This is my wedding ring. It has lived on my hand for nearly 29 years.
I don’t know if you can see how bent out of shape it is – this happened on a day a little over 20 years ago when I did a heap of gardening… leaning heavily on a shovel, edging the lawn borders.
At the end of that day I noticed my finger a slightly odd shape where the ring sits, took it off and found it to be a kind of squished oval.
I was most annoyed and didn’t have the strength in my hands to simply bend it back to round, plus I was worried about weakening it further by forcing it back cold. So I left it, most irritated by the damage, my silliness at not realising what was happening and that I would have to pay for a repair.
The very next day I lost the baby I was carrying.
Heading for theatre, I said to our lovely doctor “I did all this heavy gardening yesterday…” He didn’t let me finish the sentence, put his hand on my arm shaking his head and said “you did not cause this” and went on to explain while my tears washed away my needless guilt.
What has this to do with my wedding ring? Well, my squished wedding ring became the only tangible connector that I had to that baby. There were no clothes or presents or celebrations or cards. A squashed ring that I never did get repaired – never could get repaired – never again wanted to have repaired – as every time I looked at its odd shape, I remember that September babe.
And it is precious.
Sometimes (not always) but enough times to be noteworthy, the things that get us bent out of shape, when given perspective and time and healing, become things which in their own right possess a deeper kind of value than they did before they got squished. They become things which we can look at and hold close in full recognition of the difficulty, but with an added kind of value that previously was not there.
And just tonight when I was considering this little analogy, I realised another… my wedding ring is no longer oval, it’s just bumpy. Over the years it has partially repaired in my hand, slowly slowly mending. Not perfect, not how it was before, enough to see change – but not enough that I can forget what happened either.
A memorial in two stages.