Restored

Do you remember my wedding ring post?

A few years ago, when I decided to stop wearing my wedding ring, the solution for me was to start wearing Sawan’s. 

Sawan actually had two wedding rings.  He had the one from when we exchanged vows, and then we had bought a cheap silver band at a street fair once, because he was afraid he would lose his good one when he went fishing, but still liked to be wearing a ring.  It ended up that he wore the cheap one more often then he wore the “real” wedding ring.  This cheap silver band is the ring that the paramedics took off his finger when he died. 

The silver one is the one that I chose to wear.  It was thinner than his other one and so it fit better.  It was still way too big for me; it could easily slide off every one of my fingers, including my thumb.  I usually would wear another ring over the top of it, to keep it on.

One day in June, I put it on, and remembered feeling for it with my thumb on my way to work.  At the end of my long day of shampooing, cutting, styling, and chores (cleaning and laundry at the shop), though, I looked down and didn’t have it on.  I realized that I hadn’t put a smaller ring on top of it that morning, so it could have fallen off.  I looked everywhere.  I asked my friend and coworker if she had seen it, but she hadn’t.  I was already late to meet a friend at a baseball game, so I didn’t have as much time to look for it as I wanted, but I was devastated.  I went back to the shop over the weekend, tearing apart my station, ransacking every space that I could think of, but didn’t find it.  I left a note for the cleaning people, and they also looked, and took apart the vacuum cleaner bag, but didn’t find it. 

It was lost.  I was so sad.  I thought about it daily.  It was so hard for me that I couldn’t talk about it.  I told no one.  The only people who knew about it were the cleaning people and my coworker. 

Four months later, about two weeks ago, I was downstairs at the salon, switching out the laundry.  I heard a clinking in the bottom of the washer, and as I pulled out the last of the load to put it in the dryer, my ring came out from beneath the part that swishes the laundry around in the bin.  I found it!

I cried.  It was just a cheap silver band, but it was another piece of him that I thought was lost from me forever, and was now restored.

I’ve worn it everyday since, but am sure to put on a smaller ring on top of it to keep it on.  And, the good news is, after four months in the washer, it’s really clean.

Back on my finger, with a ring on top of it, to hold it in place.

My Man

The other day, I was driving to work, and I heard this song:

Usually, when I hear the hard ones, I immediately change the station, or sometimes turn the radio off entirely.  But this day was different.  For some reason, I needed to hear it.  I needed to have the memory.  I needed to slog through the memories that were now painful, even though they were once sweet.  I think that I needed to be reminded, because I had completely forgotten, that once, there was a man who felt this way about me.  He would sing it to me.  We danced to it in the living room of his tiny little apartment.

I guess I had forgotten.  Being the only one left in this marriage, I forget that there were two of us once, both loving.  It's silly, but I forget that I wasn’t the only one in the marriage at one point.

I got a message from one of Sawan’s friends from highschool on Facebook recently, and she said to call her if I was ever in her town, she’d love to meet the “woman of Sawan’s dreams.” And it totally took me by surprise.  I thought, “I was, wasn’t I?” 

And so, for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten my wedding ring back out and put it on.  I have just needed the reminder for a few days that once, someone loved me more than anyone else in the world.

Happy Valentine's Day

In August of 2006, Sawan and I went on vacation in Montana.  I grew up there, so I took him to all of the places that I had gone as a kid, and we even went *gasp* camping.  I wanted him to get to fish at the place where they filmed “A River Runs Through It” which I had made him watch, even though he had resisted, because it had bastardized fly-fishing or something like that (when he watched it he loved it).  It had made people think they could fly fish when they really couldn’t.  My family had gone camping in that area every summer of my childhood and I wanted him to see it, and we had a great time.  Sitting around the campfire that night, I had made him the perfect s’more.  I’ve had years of practice at this.  The key is to get the chocolate melted by setting it next to the flame while you roast the marshmallow.  How could any man not be in love after you’ve made him the perfect camping desert?  It had been a day of perfection, and he was looking into my eyes, and started to say something, and stopped himself.

Sawan always said that I could read his mind.  We would often be in situations and I would ask him a question and he would say, “Get out of my head!”  I think that this is due, not to the clairvoyance that he gave me credit for, but actually more that I’m just pretty intuitive.  Back to the camping scenario, it was one of those perfect moments that I knew that he was thinking that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me and was thinking about asking me to marry him.  But he didn’t.  I didn’t ask him about it, though, didn’t bring it up.

But, Sawan couldn’t keep a secret, and didn’t keep stuff like this to himself.  The next morning, he told me “I almost asked you to marry me last night, but I don’t have a ring and I haven’t talked to your dad.”  So I thought that we would come back to Denver and he would buy a ring and talk to my dad.

Weeks passed.  Then months.  I thought he was maybe waiting for our anniversary that was in October, but that came and went as well.  Finally, I was unable to not bring it up.  Sometime in November I finally did.  Well, I shouldn’t put it mildly.  It became a huge fight.  I just couldn’t understand why he had been sure about me in August and now he no longer was.  Had I done something wrong?  Plus, I felt that he had inadvertently asked me for my answer, which I had given just by nature of still being with him, but he hadn’t asked me the question, so it was just hanging out there, and this made me feel that I was somehow more committed then he was.  It was a very uncomfortable place to be in.

So in November we went and looked at rings.  He got an idea of what I wanted, but was still just not really on board, and for some reason he was mad at me, felt like I was pushing him, even though I felt that it had been his idea all along.

That was a rough couple of months.  All through the holidays we fought often about it.  It came to a head on the day of New Year’s Eve where, I don’t remember what started the fight, or what all went on, or how we worked it out, but I told him he better not ask me to marry him, because I wouldn’t say yes.  Then I left.  But we didn’t break up, somehow.  I think it’s because we just really loved each other.  Somehow, for me, this felt like I was able to take back my answer.  The next few weeks were just about the best few weeks of our entire relationship to that point.  It was like we fell in love all over again.  I no longer felt the pressure about my answer being out there, I just was able to remember all the reasons that I loved him.  I had, however, set a date in my mind, that if he hadn’t decided that he really wanted to be with me by Valentine’s Day, then I needed to probably move on.  I was old enough that if I wanted to have a family, I needed to be thinking about that, and I shouldn’t waste any more time.  I wasn’t one of those women who would issue an ultimatum to him, I didn’t want to be controlling, but I had that date in my mind.

Sawan worked in the restaurant business.  There are dates that you are never allowed to ask to have off work- Mother’s Day, Easter, and Valentine’s Day.  So he was working on the 14^th.  He made plans to take me to dinner on the 13^th. 

Like I said, Sawan couldn’t keep a secret.  So I totally knew he was up to something.  Well, I was pretty sure.  He had never made a big deal about Valentine’s Day before, so him making a dinner reservation was a pretty big tip-off.  Plus he kept dropping hints.  He was just so little kid-ish in his excitement.

That year the 13^th fell on a Tuesday.  I had a training conference for the company that I’m an educator for starting Sunday and ending that Tuesday.  I came home, exhausted, but excited about my date, and started getting ready.  He came while I was still in the middle of getting ready, and was anxiously trying to hurry me along.  I was expecting him to ask me while we were at dinner, so I couldn’t understand why he was trying to get me to hurry so badly.  Finally, at one point he says, “Baby, I have something we could do before dinner, so if you could hurry up, it would be good.” 

I thought, “Wow, does he want to stop for drinks before hand or something?  He’s really trying to make this special.”

So I finish up putting on mascara and flat-ironing my hair (and I can hear his heavy breathing in the next room because he’s so nervous.  It was cute).  I come out to my living room where he’s waiting and start to put my coat on.  Now, I wish I had a video of this.  He says, “Wait one minute before you put your coat on.”  And I realize, “Oh, my gosh, he’s gonna ask me right now!”  But I already had one arm in my coat.  I’m sure I looked hilarious as I tried to get my coat off and hang it back over the back of the chair.  I was so NOT smooth.  He pulled me in the living room and got down on one knee.  He told me that I looked beautiful, and he would never be the one to give me fashion advice, but my outfit was missing something.  Then he said, “Noel Hoggatt, will you marry me?”

And I said, “Yes.”

He thoughtfully had decided to ask me at my own house in case I got emotional and I didn’t want to be in front of people, this had happened to a woman the night before when he was working and he felt so sorry for her.  So like him.

The rest of the evening is a blur, except that I remember looking down at one point at my ring and thinking, “This is the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’ve ever seen and I get to wear it every day for the rest of my life.”  This is why I have trouble now with taking it off.

February 13, 2007

Happy Valentine’s Day, Baby.  I miss you.

Wedding Rings...

This is something I’ve been obsessing about.

I’ve been trying to think about how long I’ve been obsessing about it, about when I started wondering about it, and I think it’s been since the very beginning.

I have a client that is a young widow.  She lost her husband in a similar way to the way I lost mine, he was around forty years old, was completely healthy, played tennis in the morning, and died in the afternoon (I think it was a heart/artery issue).  She was in my chair about six weeks after Sawan died, and we had never talked about her widowhood before, so she was just being sweet and open about if I wanted to talk about it, etc.  The first thing I asked her was how long she wore her ring.  She said that she wore it about six months, and then the questions by others about if she was married or not were just so hard that she stopped wearing it.

I have another friend that lost her fiancé right before they were to be married.  I asked her the same question, about her ring.  He died eight years ago.  She said that she still wears it, sometimes.  She would wear it off and on.  She wore it all the time for a while, and then would take it off, and then when she would be in a new cycle of her grief, she would start wearing it again.

Another widow friend of mine is remarried and still wears her ring from her first husband on her right hand.  This is an idea that hadn’t occurred to me.  Just switching hands.  

I’ve read websites, I’ve done research.  Some people wear his and hers rings on a chain around their necks.  Some have had them re-set into a new ring to wear.  Some simply take them off.  Some have had the ashes from cremation made into a man- made diamond and wear that in lieu of a wedding ring. 

Clearly everyone does something different and whatever feels right for them at the time.  Whatever I decide for right now doesn’t have to be what I do forever.  I went through a short two-week period where I tried not wearing it back in the spring and it was just so hard on me that I started wearing it again.  I felt like I was forcing myself, and I missed it so much.

It really is a beautiful piece of jewelry.  I’ve never seen a ring that was more me or that I liked more than the one that he picked me.  I only have the engagement band, I didn’t want the wedding band, because of what I do for work (hairstylist). I didn’t want something bulky since I’m always putting on gloves for color or running my hands through long strands of hair at the shampoo bowl.  It’s got tiny little diamonds set in the band (I think they call it pave) and then a round main stone, which was Sawan’s grandmothers.  It looks very vintage.

But lately I’ve been just obsessed with the idea that it’s time for a change.  Mostly because I’m just so tired of the questions.  It completely deflates me when someone asks me if I’m married or engaged.  But I don’t want to not wear my ring anymore, so I like the idea of moving it to my right hand.

I tried this, but my left hand felt so naked.  I would feel for my ring with my thumb and panic for a moment about having lost it, and then realize that it was just on my other hand.  I bought something to wear on my left ring finger but nothing I bought seemed to be appropriate.  So I had an idea.

I went to my jewelry box and got out Sawan’s rings.  I’m wearing them on my left hand on my middle finger (they don’t really fit, I have freakishly small fingers, but with stacking two it seems to be staying on ok…).  He had two.  One was the ring that he got married with, a mixed yellow and white gold band that looks like it has a wave running through it (it reminded him of water and he loved it).  The other is a plain silver band that we bought at a street fair and he wore when he went fishing, afraid that he would lose his good one. 

This seems to be solving the problem for me for the time being.  I haven’t had a question yet about being married with the ring on my right hand, and with his rings on my left hand I look for them with my thumb rather than for my own ring. 

Just thought I’d let you in on what occupies my brain wanderings these days.