknownst to me, my mother's jewelry has disquieted my sleep with its' demands and emotional reverberations all these weeks and months and now it seems like years. Time is so difficult to gauge, in these days.

Just yesterday, visiting Dolly at the retirement home, for effect I pulled the square box from my bag with a flourish, like a silk bouquet, and studied my mother's face as she lifted the cover and peered inside.

"Oh. My rings."

She worked them one-by-one onto the ring finger of her left hand. First the engagement diamond, reset into a wide gold band years ago on her 40th wedding anniversary after the original tiny ring had worn completely through. Then the ring that was a gift from her daughters, upon which were set the birthstones of Georgia, Willa and me, MJ. Finally the fragile sliver of gold that was her wedding ring. She studied her outstretched fingers, quickly pushed the rings off, and began working them back onto the same finger, but in different order. This time the birthstone ring went first, followed by the wedding band and then the diamond.

"I don't want these rings!" she raised her voice in irritation as she pulled two of them back over her knuckle. "I'll just keep one."

"Oh-KAY!" I said in fake surprise as the symbols of her marriage bounced againt the walls of the cardboard box.

Dolly stared at her hands again, held stiffly in front of her. Then she removed the birthstone ring and placed it with the other rings in the little box. "I don't want this one, either." She closed the box, and left it.

"That must feel good," I said, searching my mother's face for connections, "to be free of all that holding-on. To not worry about keeping track of stuff. Or people."

"That's the way it is now," said Dolly matter-of-factly. It seemed, for her, neither a burden nor a blessing, but just the way it is.